My head hurts.

Breaking news: In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” by promoting the use of fossil fuels.

The court determined that a provision… pic.twitter.com/WZ97aQvwK1

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 14, 2023

Damn near everyone in our judicial system is insane. That’s all there is to it.

In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” by promoting the use of fossil fuels.

The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state’s environment and the young plaintiffs, by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstitutional, the court said.

Think I was exaggerating about the five-year-olds? I wasn’t.

…The ruling represents a rare victory for climate activists who have tried to use the courts to push back against government policies and industrial activities they say are harming the planet. In this case, it involved 16 young Montanans, ranging in age from 5 to 22, who brought the nation’s first constitutional and first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial.

Childrens have the #sadz, so now they can sue when their parents have brainwashed and frightened them so badly they feel down in the dumps and terrified to breathe. I highlighted where the judge agreed these were “cognizable injuries.”

It should also note “Climate Mass Hysteria Munchausen by Proxy” – I don’t see it there, but trust me, it’s implied.

Holy schamoly-moly. This is what swayed a district court judge?

…Across five days of emotional testimony in June, the youths made claims about injuries they have suffered as a result of climate change. A 15-year-old with asthma described himself as “a prisoner in my own home” when isolating with covid during a period of intense wildfire smoke. Rikki Held, the 22-year-old plaintiff for whom the lawsuit is named, detailed how extreme weather has hurt her family’s ranch.

OMG it gets SO much worse. This is actionable “harm”? (All screencaps are from the the judgement pdf)

Sariel is missing “snow for creation stories”? According to the local news, it’s been a pretty good snowpack year. So much so, now they’re watching for flooding.

Does the judge not watch the news? Has Montana never had a drought before?

I means…come on. I got sad when we lived in Santa Ana, CA, and the hills 10 miles to our east in Orange would burn. The ash would fill our townhouse, as would the smoky stench and for days. We didn’t have air-conditioning, either, so it was a “live with it” situation. So #sadz. That happened about every third year or so, when the canyons in the county would light off in one direction or another.

Fire happens, especially if it’s dry. Little did I know a lawsuit would have made the fires stop.

But the fix was in on this ground-breaking lawsuit from the get-go, apparently. It very much looks as if they wanted a test case to be able to hoot and holler over, and to use as a template going forward for more of the same.

FOR THE CHILDREN

The state even brought in Judith Curry, the wonderfully blunt and world renowned American climatologist, and she was appalled by the “third grade math” the plaintiffs’ climate “experts” were using.

The most astonishing thing for me in this trial was listening to Montana’s climate science experts (the “real climate scientists of Montana”). They are all academic ecologists, with several having some national prominence. They were each very fluent at reciting key IPCC talking points (especially the more dubious ones from WGII and the Synthesis Report), and then exaggerating the implications for the youth Plaintiffs with high confidence.

The key climate issues in this case are:

• attribution of extreme weather events that the youth Plaintiffs have encountered in their lifetimes (e.g. wildfire, heat wave, hail storm, drought, early snow melt).
• projections for 21st century warming (several of the Plaintiffs seem to be suffering from pre-traumatic stress syndrome)
• the contributions of MT’s emissions to global warming and severe weather/climate events in MT

None of the Plaintiffs’ climate “experts” have any expertise that relates to actually understanding these key issues. Their ignorance of extreme event detection and attribution is egregious, given the high level of confidence they had in their statements and the inconsistency of their conclusions with the the IPCC AR6 WG1. In their rebuttal reports and also in their direct questioning under trial, they each used the following logic:

• There is a long-term warming trend.
• The long-term warming trend is caused by fossil fuel emissions
• Any recent extreme weather/climate event in MT is caused by the warming trend and hence by fossil fuel emissions
• Any extreme (even worse) weather events in MT that occurred during the first half of the 20th century were caused by something else (e.g. La Nina).

They all relied heavily on the implausible emissions scenario RCP8.5 for future projections of impacts. None could answer the most basic question on the quantitative contribution of Montana’s emissions to global warming. Ooops.

She said the MT defense lawyers didn’t call these academic experts out on any of their exaggerated or flat-out erronious assertions.

…Nevertheless, their expertise as ecologists who examine the impacts of climate variability on ecosystems, bleeds into labelling them as “climate experts” who are making wildly unjustified and highly confident statements about these broader climate change issues. If I had been cross-examining these witnesses, I would have shredded their testimony.

In Curry’s report prior to this verdict, she rips the activities of Our Children’s Trust – the advocacy group the helped bring this lawsuit – and warns this is just the beginning. Then she speaks a simple truth.

…Our Children’s Trust, and other advocacy groups filing lawsuits against fossil fuel companies and electric utility companies, aren’t going away and are arguably stepping up their activities. Governments at all levels, companies, judges and lawyers are ill prepared for such lawsuits (MT’s lawyers are a case in point). Our Children’s Trust is apparently “helping” this situation by educating judges (uh oh). Montana’s lawyers, in spite of some ineptness, show the way forward here. Focus these cases on narrow legal points and procedures. Issues surrounding climate change policy related to emissions or whatever, should be addressed by the political and legislative process, not by judicial decree.

There is no right to a “safe and stable climate,” for the simple reason that Earth’s climate is constantly out of equilibrium and evolving.

Montana has a pretty wild climate history. 600,000 years ago there were hugely massive volcanic eruptions from Yellowstone. Around 20,000 years ago, Montana and the entire northern part of the continent was under a massive ice sheet that was more than a half mile thick. Around 15,000 years ago there were massive floods that created Lake Missoula. On the time scales of centuries, the climate is never in equilibrium, even in the absence of external forcing like volcanic eruptions of human-caused CO2 missions. There is a whole spectrum of time scales in the deep ocean and ice sheets that keep the climate in a state of disequlibrium on century to thousand year time scales. The impacts of natural (internal) decadal and interannual climate variability are readily evident in the fingerprints of extreme weather/climate events that have occurred in MT since 1900. There was nothing particularly “safe” about the Earths climate circa 1988 (or different from the current climate), when CO2 concentrations were 350 ppm.

There is no right to “stable” anything.

But it is definitely not right for parents to imply there is and use their children as instruments of something that cannot be changed for all the histrionics.

All the successful lawsuits in the world can’t control the weather.

But all the successful lawsuits are about control.