I was recently pre-fired from a job helping with the defense of a very large company in its fight over being charged with the same non-crime detailed below.
My point has nothing to do with myself, per se, but on the increasing difficulty, and even impossibility, of defending oneself from non-crimes when people like me are prevented from helping with the defense.
Which sounds confusing. Let me explain.
The non-crime is “climate attribution”. That somehow companies not publicly wringing their hands over “climate change” caused the public not to care, which in turn caused “climate change” to grow worse, which in turn caused “climate change” to cause bad weather.
Which in turn gave dark-souled unscrupulous midwits something to sue over.
I was “pre-fired” (and not for the first time), because the defense was concerned my thought-crimes unrelated to climate attribution studies would become the focus of any cross examination or deposition. Thought-crimes such as my public writings on covid, transgenderism, Equality, race, and so on. And thus all my cogent, and damning, arguments against climate attribution would be ignored.
The defense was sad about this, because they wanted me. And they wanted me because I am one of the only people making certain criticisms of climate attributions, and I can make them stick.
But this is politics and not science—science has scarcely anything to do with The Science today—and they were right not to hire me. (As sad as that is to my bottom line.)
I put this here in case somebody else who is involved in the defense against these kinds of ridiculous charges can benefit from reading (at least) my two papers on the subject, both found at the Global Warming Policy Foundation: “The Climate Blame Game: Are we really causing extreme weather?” and “How the IPCC Sees What Isn’t There“. The first in particular contains (what I think) are damning arguments to any attribution claim. See also this post (blog, Substack) for gross over-certainties in “climate change”.
And now for a real-life example. I want to emphasize that this is not the case which I was pre-fired from. It’s just a typical one.
The only thing to admire about the Attorney General of New York Letitia James is her vicious conscienceless ruthless political instinct. She knows how to manipulate the Regime to get ahead.
She cares nothing for the law. She ravages Truth like Lindsey Graham his boyfriends. And she is as open in her grafting as, well, as a New York politician.
She recently tweeted:
I’m suing @JBSFoodsUSA, the world’s largest beef producer, for misleading the public about its environmental impact.
The beef industry is one of the largest contributors to climate change, and JBS has falsely advertised its commitment to sustainability and endangered our planet.
JBS knows that people are more likely to buy products that will not harm the environment, so it has spent years advertising fake sustainability efforts to boost sales.
In reality, JBS is increasing its beef production and its carbon footprint.
Since the words were spelled correctly and the grammar passable, this was surely composed by a staffer. But whatever. It’s under her name, and she is responsible.
Her claim is absurd, and anti-scientific. But that does not mean she won’t win. Absurdity has long passed as The Science in the Regime. The Wall Street Journal has an article detailing the many facets of the case, many of which have nothing to do with the “climate”.
Obviously, I certainly would never be asked to assist in this case. But here’s the twist: very few can.
The defense has to find somebody, likely in academia, who has only written or spoken publicly on this one narrow subject. There are two problems: finding somebody in academia or the equivalent, and finding a person who has never taken an anti-Regime view on any subject.
Both are near impossibilities. The first because being in academia very likely means espousing a Regime view. And the second because so many anti-science positions taken by the Regime are correlated (as we say), such that being critical in one area very quickly becomes being critical in another area.
Whereas the prosecution in these cases is free to pick from Experts galore. They can grab a Harvard professor who says “A man can transform into a woman and climate change will kill 12 billion people”, and he will be celebrated by the courts. But his opponent who says “A man is ever a man and climate change will not kill 12 billion people” will be asked, “Why are you a transphobe?” by the courts.
This is why Broken Science is so important.
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There is a reliable defense against out of control politicians like Letitia James. But it isn’t nice, and it isn’t pretty. It does, however, have the advantage of actually working. And an additional effect pour encourager les autres.
We must start clambering for ‘loser pays’ laws to insure frivolous lawsuits are are too expensive for the vocational plaintiffs (including governmental institutions).
Hm. She’s right about JBS though. They are also no friend to beef farmers. I look forward to our enemies mauling each other.
AGW has been promoted since their Ice Age hobby horse collapsed back in the late 1970’s.
