Lethal Heating: 12/13/16

13/12/2016

Doctrine of Public Trust

Lethal Heating

Legal opinion worldwide says citizens have the right to sue their governments for failing to protect common natural resources.

These include the atmosphere, water, landscape and wildlife.

Under the Doctrine of Public Trust, Federal, State, and Local Governments must safeguard these resources for the benefit and use of the general public now and in the future.

According to legal experts, this is the key to successful class action.

For instance, Chief Judge of the NSW Land and Environment Court, Justice Brian Preston, says the Doctrine "holds that the earth's natural resources are held in trust by the present generation for future generations".

He says Government, as trustee, "is under a fiduciary duty to deal with the trust property, being the common natural resources, in a manner that is in the interests of the general public".

WH Rodgers, in "Bringing People Back: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Taking in Natural Resource Law", writes that public trust law may be "the strongest contemporary expression of the idea that the legal rights of nature and of future generations are enforceable against contemporary users".

There is legal precedent in Australia.

Professor Tim Bonyhady, of the ANU Law School and Director, Australian Centre for Environmental Law, cites two successful 19th century public trust cases, one involving Melbourne's Albert Park, the other a proposed coal mine on the shores of Sydney Harbour.

And in the 1992 case, Willoughby City Council v Minister Administering the National Parks and Wildlife Act, Justice Paul Stein stated: "...national parks are held by the State in trust for the enjoyment and benefit of its citizens, including future generations".

The President of the Australian Coastal Society, Professor Bruce Thom, a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, says there is scope for environmental law in Australia to make use of the Doctrine of Public Trust.

"This Doctrine recognises that governments at all levels owe a duty of care to protect environmental assets for the common benefit of the public," Professor Thom says.

Professor Mary Christina Wood, Faculty Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program at the University of Oregon, says the Doctrine calls upon the judicial branches of governments world-wide to force carbon reduction on the basis of their fiduciary responsibility to protect the public trust.

She says the Doctrine also provides the legal foothold for Atmospheric Trust Litigation - lawsuits mounted by ordinary citizens against governments that fail to live up to their obligations to look after the atmosphere or national heritage properly.

The principles of Atmospheric Trust are contained in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of which Australia is a signatory.

Professor Wood says the UNFCCC "provides an umbrella legal framework for applying the public trust concept to climate change by calling upon nations to 'protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind'." "In Australia, a country that has common law roots, one would expect the public trust to be a pillar of environmental jurisprudence," she says.

In summary, crowdfunding subject to strict independent oversight could finance this, Australia's biggest class action, with the Doctrine of Public Trust compelling Federal, State and Local Governments to take immediate and substantive action on climate change.

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What Is The 'Holy Grail Of Climate Science' And How Will Scientists Find It?

ABC News - Jane Norman

A palaeoclimatologist inspects an ice core sample at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies. (Supplied: Jill Brown/Australian Antarctic Division)

The Million-Year Ice Core.

It sounds like the name of a Hollywood blockbuster starring a Hemsworth brother.
But it is actually far cooler than that.
It's the "holy grail of climate science", a piece of ice so old that it might be able to reveal the climate of the past and help predict the future of Earth's atmosphere.
And Australia's Antarctic scientists are now part of an international race to find the ancient time capsule.

So, what is it?
Somewhere deep below the surface of Antarctica, ice has laid untouched for a million years or more — it's believed to be the world's oldest ice.
Scientists have spent years mapping the areas where they believe this ice may be and are now racing to identify the precise location and retrieve it.

Australia's Antarctic scientists are part of an international race to find the ancient time capsule. (ABC News: Jane Norman)

How will they do that?
Once they settle on a location, scientists will drill up to three kilometres into the Antarctic ice sheet and extract a long cylinder or "core" of ice to sample.
That cylinder is then sliced thinly and analysed, like the rings of a tree.
It's a difficult, expensive and lengthy process which is why Australian scientists aren't expected to start drilling for another few years.

What do ice cores tell us?
Scientists have been extracting ice cores from Antarctica for decades — the oldest is 800,000 years old.
When ice freezes, it traps tiny bubbles of air so these ice cores provide a detailed archive of what the Earth's atmosphere, temperature and carbon dioxide levels were like going back hundreds of thousands of years.
The idea is that by studying the past climate, scientists will able to make more accurate predictions about how it will change in the future.
For example, ice core research has proven that up until industrialisation, the Earth's temperature and carbon dioxide levels rose and fell in lockstep.

