Here is the concluding section of the dissenting opinion of Chief Justice Roberts (and joined by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito) to the Supreme Court’s ruling that carbon dioxide regulation falls under the EPA’s purview under the Clean Air Act. (the complete decision including the majority and dissenting opinions can be found here )

According to Chief Justice Roberts:

IV.…The realities make it pure conjecture to suppose that EPA regulation of new automobile emissions will likely prevent the loss of Massachusetts coastal land.

V. Petitioners’ difficulty in demonstrating causation and redressability is not surprising given the evident mismatch between the source of their alleged injury—catastrophic global warming—and the narrow subject matter of the Clean Air Act provision at issue in this suit. The mismatch suggests that petitioners’ true goal for this litigation may be more symbolic than anything else. The constitutional role of the courts, however, is to decide concrete cases—not to serve as a convenient forum for policy debates [emphasis added -eds]. See Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc., 454 U. S. 464, 472 (1982) (“[Standing] tends to assure that the legal questions presented to the court will be resolved, not in the rarified atmosphere of a debating society, but in a concrete factual context conducive to a realistic appreciation of the consequences of judicial action”).

When dealing with legal doctrine phrased in terms of what is “fairly” traceable or “likely” to be redressed, it is perhaps not surprising that the matter is subject to some debate. But in considering how loosely or rigorously to define those adverbs, it is vital to keep in mind the purpose of the inquiry. The limitation of the judicial power to cases and controversies “is crucial in maintaining the tripartite allocation of power set forth in the Constitution.” DaimlerChrysler, 547 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5) (internal 14 quotation marks omitted). In my view, the Court today—addressing Article III’s “core component of standing,” Defenders of Wildlife, supra, at 560—fails to take this limitation seriously.

To be fair, it is not the first time the Court has done so. Today’s decision recalls the previous high-water mark of diluted standing requirements, United States v. Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures (SCRAP), 412 U. S. 669 (1973). SCRAP involved “[p]robably the most attenuated injury conferring Art. III standing” and “surely went to the very outer limit of the law”—until today. Whitmore, 495 U. S., at 158–159; see also Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, 497 U. S. 871, 889 (1990) (SCRAP “has never since been emulated by this Court”). In SCRAP, the Court based an environmental group’s standing to challenge a railroad freight rate surcharge on the group’s allegation that increases in railroad rates would cause an increase in the use of non recyclable goods, resulting in the increased need for natural resources to produce such goods. According to the group, some of these resources might be taken from the Washington area, resulting in increased refuse that might find its way into area parks, harming the group’s members. 412 U. S., at 688.

Over time, SCRAP became emblematic not of the looseness of Article III standing requirements, but of how utterly manipulable they are if not taken seriously as a matter of judicial self-restraint. SCRAP made standing seem a lawyer’s game, rather than a fundamental limitation ensuring that courts function as courts and not intrude on the politically accountable branches. Today’s decision is SCRAP for a new generation [emphasis added, -eds].

Perhaps the Court recognizes as much. How else to explain its need to devise a new doctrine of state standing to support its result? The good news is that the Court’s “special solicitude” for Massachusetts limits the future applicability of the diluted standing requirements applied in this case. The bad news is that the Court’s self-professed relaxation of those Article III requirements has caused us to transgress “the proper—and properly limited—role of the courts in a democratic society” [emphasis added, -eds]. Allen, 468 U. S., at 750 (internal quotation marks omitted).

I respectfully dissent.

On Wednesday March 14th a debate was held by the organization Intelligence Squared on the motion “Global Warming is Not a Crisis.”

Intelligence Squared’s (IQ2) mission is:

The goal of IQ2 US is to raise the level of public discourse on our most challenging issues. To provide a new forum for intelligent discussion, grounded in facts and informed by reasoned analysis. To transcend the toxically emotional and the reflexively ideological. To encourage recognition that the opposing side has intellectually respectable views. To engage the live audience as active participants who will ask questions and decide which speakers have carried the day by voting on the motions both before and after the debate.

Its debates are well-respected and broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR) and transcripts and podcasts are available for anyone interested in them.

