Supreme Court backs off alarmist climate science
The Supreme Court stepped back from alarmist climate science in today’s decision in AEP v. Connecticut.
In the Court’s 2007 Justice Stevens-authored decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, a majority of the Court was fully in the alarmist camp. As an example, the Court held:
The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized. The Government’s own objective assessment of the relevant science and a strong consensus among qualified experts indicate that global warming threatens, inter alia, a precipitate rise in sea levels, severe and irreversible changes to natural ecosystems, a significant reduction in winter snowpack with direct and important economic consequences, and increases in the spread of disease and the ferocity of weather events.
Now contrast that position with the one stated in footnote 2 of today’s essentially unanimous opinion delivered by the liberal Justice Ginsburg:
The Court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated issues related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.
Supreme panic has been replaced supreme neutrality.
We trace this change to Climategate and its progeny… the scandals that saved Western society.