Search for world's oldest ice core continues in Antarctica (ABC News)

Why is it the Holy Grail of climate research?
While the 800,000 year ice core has revealed a lot about climate history, something strange happened about a million years ago; the cycle of ice ages slowed down.
Rather than happening every 40,000 years, they started happening every 100,000 years.
Scientists believe carbon dioxide played a role but the only way to prove that theory is by finding the oldest possible record of the Earth's atmosphere.
It's one of the major unanswered questions of climate change and it's hoped the Million-Year Ice Core will finally solve it.

Why are so many countries in the race?
They say science is the currency of influence in Antarctica so if Australia can play lead role in locating it, our stocks on the frozen continent will go up.
This is important because the politics of Antarctica are changing and Australia needs to maintain its credibility, and role as an Antarctic leader, by investing in projects like this one.
China has already started drilling at one spot but Australia thinks an area called Dome C shows far more promise.

When will we start?
Australia will start preliminary drilling this Summer and if all goes to plan, we will start drilling for the ice core around 2020.
So stay tuned.

An image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica on March 25, 2009. (British Antarctic Survey)

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Trump Says ‘Nobody Really Knows’ If Climate Change Is Real

Washington Post - Juliet Eilperin

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during an election night rally on Nov. 9 in New York. (Evan Vucci/AP)

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real and that he is “studying” whether the United States should withdraw from the global warming agreement struck in Paris a year ago.
In an interview with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace, Trump said he’s “very open-minded” on whether climate change is underway but has serious concerns about how President Obama’s efforts to cut carbon emissions have undercut America’s global competitiveness.
“I’m still open-minded. Nobody really knows,” Trump said. “Look, I’m somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It’s not something that’s so hard and fast. I do know this: Other countries are eating our lunch.”
There is a broad scientific consensus that human activity — including the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, heating and industrial manufacturing — is driving recent climate change. In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that it is “extremely likely” that, since the 1950s, humans and their greenhouse gas emissions have been the “dominant cause” of the planet’s warming trend. The top 10 hottest years on record have all been since 1998, and 2016 is expected to be the hottest year since formal record-keeping began in 1880.
But it’s not the first time that Trump has disregarded that established scientific view.
During the presidential campaign, Trump referred to climate change as a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, a comment he later described as a joke. But during a town hall in New Hampshire, he also mocked the idea of global warming. At that event, Meghan Andrade, a volunteer for the League of Conservation Voters, asked Trump what he would do to address the issue, to which he replied: “Let me ask you this — take it easy, fellas — how many people here believe in global warming? Do you believe in global warming?”
After asking three times “Who believes in global warming?” and soliciting a show of hands, Trump concluded that “nobody” believed climate change was underway except for Andrade.
During Sunday’s interview with Wallace, Trump said he needed to balance any environmental regulation against the fact that manufacturers and other businesses in China and elsewhere are able to operate without the kind of restrictions faced by their U.S. competitors.
“If you look at what — I could name country after country. You look at what’s happening in Mexico, where our people are just — plants are being built, and they don’t wait 10 years to get an approval to build a plant, okay?” he said. “They build it like the following day or the following week. We can’t let all of these permits that take forever to get stop our jobs.”
The U.S. has outpaced the rest of the developed world in terms of growth since the 2008 recession, though developing countries such as China boast higher growth rates. Typically, economists compare the U.S. against other industrialized nations since developing countries typically grow faster than their developed counterparts.
The New York businessman made the same critique of the Environmental Protection Agency, to which he has nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt — a climate change skeptic — as the head. Wallace asked whether he was “going to take a wrecking ball to the Obama legacy,” to which Trump replied, “No. No. No. I don’t want to do that at all. I just want what’s right.”
“EPA, you can’t get things approved. I mean, people are waiting in line for 15 years before they get rejected, okay? ” he said. “That’s why people don’t want to invest in this country.”
It is unclear which permit application Trump was referring to, but he has repeatedly criticized EPA rules. And though he has given mixed signals on whether he would back out of the United States’ voluntary commitments under the Paris climate agreement, it would take several years for the next administration to withdraw now that the agreement has entered into force.
Last week Trump’s transition team for the Energy Department asked officials there to identify which employees have participated in international climate negotiations or worked on domestic efforts to cut greenhouse gases, such as calculating the social cost of carbon. Several scientists, federal union officials and public watchdog groups have expressed concern that these individuals could be targeted for retaliation once Trump takes office.
The Trump transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking officials there to identify which department employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation's carbon output. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)

At the urging of daughter Ivanka, Trump has met in the past week with former vice president Al Gore and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, both environmental activists. Trump described the sessions as “good meetings” but did not elaborate.

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