How would AGW theory stand up in court?

Suppose a person took the federal government to an impartial court, claiming damages and loss of liberty because of enforcement of laws to protect the environment from Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), and a truly impartial judge allowed the scientific evidence of AGW to be brought into court to substantiate the plaintiffs claims that the government lied about the science provide a basis for cap & trade, and other draconian energy laws.

Our litigants would ask a basic question; what evidence backs up the claims of AGW proponents used to justify the draconian environmental laws?

The government paid scientists would instead of solid, reproducible scientific evidence, offer hypotheses, speculation, assumptions, assertions, “hockey stick” graphs, computer models and worst-case scenarios – purporting to demonstrate that CO2 causes planetary warming … and the warming will be cataclysmic. These government paid for reports were “peer-reviewed” by networks of fellow government paid for proponents of AGW who tied every temperature, weather and wildlife anomaly to global warming and carbon dioxide. They would claim the “science is settled”.

Our litigant would start by showing case law, where a London High Court found no less than 9 false claims in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, to demonstrate that there is evidence that the data presented to promote AGW is false. They would also lay at the court, news articles and quotes, of government agents saying that even if there is no evidence of global warming they must use the crisis to promote social change.

Our litigants would present reliable satellite temperature measurements that span most of the planet. This data only covers the last 30 years, and for the past 15 years show stable and then declining temperatures, despite steadily rising CO2 levels.

They would show that the data used the government paid for scientists is from their research using ground temperatures. Our litigants would expose some not so nice facts, like approximately half of the world’s current ground-based temperature gauges are in the United States, and cover just 1.8% of the Earth’s surface. They would have meteorologist Anthony Watts testify about his research which shows that most of those gauges are close to air conditioning exhausts, tarmac, blacktop and other heat sources. Thus have abnormally high readings, corrupting climate records, models and analyses. He would also testify that the majority of Siberia’s stations were shut down years ago, leaving that frigid region without reliable data, further tilting average global temperatures upward. Britain’s combined marine and land-based temperatures were “value-added” (aggregated, averaged and manipulated) by its East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU), which then lost all the original raw data, so no one could check its methodologies, honesty or accuracy.

They would present evidence that the government paid for scientists stonewalled requests from experts who did not accept dire predictions of planetary mayhem, and wanted to examine the raw temperature data, computer codes and analyses. Then the litigants would present thousands of emails revealing a systematic, concerted collusion to stifle debate, conceal data, manipulate temperature trends that contradicted predictions of dangerous warming, delete data, and pressure scientific journals to publish only pro AGW studies and exclude analyses that did not agree with AGW theory.

They would then call on a sampling of the more well known scientists who don’t believe in AGW, there are tens of thousands, including Dr. Grey noted climatologist who says that the thousands of emails from GRU are just the “tip of the iceberg” in exposing the AGW hoax.

No impartial judge when shown the obvious malfeasance of the government’s AGW scientists would allow their evidence for AGW to be used in a court of law. Without a scientific basis for the laws proposed by AGW proponents are shown to be capricious arbitrary controls on the liberty of the people, designed to redistribute wealth not protect the environment, and these laws have no rationality in science, and the judge would be force to issue a cease and desist order to the government.

Of course this could never happen. The same government that controlled the $30 billion dollars in climate research over the past 20 years also controls the judges. When an AGW scientist tries to throw out research because it was funded by some corporation, look at where they get their funding, and who would benefit from their results? The obvious answer is the government? Look at which scientists are willing to share their raw data and methodologies and which are not. Obviously the government funded research is less trustworthy than privately funded research. To repeat myself from previous blog entries, AGW is not about science, it’s about power.