;)
With Professor Shukla (and Kevin Trenberth) calling for sceptics to be put in the dock last week, it is perhaps unsurprising that a Guardian article on climate and the law provoked a bit of an overreaction. The article in question, by Adam Vaughan, was about a speech by prominent lawyer Philippe Sands and was entitled "World court should rule on climate science to quash sceptics, says Philippe Sands". This was taken by many to mean that sceptics should be prosecuted, particularly as the standfirst then read "International Court of Justice ruling would settle the scientific dispute and pave the way for future legal cases on climate change, says high-profile lawyer".
However, examination of the text of Sands' speech reveals that the Guardian headline writers had actually been playing a little fast and loose with the facts. What Sands actually wants is for the international courts to rule on some of the scientific questions surrounding the global climate. He gave as examples the following:
A first tier of issues might include: is climate change underway? have sea-levels risen? Have anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions been the main cause of atmospheric warming?
The first two questions are desperately ill-posed of course, given that both sides of the climate debate agree (I think) that we have yet to identify a period when the climate was stable and also that sea levels have been rising for tens of thousands of years. A court ruling on matters that are not in dispute seems somewhat superfluous.
Yet even if we restate these two questions within an AGW framework, we still run into problems. Everyone seems to agree that you can't demonstrate that global temperatures have done anything out of the ordinary at least in terms of a statistical model, and signs of acceleration in sea levels are hard to discern too.
So all of this - and also Sands question on attribution - leads rapidly back to computer simulations of the global climate. And here I think we have to wonder whether he has actually thought this through at all. Asked by a reader on Twitter whether a court could decide on scientific questions, he referred to the decision of the International Court of Justice to make a ruling on the question of whether Japan's whaling programme was "scientific" or not; apparently there were competing scientific opinions on the subject.
However, the ruling on whaling was about whether science was being done or not. On climate, the court would be addressing a very different question: whether the output of an unvalidated computer simulation was a "fact". When you think about it, if the court was to press ahead it would turn centuries of legal practice on its head. According to Black's legal dictionary, the definition of the word is:
A thing done; an action performed or an Incident transpiring; an event or circumstance; an actual occurrence...An actual and absolute reality, as distinguished from mere supposition or opinion; a truth...
It's hard to see how the output of a computer simulation could possibly be made to fit that. So any decision by the courts to make a ruling on the facts of climate change would represent an extraordinary definitional expansion. And when you think about it, the implications are terrifying: if a court was to accept a computer simulation as a fact then how long would it be before someone was condemned to lifetime imprisonment because a computer model had determined his guilt?