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A couple of weeks ago, Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and John Rockefeller (D-WV), teamed up to write a letter to ExxonMobil asking them to no longer fund climate change skeptics. Apparently, the Senators feel that they already know enough and are not interested in hearing anything by anyone other than from who and what they already believe about the issue of climate change and it potential impacts.

The reactions to the letter have been mixed, to say the least. While the Senators obviously thought this was a good idea, others were less than thrilled. A few folks think that this amounts to little more than politics-as-usual (e.g., here), while others are a bit more incensed(e.g., see here, here, and here, for example).

We invite you to visit the link above and decide for yourself.

For nearly 100 years, Californians have claimed to be the innovators that the rest of the United States and the world ultimately follow. Not so on global warming. Instead, the California Legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger have just passed and signed global warming legislation that is an awful lot like a watered-down version of the failed Kyoto Protocol. That’s sooo 1990s.

That Protocol was supposed to reduce our emissions of Carbon Dioxide, the main human-generated global warming gas, to 7% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Nationally, emissions are up about 18% since then. Recognizing this failure, the California law merely cuts back California emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a 25% cut.

Why on earth did they do this, and what will it accomplish?

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It’s the rare bestseller that commits factual suicide in its first pages, but Al Gore has managed this feat in a big way in An Inconvenient Truth.

An Inconvenient Truth is mostly a picture book (or a movie) with screaming, large-fonted text superimposed to make sure we get the point—mankind is ruining the Earth. Everything bad, and nothing good—floods, sea level rise, drought, famine, disease, tornadoes, hurricanes, and fire, destruction etc.—are all caused by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide.

Where’s the picture demonstrating that fossil-fuel powered societies have doubled life expectancy in the last 100 years. Where’s the amber waves of grain, pumped up in part by atmospheric carbon dioxide? Or, perhaps too close to home, where are all the plump Americans, because food is no longer a limiting resource?

Instead, picture after well-crafted picture provides the backdrop to Gore’s frightful but droning text (or speech, in the movie). Each page is slick and deliberate. Each is perfectly airbrushed climate porn with a Hollywood twist. “Twist” in the sense that truth becomes an inconvenience, right from the get-go.

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The Supreme Court has agreed to review whether or not the federal government is currently required by law to limit emissions of carbon dioxide, the major human emission implicated in global warming.

How could they not do it? The public is being barraged daily by climate horror stories. Greenland is shedding ice at a fever pace. Antarctica isn’t far behind. Hurricanes are getting worse. Species are going extinct by the millions. And worst of all, it just rained a lot in Washington. All because of (ahem) global warming.

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Laurie David, the primary force behind HBO’s recent global warming “documentary” as well as a recent Fox News special (see here for our review), has seen fit to comment on Dr. Patrick Michaels’ publication record in her May 10, 2006 entry on Arianna Huffington’s blog site.

For some reason, Ms. David decides to attack Dr. Michaels’ credentials to comment about the results of his own peer-reviewed scientific paper he just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Atlantic basin tropical cyclones and their possible behavioral changes resulting from rising temperatures (see here for more details of the results).

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In the February 8 New York Times, NASA’s Jim Hansen again complained that his ideas on climate change are being suppressed by the Bush Administration, which is destroying our democracy by censoring climate science. According to the Times:

“On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed,” he said. “The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That’s the big issue here.”

On the other hand, Hansen thinks that lying about climate change in order to get attention is just peachy.

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Juliet Eilperin’s latest headline in the Washington Post (January 29, 2006) about how global warming is destroying the earth was “Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change.” The Post, which has been news-editorializing this story for a couple of years now, featured her article above the fold in the top-right corner of the Sunday paper. Obviously they are exercised. Our response: cool it.
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We’ve been getting a bunch of hits from people searching on “James Hansen” since the New York Times and Washington Post have both run articles in which Hansen claimed he was being censored by the Administration.

So, to make everyone’s life a bit easier (and since there is really not much new here), we’ve provided the links below to a couple of particularly poignant World Climate Report articles in which we covered Hansen’s political activities, his recent findings, and his philosophy on the reporting on the global warming issue. If you want more stories like these, we invite you to use our “Search” feature located in the righthand sidebar to search recent articles or go here to search our back issues (e.g., enter, say, “Hansen” for best results!).

