I'd be very interested in the testimony in this case as it seems that the plaintiffs argue that 100+ deaths during 2021 PNW heatwave were caused by global warming.
I'm not sure what argument you make. Climate is different from weather and there have been extreme temperature events throughout history. Furthermore, how do you account for natural releases of methane or the whole cow farting angle? How do you establish responsibility, etc.
Climate change increases the number and severity of extreme weather events in a given year. That is well documented by now. So you can’t attribute all heat wave deaths to climate change, but you you can have a high confidence in attributing some of them. You can also quantify the contribution of individual companies to historical CO2 emissions. As long as the court follows that basic logic (and courts in other countries have done so) I don’t see a problem.
Ah, but do you ascribe blame to the fuel producers? Or the fuel burners? As a liquid it's not a problem. Burning it is the problem. Therefore should it not be the burners who are responsible?
Perhaps the county should just ban the burning of fool fuels. If its causing do many local deaths then surely that's the logical first step? Or would that just be political suicide?
The plaintiffs in this case do not argue that one or another party is responsible for the ultimate emission of CO2. They argue that the oil companies recklessly and with the aim of increasing their profits deceived the public about negative externalities associated with burning oil/diesel/gasoline/etc. And that this reckless behavior led to certain damages for which the companies should now be punished both to help pay for consequences and to deter similar behavior by these and other companies in the future. I am not a lawyer so I don't know if this legal theory will hold up in court or if a jury will follow these arguments. But on a personal and moral level it makes sense to me.
Should a few dozen deaths -- as absurd as it is to put the blame squarely on oil producers and not on, for example, Chinese coal-burning plants -- be countered by the enormous number of lives saved because an oil company allowed people to heat their homes during freezing cold winters, to cool them during this heat wave, and enable millions of ambulance rides when people are having heart attacks, etc? I'd say oil, overall, is way net positive in its contributions to society. The fact that this county won't ban oil is evidence that virtually everybody agrees.
People paid for the positive externalities i.e. heating their homes, driving their cars. Those who didn't pay also didn't share in the benefits, their homes remained cold. Society does not owe the companies anything for the positive externalities, any debt was already settled in cash.
But the companies, according to the lawsuit, knowingly and recklessly hid the negative externalities (CO2 emissions and hence global warming) from public scrutiny. These externalities potentially impact everyone, no matter how much oil they actually consumed or how much they benefited from society's oil consumption. The county does not have to ban oil (which it wouldn't be empowered to, anyway) to make that point. You don't have to agree with it, but the arguments you have brought up do not address the complaint that plaintiffs have brought here.
No, they paid for the direct results, i.e. heating oil, gasoline. The externalities that result include having a functional society where millions of people don't die every year due to the weather, where innovative goods (many of which are produced using large amounts of oil) can be produced anywhere in the world and still end up on a store shelf very close to you (or even delivered), and where the majority of people are freed up from having to produce their own food supply. Whereas a few deaths are countable (and the connection from oil production to these specific deaths is highly specious), the positive benefits of oil and electricity are so massive and so embedded and crucial to society that they are literally incalculable.
Further, the amount paid is massively reduced due to the incredibly efficient global infrastructure dedicated to producing, refining and transporting oil, thanks (in part) to Exxon, BP, Shell, etc. Instead of paying $60 for a gasoline fillup, imagine the costs of finding oil-producing land, independently drilling for oil and personally refining it into gasoline. The fact that you don't have to do any of that, is the true "externality" that you've benefitted from, but no, you have not paid for.
Every single positive aspect of the production of oil you listed has been paid for by some consumer at the pump or in the store at some point. And by governments/taxes through subsidies for oil companies. Consumers and citizens not only paid for the cost of everything you listed, they also paid for the (substantial) profits of the oil company's shareholders. Yes, some of that value creation also benefited overall economic growth but that is the same for literally every kind of business transaction and economic innovation.
Overall, the quality of life for most people at the moment is certainly higher than it would have been if oil has never been developed as a natural resource. But the risk of unmitigated climate change (which largely is due to humanity's consumption of fossil fuels) is that this equation will shift in the coming years and the use of oil, coal, etc. will turn out to have had a net negative impact on human quality of life.
"will shift"? "will turn out to have had a net negative"?
They are suing today, it hasn't even happened yet, and you're lacking proof it will. "Might" is the word you should be using, not "will." "Might not" is a lot more probable, however.
The effects of climate change are already apparent and are impacting millions of people negatively every year. That is exactly what the lawsuit in question alleges regarding this single county. And on a global level, waiting for a risk to turn into a certainty before acting is how you get your civilization destroyed, so I’d rather listen to the best available data and act immediately.
If 50% of fossiful fuel consumption is necessary and beneficial and 50% costs more than people benefit then getting rid of the latter will make everyone better off.
Well documented? This claim about extreme weather gets repeated and echoed by people who assume that it must be true because they keep hearing it, so they don't check. But it's not actually true.
There's a summary paper here that explores the data and shows this to be true:
The analysis is then extended to some global response indicators
of extreme meteorological events, namely natural disasters, floods, droughts, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat). None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events
There are other indicators you could use but they also don't show any crisis of extreme weather, often the opposite. Examples:
- Wildfire burn acreage is drastically down over the past 100 years.
- Hurricanes are in decline, both in frequency and energy.
