U.S. District Judge William Alsup on Wednesday will convene his ordered “tutorial” on the causes and consequences of climate change to inform the lawsuit two California cities have filed against five oil companies. The cities of San Francisco and Oakland sued BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillps, Exxon, and Royal Dutch Shell in September for “billions in expenditures to abate the global warming nuisance.” Before hearing the case, Judge Alsup asked both sides in the suit to “trace the history of scientific study of climate change” and share “the best science now available.”
The amici curiae brief was filed by Heartland Policy Advisors Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, and William M. Briggs, as well as David Legates, Michael Limburg, Dietrich Jeschke, Alex Henney, John Whitfield, and James Morrison. The attorneys filing the brief are Heartland Senior Fellow for Legal Affairs Peter Ferrara and James Braden.
Read the brief at this link.
The Heartland Institute is a 34-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. It has held 12 International Conferences on Climate Change, and is the publisher for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). NIPCC has produced 13 reports, including the four-volume Climate Change Reconsidered series – more than 4,000 pages from the peer-reviewed literature showing humans are not causing a climate crisis.
For more information about The Heartland Institute, visit our website or contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] or 312/377-4000.
Excerpts from the amici curiae brief:
- “The underlying science is simple enough to allow the Court, which has earned a unique and commendable reputation for diligent mastery of scientific questions, to understand the argument and to verify its soundness.”
- “The amici curiae will demonstrate that there is no ‘consensus’ among scientists that recent global warming was chiefly anthropogenic, still less that unmitigated anthropogenic warming has been or will be dangerous or catastrophic. The “consensus” proposition, as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states no more than that most of the global warming observed since 1950 was anthropogenic. That proposition does not necessarily entail the conclusion that global warming has been or will be net-harmful.”
- “The amici curiae will demonstrate that, even if it be assumed ad argumentum that all of the 0.8 Kelvin global warming since anthropogenic influence first became potentially significant in 1950 was attributable to us, in the present century little more than 1.2 K of global warming is to be expected, not the 3.3 K that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had predicted.”
- “…concern about global warming is unnecessary, whereupon not only must plaintiff’s case fail but defendants’ public assertions that global warming is a serious problem are also unjustifiable …[therefore] plaintiff’s claims should be dismissed and defendants, having based their public expressions of concern about global warming on the same error as plaintiff, should meet their own costs in the cause.”
For more on this topic, visit The Heartland Institute’s archive of the 12 International Conferences on Climate Change, the NIPCC website, and Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.
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Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, was Special Advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1982 to 1986.
Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and a geoscientist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
William M. ‘Matt’ Briggs is a policy advisor at The Heartland Institute.
Peter Ferrara, J.D., is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and an advisor for entitlement reform and budget policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation.
