Articles Tagged "Law/Policy"

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Two days ago I picked up on what Graeme Archer at The Telegraph had to say about The L'Aquila earthquake trial, in as much, Graeme's essay stated that "The L'Aquila earthquake trial reminds us that scientific evidence shouldn't determine public policy".

Now the BBC have also joined in with a similar point of view with Charlotte Pritchard - "Should scientists stop giving advice?" All I can stress on these two essays is how far removed would it be for when the day comes, that the Met Office and other Institutions admit their failure to correctly correlate CO2 to Global Warming and also face crimminal action.

Just like scientists have at the L'Aquila earthquake trial, the Met Office and other Institutions have tried to achieve an impossible task as a result of Government Policy, rather then science....maybe that day is not far away!

L'Aquila ruling: Should scientists stop giving advice? by Charlotte Pritchard, BBC News

This week six scientists and one government official were sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, for making "falsely reassuring" comments before the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. But was this fair?

I had to pinch myself over this story from Graeme Archer at The Telegraph.....The L'Aquila earthquake trial reminds us that scientific evidence shouldn't determine public policy!..Graeme have you not thought of another area this may apply?

The L'Aquila earthquake trial reminds us that scientific evidence shouldn't determine public policy! by Graeme Archer - The Telegraph

People find it hard to understand the nature of risk: discuss. A pertinent assertion, in the week that scientists have been found guilty in an Italian court for understating the likelihood of the L’Aquila earthquake. Moreover, the assertion is true, as can easily be demonstrated. Stand behind someone in the queue at WH Smiths while they purchase a lottery ticket, and watch the care with which they select “their” (irrelevant) numbers. Or travel across the Atlantic on a plane, sat beside me.

The former is less physically demanding, as I’m less likely to claw at your arm in terror during the purchase of a lottery ticket than I am while the plane bounces around in turbulence. There’s no point telling me that there’s a very low probability of falling from the sky in a ball of flame, that such disasters happen only rarely. I don’t care about “long-run” arguments: I care about this flight. If the probability of any event is non-zero – if there’s a finite chance that it will occur – then it will happen, at some point; and nothing in the construction of a long-run probability (in its English sense, or its precise mathematical expression) has anything useful to say about any particular instance of any particular flight.

Even though neither U.S. presidential candidate is talking up man-made global warming behind the scenes courts are hard at work making laws based on controversial greenhouse gas science.

An undemocratic, largely unseen shift in American law is now taking place. You would never know it from the media facade but 2012 has witnessed an inexorable Big Green legal juggernaut driving across America. Judges not voters are at the wheel and by stealthy maneuvering we are being steamrollered by secret government diktat rather than electoral preference. It is happening away from the public political barometer because the mainstream media focuses voter minds on believing the race for the Whitehouse is all about the grassroots economy. With $3 billion per year in government climate funding up for grabs neither Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney nor Democrat President Barack Obama appear willing to debate the American courts’ back door imposition of new draconian climate laws. Left unchecked more democracies are headed for the abyss of unreasoned totalitarianism.

Voters don’t know it yet but our courts shifted gear to drive us all to accept – by imposition of law – the cornerstone of man-made global warming science: the greenhouse gas hypothesis. All this despite repeated concerns expressed by conscientious climatologists. For example, only last week another top climate scientist unswerved by government bribes (Dr. John Christy) gave evidence to the U.S. House Energy and Power Subcommittee declaring: “I’ve often stated that climate science is a ‘murky’ science. We do not have laboratory methods of testing our hypotheses as many other sciences do.”

A climate change group has taken the National Institute for Atmospheric and Water Research (NIWA) to court over what they say are inaccurate temperature recordings.

The New Zealand Climate Education Trust - a branch of the NZ Climate Science Coalition - are challenging NIWA figures which show a rise in temperatures in New Zealand of 1degC over the past 100 years.

This figure is significantly higher than global warming figures around the world and the trust is questioning how NIWA calculated the figures and whether they are accurate.

It believes there has either been no warming or a trivial warming of around 0.2degC.

The group's lawyer Terry Sissons told the High Court at Auckland today that NIWA could have obtained inaccurate New Zealand average temperatures due to 'sudden site relocations' and by regularly changing temperature gauging instruments.

ROME—The L'Aquila judge who last October sentenced seven scientists and engineers to six years in prison each for advice they gave ahead of a deadly 2009 earthquake explained his reasons for the manslaughter convictions on Friday. He said that the seven, at the time members of an official government body called the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, had analysed the risk of a major quake in a "superficial, approximate and generic" way and that they were willing participants in a "media operation" to reassure the public.

