Posted 2:47 PM by Jason
Inuits sue U.S. over global warming

Yeah, this will be tossed pretty quickly. You’d think they would be grateful.

UPDATE: Maybe I should have read more closely, turns out that what they seek is a declaration from some international outfit with no enforcement power.  To that end:

“The petition urges the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to declare the United States to be in violation of the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.

It also wants the Commission to recommend that the United States adopt mandatory limits of its greenhouse-gas emission and join international efforts to curb global warming.
And it wants the Commission to declare the United States should help the Inuit adapt to unavoidable impacts of climate change.”

What’s more, the article (at the fault of the ICC, not Breitbart) claims that:

“Rising emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases primarily caused by burning fossil fuels are expected to warm the Arctic about 4-7 C (7.2-12.6 F), about twice the global average rise, over the next century, the ICC report concluded.”

Which, though it acknowledges this level of warming as particular to the Arctic, is still at the very least toward the steep end of the warming predictions currently circulating.  

If scientists can respectably disagree on the issue of climate change, whether or not it is happening, the extent to which it is anthropogenic, etc… I think it would be preposterous for a pseudo-court to find proximate cause or cause in fact (or whatever sort of tests a pretend court might use) here.  If they want to pin it on not ratifying Kyoto, then I would have to point out that countries that did ratify Kyoto are not meeting their targets, and even if they had, and we had as well, the overall scheme of Kyoto is insufficient to effect the changes that its proponents seek.  

At the base of it, this is more than likely a bunch of do gooder lawyers (and other do gooder types) exploiting a potential sob story to make a political statement using (emphasis on using) these Eskimos (yeah, that’s right, I said it).
    

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