Blowing Your Own Whistle

Summary: Prominent scientist James Hansen criticizes President Bush’s climate change policy, despite the fact that the policy is in part based on Hansen’s own findings.

This is unheard of: A prominent scientist in the pay of the federal government attacks the President in a crucial state (Iowa) one week before the election. Not just any prominent scientist, either, but James Hansen, recipient of $250,000 in pocket change from the Heinz Foundation, run by Mrs. John Kerry. Don’t worry, though, he said he was speaking as a private citizen because he paid his own way. With Mrs. Kerry’s money, we might add, in his family nest egg.
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James Hansen Increasingly Insensitive

Summary: It seems that the longer NASA scientist Jim Hansen studies the climate, the more insensitive he, or should we say, his interpretation of the climate, becomes.
Climate “sensitivity” is the change in surface temperature expected for each additional Watt of energy that is re-radiated onto the earth’s surface and lower atmosphere by slight changes in the greenhouse effect. The main cause of these changes in the greenhouse effect, of course, is the increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by the combustion of fossil fuels.
You would think that it would be big news when Hansen—the guy who started all this mess with his incendiary 1988 congressional testimony—lowers his estimate for the sensitivity to two-thirds of the value he used back then.

After all, he does get a lot of ink. That’s what happened in October, 2004, when he traveled to hotly contested and environmentally sensitive Iowa the weekend before the election, and publicly berated his Boss’ global warming policy. Talk about insensitive!
Hansen’s most recent figure, just published in Sciencexpress, is that the surface temperature ultimately changes 0.67˚C per Watt per square meter (W/m2). In 1988 he said it was a full degree, and in 2001 he lowered it to 0.75.

The lower the climate sensitivity, the less that the global temperature will rise in the future (given the same amount atmospheric carbon dioxide) and the lower the threat of catastrophic climate change.
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Observations Not Models

Summary: Urging caution regarding “implausible” and “unduly pessimistic” IPCC climate scenarios, NASA’s Hansen opts for observations to guide his forecasts of a 0.75ºC temperature rise by the year 2050.

NASA’s James Hansen, who is widely credited as being the “father of global warming” recently wrote that the climate change scenarios put forth in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) “may be unduly pessimistic,” and that the IPCC extreme scenarios are “implausible.” In fact, he argues, the observed trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations for the past several years fall below all IPCC scenarios, so consequently future temperature rise will most like be about 0.75ºC during the next 50 years.
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Is soot, not CO2, to blame for the loss of Arctic ice?

Summary: There are three primary tools that global warming alarmists use in their arguments that anthropogenic enhancements to the world’s naturally occurring greenhouse effect are causing the climate to behave as it never has before and this will ultimately be catastrophic. They are 1) the “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction for the past 1,000 years, which purports to show that left to its own devices, the global average temperature changes very little, yet it jumps at the slightest provocation from mankind; 2) the IPCC 21st century temperature projections which show a range of possible warming by century’s end that spans 1.4 to 5.8ºC (of course, the alarmist attention is given to the high end projection); and 3) the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been steadily declining for the past several decades and will be entirely gone in the summertime in the next 50 years as a result of rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. With the latest publication by NASA scientists Dorothy Koch and James Hansen, the final of these arguments now joins the first two in being soundly repudiated.
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AAAS “all-stars” lead biased discussion

Summary: On June 15, 2004, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) convened what they described as an “all-star” panel of U.S. climate scientists to discuss climate change. Never before has such a biased look at the issue been put together by a group that supposedly represents the purest ideals of science.
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Joint Statement of the G8 National Academies: A Non Sequitur

Summary: On June 7, 2005, a joint statement on climate change was issued by the national science academies of the G8 countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Canada, Japan, and the United States) along with China, India and Brazil. The statement emphasized two primary points, 1) that climate change (as caused by human-induced alterations of the composition of the atmosphere) is real, and 2) something needs to be done about it.

As has been the case in the climate change debate for years, the second point simply does not follow from the first.
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