The seven were brought to trial in September 2011 for advice they gave in a meeting on 31 March 2009, six days before the earthquake, and a day after the latest, and strongest, in an ongoing series of tremors, known as a swarm, to strike the area around L'Aquila. They were accused by the public prosecutor of having caused some of the town's residents to change their behaviour and led them to stay indoors on the night of the quake instead of seeking shelter outside, as they were used to doing when tremors happened.

Following his conviction of the seven commission members on 22 October, Judge Marco Billi had 90 days to make public his reasoning, and in the event did so with just three days to spare. The 950-page document Billi released, known as the "motivazione", shows him to have largely accepted the prosecutors' argument. He explains that the trial was not against science but against seven individuals who failed to carry out their duty as laid down by the law. The scientists were not convicted for failing to predict an earthquake, something Billi says was impossible to do, but for their complete failure to properly analyse, and to explain, the threat posed by the swarm. Billi ruled that this failure led to the deaths of 29 of the 309 people killed in the quake and to the injuries of four others. "The deficient risk analysis was not limited to the omission of a single factor," he writes, "but to the underestimation of many risk indicators and the correlations between those indicators."

"the science is certain" was unnecessary -- the effect of the precautionary principle is that the science supporting the theory does not have to be certain, but the case against the theory does.

Julia Gillard's climate change committee to explore carbon price options reflects the precautionary principle in the climate change debate

This principle has revolutionised international and Australian environmental science and environmental law. The precautionary principle has driven the international movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it has been ignored in the public debate. It is also the reason that climate sceptics could never win.

The principle appears in Article 3 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 1992. It is one of the four principles of ecologically sustainable development.

Those principles have been absorbed into Australian environmental law at commonwealth and state levels since 1991.

In a speech given in December 2009 at a symposium in honour of retired judge Paul Stein, chief judge Brian Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court described the effect of the precautionary principle which appears in NSW legislation in similar terms to Article 3 of the 1992 Climate Convention:

Updated below with comments from Stephen Wilde & Piers Corbyn (inc. Climate Fools Day News)

image source

Dr. Tim Ball received the second of two libel lawsuits from North Vancouver law firm of Roger D. McConchie on Friday (March 25, 2011). Global warming doomsaying professor Michael Mann files the latest writ.

Professor Mann, the infamous creator of the now discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph was once the darling of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a tax hungry government funded organization that blames mankind for raising global temperatures by 0.7 degrees during the 20th Century.

The IPCC plucked Mann from total obscurity after his problematic and “rushed” Ph.D was granted. His viva voce examination was in 1996 and he was required to make corrections. Such a two year delay suggests substantial errors and corrections which would normally require a second viva, but this was strangely not recorded. Then, despite no reputation whatsoever in the field of tree ring proxy research Mann was bizarrely appointed not only as an expert by the IPCC but as Lead Author for the 2001 Third Report.

Several fellow academics, including Dr. Judith Curry smelt something most fishy at once and their fears were confirmed when Canadian statistical experts, Steve McIntyre and Professor Ross McKitrick found a string of ‘errors’ in Mann’s work. All the errors skewed the data in favor of the man-made global warming hype.

It transpired Mann and his secretive clique of climatologists who ‘pal reviewed’ his junk science benefited to the tune of millions of dollars in government research grants. Since the Climategate revelations public support for the IPCC has nose-dived.

One of the Government's most senior scientific advisors has said that efforts to stop a sharp rise in global temperatures were now unrealistic.

Professor Sir Robert Watson said that the hope of restricting the average temperature rise to 2C was "out the window".

He said that the rise could be as high as 5C - with dire conseqences.

Professor Watson added the Chancellor, George Osborne, should back efforts to cut the UK's CO2 emissions.

Updated below with BBC MUST SEE VIDEO LINK

The 2°C guarantee should be dropped from the global climate change deal to allow for more flexibility and avoid deadlock, US Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern has said.

Speaking at Dartmouth College he said removing the 2°C specification from the agreement would allow countries to get on with actions to limit climate change now while leaving it open for further ambition at a later date.

“It is more important to start now with a regime that can get us going in the right direction and that is built in a way maximally conducive to raising ambition, spurring innovation and building political will,” he said adding that insisting on an agreement that would guarantee the 2°C limit would only lead to deadlock.

The 2°C target, which all countries signed up to at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, follows from the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looking at the impacts of climate change which surpasses this limit.

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