The justices of the United States Supreme
Court this week became the world’s most august global warming sceptics. Not by
virtue of their legal reasoning – the global warming case they decided turned
on a technical legal issue — but in their surprising commentary. Global warming
is by no means a settled issue, they made clear, suggesting it would be
foolhardy to assume it was.
“The court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated
issues related to carbon-dioxide emissions and climate change,” reads the 8-0 decision, delivered by the court’s
acclaimed liberal, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The court decision noted that the Environmental
Protection Agency itself had “Acknowledg[ed] that not all scientists agreed on the causes and
consequences of the rise in global temperatures,” before suggesting readers
consult “views opposing” the conventional wisdom. Specifically, the justices’
recommended reading was a superb profile of Princeton’s Freeman Dyson, perhaps
America’s most respected scientist, written in the New York Times Magazine,
March 29, 2009.
Dyson, an unabashed skeptic, believes that
carbon dioxide, rather than being harmful, is both necessary and desirable,
arguing that “increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial
effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
Somewhat in the same vein, Justice Ginsburg
notes carbon dioxide is necessary and ubiquitous, and thus shouldn’t be the
target of indiscriminate attacks. “After all, we each emit carbon dioxide merely by
breathing,” she notes, repeating a point that Dyson couldn’t have said
better himself.
To see exactly what the Supreme Court said in
its remarkable American Electric Power v. Connecticut decision, click here.
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