- Rainfall is also down slightly.
You can google those claims to find them if you like because the datasets are all public, except maybe the third which is a bit obscure so I'll give it here:
the small- and medium-size precipitation systems both exhibit significant decreases during 2001–2020 with trends at −1.13 and −2 mm/h per century, respectively. The large-size precipitation systems exhibit nonsignificant increasing trends during 2001–2020.
The study you are linking is written by four authors, three of which are without any climate science credentials (at least two are nuclear physicists). One of those three has been disowned by a former institute he has worked at because of his unfounded claims regarding climate change (or the supposed lack thereof): https://it-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Franco_Prodi?...
These quotes are from the IPCCC (which represents the consensus of thousands of climate scientists) sixth assessment report from 2021:
"The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain). This also applies at regional scale, with more than 80% of AR6 regions1showing similar changes assessed to be at least likely."
"The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have likely increased at the global scale over a majority of land regions with good observational coverage. Heavy precipitation has likely increased on the continental scale over three continents: North America, Europe, and Asia. Regional increases in the frequency and/or intensity of heavy precipitation have been observed with at least medium confidence for nearly half of AR6 regions, […]"
"More regions are affected by increases in agricultural and ecological droughts with increasing global warming (high confidence)."
"The average and maximum rain rates associated with tropical cyclones (TCs), extratropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers across the globe, and severe convective storms in some regions, increase in a warming world (high confidence)."
This stuff is complex, as is correctly interpreting the available data. But sure, go with the opinion of four random Italian dudes over the consensus of literally thousands of subject matter experts.
I am not a climate scientist so my ability to adjudicate the finer details of climate science is very limited. But I have a decent understanding of how science works in general. If I am confronted with two rivaling interpretations of the data and one side is supported by the consensus of 99% of the subject matter experts from virtually every country in the world, while the other is brought forth by four dudes, at least three of which are not subject matter experts, I know which side I trust.
I'm not sure if you understand how the IPCC reports are put together. There are working groups for each specific subject matter, comprised of subject matter experts. They put together their findings and open up the draft for comment to the entire scientific community. The version that is published in the report is the lowest common denominator that all involved experts in a given field (literally hundreds of people from around the world for each chapter) can agree on.
If I read the 2023 study you cite correctly (I am not an hydrologist and my guess is you are neither), it looks at a very specific set of data and interprets it under a narrow set of questions, bringing up some potentially interesting questions that would need to be studied further. At no point do the authors claim that it fundamentally contradicts established scientific consensus. They argue that their results could help better understand the phenomenon of climate change and its effects, which might well be the case. My guess is that their findings will be considered as we speak by some of the people involved in the IPCCC reports and matched with other studies that have studied aspects of the issues in question.
Global climate change is an incredibly complex subject and I do not claim to understand more than a sliver of it. But having followed this topic intensely for 20+ years, there has never been a scientific subject of this complexity that at the same time was supported by such a broad consensus of the actual subject matter experts. If you say that a fundamental aspect of this consensus is false, that claim is extraordinary and demands extraordinary proof. A couple of random studies one of which you haven't researched the authors for and the other which you probably do not have the required knowledge to understand just won't cut it.
> I have a decent understanding of how science works in general. <consensus>
That's not how science works, that's the opposite of how science works. This is the first reason we cannot get anywhere in this thread.
Science is not some academic claiming everyone agrees with him, some random journalist reporting that as gospel, therefore it's true. That's the pre-scientific approach. Science is a method for arriving at the truth regardless of what people's titles are, and regardless of how popular they are or claim to be. It's about data and theories, not social support, that's why it works. The alternative you're trying to use here is a mishmash of tribal signals combined with strange attempts to do title-based reasoning, like trying to decide whether physicists, hydrologists or climatologists are more "expert" for any given topic. The world doesn't neatly break down that way.
> If you say that a fundamental aspect of this consensus is false, that claim is extraordinary and demands extraordinary proof.
This is the second reason we can't get anywhere. I've already given you proof of all these claims in the form of data. Even data in the form of peer reviewed studies, by scientists, although that isn't actually necessary for it to be proof.
You're rejecting it because you seem to be reasoning purely on the basis of social signals. That's a problem, because for a claim of the form "those people over there are making false claims", no level of proof can ever be accepted if you think that way, no matter how extraordinary. It's a form of circular reasoning: These guys says they're experts and every other expert agrees with them. Those guys says they're also experts and the first group are wrong, but the first guys told me every expert agrees with them, so therefore the others must not be experts, and therefore I must not listen. If you think that way it's just a race to see who can get to you first.
The way out is to recognize that it's not really that complicated. You can engage with the science on its own terms quite easily. If the news says extreme weather is getting more common, and charts of extreme weather events show otherwise, the data should win unless you have some reason to believe it's wrong.
Besides, how can you ascertain that CO2 causes GW? It’s been shown in a small-scale model, absolutely, but can a 2m3 box model be used in court to demonstrate Earth-sized climate changes? Are petrol companies responsible for all weather events starting from now? And for how long? Are they non-responsible when we come back to 400ppm of CO2?
I'm not sure what argument you make. Climate is different from weather and there have been extreme temperature events throughout history. Furthermore, how do you account for natural releases of methane or the whole cow farting angle? How do you establish responsibility, etc.