Untold billions have been spent on embedding the AGW brain virus which is unmatched on
a planetary scale. Well there may be one exception; that other hobby horse that’s been promoted
since 1947. Be that as it may, in both cases the operant mechanism is guilt leading to compensation
in the form of unending reparations and now climate taxes that translate into perpetual theft that
will keep on stealing presumably forever. Pretty clever huh those billions spent will translate into
trillions extracted with the added bonus of total spectrum dominance of the population by control
of energy, food, housing, transportation, finance, in short all aspects of growth and development
that will limit individual autonomy and agency forever. All innocently presented Ad nauseam as a
Herculean effort to ‘Save the Planet’…you Schmuck.
McChuck: I like your thinking.
Every time I read about these zealots and lunatics, I want to barbeque a mess of steaks and have a bonfire of old tires, just so my carbon footprint can be seen from space.
On a superficial level, suing JBS is quite odd. Here’s a company that’s playing the game just as they ask, “wringing their hands over climate change”. But no, Letitia James is suing because the company isn’t following through and, in effect, putting itself out of business by reducing production. Surely even James knows that you can’t have both hand-wringing and follow-through, as the consumption of beef is independent of JBS’s existence. To the degree she is successful in reducing JBS’s beef production, beef prices will rise in response, encouraging competitors to increase their production. And the competitors won’t be so willing to play the climate hand-wringing game after witnessing the JBS fiasco. So Letitia James is actually damaging the cause, but she knows that her base is too stupid to connect those dots.
But on a deeper level it makes perfect sense. Letitia James is singularly focused on her lefty bona-fides, damn the collateral damage. And as Rush used to say, lefties earn their bona fides by attacking disfavored individuals and companies. The more complete the destruction, the more resplendent their image becomes.
Letitia James is a hack beginner compared to Washington State’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson. That man is pure evil, spawn of Satan. Which means he is probably a shoe-in for governor, since Washington State is 100% mail-in de-voting.
Off-topic: I’d like to see some form of tort reform in civil cases. Some possibilities:
1) Somehow limit the amount of money/resources that can be spent by the any of the involved parties
2) Some form of loser pays
3) Government is treated no differently than any other involved parties, with some form of individual liability when a government official loses a civil case with a loser-pays award
The goal is to reduce frivolous and bad-faith lawsuits, and reduce “the process is the punishment” lawsuits. And yes, I realize that there is an enormous amount of vested-interest money/power that will adamantly oppose any change to the current system. But wishful thinking seems to be a core component of this comment section, and I have an many wishful thinkings as the next guy.
–>”The beef industry is one of the largest contributors to climate change…”
How does that even amount to a fact statement that can be sustained in court??
JBS is not the beef industry.
Largest contributor of what?
Who are these contributors?
Climate change defined how?
Though, the mind boggles at the propaganda…
Didn’t you know? Just like a butterfly flapping its wings causes typhoons, cows farting warms the Earth and by the year 2999 New York will be underwater! Blacks will be most affected! Also, they prefer fried chicken anyway, so the beef won’t be missed. Only whites eat burgers and French cuisine fries.
JBS ought to do what the European farmers did and dump truckloads of manure outside of her front door and office.
Dear Dr Briggs
Thanks (again) for your many informative posts in climate change (inter alia). I want to make a suggestion. Could you give us readers without a phd in statistics in climate related issues some pointers about how to get people, especially young people, to question their beliefs about climate change in an effective way (getting them to think and want to study various viewpoints)? I am not talking about the more fanatical true believers, just young people spoonfed the correct view on carbon emissions, climate crises, footprints, the evils of flying, climate denialism and all the rest? The kind of people who could change or broaden their minds if exposed to other views or thought-provoking arguments in the right way. Have you or any readers here come up with some Socratic method(s) to get them to rethink what they think they know?
Denis,
Excellent idea. I’m going to email you to remind me to do this.
Denis Searby, there’s a book written in an answer to your question : How To Get Expelled From School by Ian Plimer . IIRC, on Tom Nelson’s podcast he mentioned having published one more book on this, for kids or adolescents.
I’d like to know exactly how beef contributes to “Climate Change” even by their own metrics. Burning fossil fuels really does increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, either in the form of methane or in the form of CO2. But raising cows does not do this. They eat the carbon of plants which was sucked out of the atmosphere. This plant material, if not eaten by the cow would have decomposed into CO2 and some methane. It does not increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. If you zoom in on the atmospheric CO2 chart, you can see that every year the amount of CO2 falls in the spring and summer and rises in the fall and winter. This is the vegetation growing and dying. The whole anti-beef movement is based on lies like this one.