Climate Change: Dogs Of Law Are Off The Leash

by Richard Ingham - January 23rd, 2011 - AFP

From being a marginal and even mocked issue, climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.

Compensation for losses inflicted by man-made global warming would be jaw-dropping, a payout that would make tobacco and asbestos damages look like pocket money.

Imagine: a country or an individual could get redress for a drought that destroyed farmland, for floods and storms that created an army of refugees, for rising seas that wiped a small island state off the map.

In the past three years, the number of climate-related lawsuits has ballooned, filling the void of political efforts in tackling greenhouse-gas emissions.

Billions of dollars were won in law suits targetting doctors for causing various diseases like Cerebral Palsy, quadriplegia and other birth defects for "failure to perform a Cesarean." The increased practice resulted in real death to mothers and children who underwent Cesarean operations when the doctor advised against it but offered the mother her choice based on the rumors. Despite the soaring number of these useless operations, there was no discernible reductions in the number of any of these claimed problems. Why? Because having a Cesarean or not had no effect on any of them. The entire basis for the lawsuits was lawyer avarice, not good science. They are still being won, even though it has been proven the supposed causation does not exist.

Yet none of the lawyers have to give back a dime of their fraudulently gained legal fees. Nor will the lawyers ever be held liable for the rash of deaths useless Cesareans caused.

Billions of dollars were extorted from asbestos companies - even a great number of companies who never were involved in asbestos except in some nebulous manner, such as transporting it. Companies that asked for better weather proofing that in those days could only be provided by asbestos were made to pay damages for asking for better weather proofing. Asbestos was always known to be dangerous. Yet damages were paid to people who never had symptoms merely because they were exposed and "might" someday come down with the diseases that asbestos increased. Of course, if you had any of these lung diseases, you did not even have to prove you were exposed. That the diseases existed before asbestos and will still exist after asbestos has been eliminated from the earth did not matter.

When asbestos was declared illegal we went through a period where it was required to rip it all out, until it was discovered that the practice of removing asbestos caused more damage and harmed more people than sealing it in and leaving it where it was. Lawyers who had demanded the removal, then sued for more damages for the practice of removal they had forced companies to comply with. And in our corrupt court system, they won those lawsuits too.

Many small investors had the companies in which they held stock bought out by tobacco company corporations. Only to find that having been bought by the tobacco companies, they were now liable for the lawsuits against the tobacco companies too. Their life's work was then taken by states despite the fact that they never invested in tobacco, never benefited from tobacco, never even realized that our country would abandon the rule of law and hold them liable for acts they never participated in.

Which brings us to global warming. It will not matter to our corrupt courts if AGW is reality or a political scam. Our courts are nothing but a lottery system of corruption, allowing lawyers to extort billions for any trivial lame brain excuse if they can make an argument that seems credible to a gullible judge. It is not that our judges are too stupid to know these lawsuits are a scam. It is that our judges are too corrupt to care.