Well if anyone wins a case like this then I'm going to start a banana plantation in Tasmania.

The reason why I going to grow bananas there is because once it spectacularly fails due to Tasmania's cold weather I can sue the Government for not previously implementing policies which dramatically increase CO2 in the atmosphere and thus cause 10+ degrees of global warming. This warming would definitely have happened since the previous court case established it as fact. A consequence of this global warming, which they were negligent in not encouraging, would have been to wipe out bananas in the tropics since it would have been too hot for them to grow. Thus my banana plantation in Tasmania would have been the world's major supplier of bananas and I should have been a multi-billionaire. So obviously I can sue the Government for my loss.

As a (just) nominal Christian and a non-Catholic, I doubt many modern Catholics still regard the Pope as being infallible; but this Pope thinks he is. He believes that humans can and should be able to change the climate. It's strange then that he, in his infallibility, can't stop kiddy-fiddling in his own church.

It is strange that there is a system of law which can produce such a ridiculous outcome as this Dutch case.
In Australia this nonsense would have as much chance as the baseless “stolen generation”.

No evidence, no case.

There is no science to demonstrate any measurable effect of human emissions on climate.

The failed assertions of the IPCC are opinion, not fact.

Don,

You said:

>"I don't rule out some sort of action. It would need to be based on a claim about negligence on the part of the Government, argued to have something like a duty of care to the plaintiffs. Then the plaintiffs would need to show, I think, that the harm of global warming was known, and that the Government should have acted to do something about it, and that what it had done was not enough."

I think you have missed the most important point the plaintiffs would need to show, i.e. that if "the Government [had] acted to do something about it" the action taken would have reduced the harm done. The plaintiffs would have to demonstrate and quantify by how much the harm would have been reduced if the government had taken the proposed actions.

I used to wonder how a successful society could quite quickly collapse. How for example, could the Roman Empire collapse so quickly?

Well I am starting to understand. Watching the most successful society the world has known, the western democracies, fall into chaos is at least educational.

Is it coincidence that this is happening since we let the ladies out of the nursery & kitchen? Did other failed societies make this same mistake? Perhaps it's not the ladies, but that Clinton woman does provide good evidence for that case.

Could it be the closing of the mental institutions? Letting all those Lefties & Greenies out to walk the street was never a good idea. Giving them their own media organisations, the ABC & BBC was really stupid, but letting them use the courts to enforce their batty philosophy is even worse.

Who would have thought we were going to give the great world we've built to these ratbags.

Well at least we now have the Muslims coming to sort out this mess. I doubt they will pay much attention to those people in fancy dress, wearing funny wigs we call the judiciary.

That Chinese curse about living in interesting times is proving very true. Thank god most of my life was in saner times.

"Urgenda has had a striking success"

Not really. All that they have won is a lower court ruling by a junior activist judge. That the Dutch government is appealing is a sign that they are confident of overturning the ruling.

However, in Australia with the separation of the court system and the state, the courts are not able to dictate policy, especially those that require substantial spending. A similar ruling in Aus could simply be ignored by the parliament.