Just as prominent climate-change scientists are admitting their models predicting global warming were wrong, the city of San Francisco is suing five of the world's largest oil and gas companies based on the "scientific consensus" that mankind is causing catastrophic damage to the planet through fossil fuels and other carbon emissions.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday in California court accuses the oil companies – including Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips – of ignoring warnings that fossil fuels would cause global warming and of engaging in campaigns to discredit the claims of climate scientists, the Associated Press reported.
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The city of Oakland, at least two California counties and another city have filed separate but similar suits.
San Francisco, claiming the oil companies have created a public nuisance, wants to be reimbursed for the costs of sea walls and other infrastructure that officials claim are needed to protect against climate change.
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However, just last week, Nature Geoscience published a study admitting that computer modeling used a decade ago to predict how quickly global average temperatures would rise may have forecast too much warming.
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Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford in England.
Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors, told the Times newspaper of London: "We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations."
According to the Times, another of the paper's authors, Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admitted his earlier forecasting models had overplayed how temperatures would rise.
AP reported Chevron said in a statement regarding the lawsuit that it welcomes serious attempts to address climate change, but the lawsuits do not do that. ExxonMobil said the claims in the lawsuits were without merit, and ConocoPhillips said it doesn't comment on pending litigation.
Scientists skeptical of the theory of man-caused climate change argue that satellite and weather balloon readings show only 0.28 degrees Celsius warming since 1979, a rate that would equal less than 0.75 degrees Celsius over 100 years.
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Steven Hayward, in a post for the Powerline blog, pointed out that the most ambitious global effort to combat climate change, the Paris Climate Accord, even if fully implemented, promises to barely slow global warming, noting former NASA chief James Hansen called the agreement "a fraud."
Hayward also recalled a statement by study-author Grubb at the Paris climate summit in 2015 indicating the "authoritarian" political agenda of many global-warming theorists who are on record advocating forced global wealth redistribution.
Grubb said, referring to the Paris Climate Accord goal for reducing temperature: "All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy."
The scientist's statement, said Hayward, was a "revealing slip of the mask."
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When President Trump announced in June that the U.S. was pulling out of the Paris agreement, Tim Ball, a retired climatologist at the University of Winnipeg and author of "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science," told WND that aside from relying on "false science," the Paris Climate Accord was a bad deal economically and was "deliberately designed to punish the United States."
Ball said the Paris climate deal was the latest incarnation of the old Kyoto Protocol from the 1990s that sought to redistribute wealth from the industrial nations. He contends the Green Climate Fund, which is part of the Paris agreement, is the latest effort in that regard.
Ball pointed out the nonbinding nature of the agreement – which is the only way the deal could be struck – means most nations have not contributed what they've pledged to the Green Climate Fund.
