[Vision2020] Wired, 3-21-18 "...on the record, in federal court, on what is... true about climate science...literally unprecedented."

[Ted Moffett]

The nine climate science questions Judge Alsup asked are answered on
Realclimate.org at this website:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/03/alsup-asks-for-answers/#more-21208
--------------------------------
In the Courtroom, Climate Science Needs Substance—and Style

https://www.wired.com/story/courtroom-climate-science/

*Adam Rogers*
- 03.21.18

Chevron would like you to know that it believes in climate change. It also
believes people cause it by burning carbon-based fuel—the kind Chevron
extracts from the ground, refines, and sells. In fact, Chevron believes all
this so hard that today its lawyer said so, in a federal court in San
Francisco. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Yup. They’re right.

That’s not as up-is-down as it might sound; Chevron representatives have
said as much before. The follow-up questions, though, will be the tricky
part. Because what was at stake in that courtroom was not whether the
effects of climate change—sea level rise, ocean acidification, weather
extremes, wildfires, disease outbreaks—are *people’s* fault. It was whether
a lawsuit could show that specific effects (floods) are *specific* people’s
fault. Specifically, the people at Chevron.

...and BP and ExxonMobil, because San Francisco and Oakland are suing
<https://www.wired.com/story/could-san-francisco-get-the-oil-industry-to-pay-for-climate-change/>
those companies for money to build seawalls and other protective
infrastructure. The idea isn’t just that petrochemical transnationals
extract, produce, and sell the fuel that puts carbon into the atmosphere.
It’s that they *knew* that was bad, kept doing it anyway, and cut ads and
marketing that tried to convince people it wasn’t a problem.

But before they could really dig into that, the judge in the case, William
Alsup, asked for what he termed a “tutorial.” On March 6, he sent the
lawyers on both sides a list of nine questions
<https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2017cv06011/318403/138>
digging into the basic history and science of climate change.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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