I’m sure that sooner or later the legal profession is going to realise that with some $trillion in value being made from this scam – that there’s an awful lot of ways they can make a huge amount of money by arguing for the “rights” and “compensations” deserved by all the many groups and companies involved.
And because it was just one enormous “snouts in the trough” rush to make money, not many cared or even knew about the massive personal liability that they have taken on. There was not careful consideration of the risks they took on – most had no idea of their own personal liability.
For example, Phil Jones – who was ruled to have broken the law in Climategate – has been personally vouching that we can all rely on him (the bloke who can’t use excel) and that based on his many years of perfect forecasting (none) that we should all spend billions on bird killers & other environmental destroyers – when even a casual look at the figures will see would be far far far far far far better spent on hospitals or other facilities EVEN IF EVERYTHING HE WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR WAS RIGHT (which it is not – kids won’t know what snow is …).
So, the last and perhaps the most ugly and vicious phase of this scam was always likely to involved the lawyers (the copy-n-paste media no longer having the balls to do investigative reporting).
And now it seems that dam has burst:
Germany: City Council Members Approving Wind Parks May Face Personal Liability For Damage To Health!
The legal winds are shifting! Many city councils and wind park planners are going to have to clean up their acts when pushing their pet wind park projects.
Germany’s Fundamental Law specifically expresses that the State is obligated to protect the life and physical body of the individual, foremost from illegal attacks by others.
Consequently, according to German legal experts Prof. Michael Elicker and Andreas Langenbahn here, city councils approving the installation of wind parks may be held personally liable to damage to health of persons who live close to them.
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2016/02/08/germany-city-council-members-approving-wind-parks-may-face-personal-liability-for-damage-to-health/#sthash.gDcwHFbs.dpuf
The significance is not this individual case – it is that it marks a change in the attitude of the legal profession. And those are the ones the scamsters really need to fear!
How to put this … let me put it this way: every engineer knows it is relatively easy to defend your calculations when the proverbial bridge is standing. But what is difficult is to defend your calculations when the bridge has not only fallen down – but someone has died – and some corrupt material supplier is now hiring a very expensive lawyer to pin the blame on you – and all you have left in your defence is your hastily prepared calculations written a decade ago before you even knew it was going to be built.
Likewise, it was all too easy for Phil Jones to claim the world was falling apart when he had fooled himself – and could still count of the support of every other academic to back him in saying that … by a bit of bad data that the world was falling apart. What however isn’t going to look quite so compelling in court, is defending statements that the world is going to fall and a lot of people MUST put a LOT OF MONEY into projects based on his “expertise” … when the world clearly did not fall apart, when his predictions look totally stupid if not corrupt … when he has refused to come clean, when he personally has made a lot of money off the scam … it doesn’t take a very good lawyer to spin that into a very nasty perhaps even politically inspired fraud.
This is why I keep saying academics are like lambs being taken to the slaughter – and it is why most sceptics are engineers. Because no engineer ever says “the bridge will stand up” (or to put it in climatic terms – it must fall down). Instead they will only say: based on our calculations assuming the materials are as specified, our best judgement is …”. Caution, Caution — data-defendable caution.
And what do acedemics engage in … crying wolf, time and time and time again and never stopping not even after the evidence clearly contradicts then.
And likewise – just as an engineer needs to be able to defend themselves when the bridge falls down – to put that in a legal context. The law on liability for the penalty for pushing the “global warming scandal” will not be made when everything looks rosy in “Phil Jone’s Garden”. Instead it will be made when the public mood has completely changed, when the evidence is pretty obviously contradicting Phil Jones … at a time no doubt when the public are baying for blood – baying for someone to pay back the billions of wasted money.
And for engineers who are always the first people to blame when something goes wrong – their culture impels to caution as a defence against the inevitable law suits when (usually not for the engineer’s fault) things do go wrong.
But academia is a culture which has no real concept of caution, or quality – where it is believed getting a buddy to give a nod and wink to a paper is all that is needed to make something “true” – where in short they think the worst think that can possibly happen is to have a paper withdrawn and a bit of ribbing from their in-the-same boat colleagues. So, these poor lambs, who haven’t any involvement outside academia – who thought that being an academic made this somehow immune to prosectuation – there will be a very unwelcome shock waiting around the corner in the form of those all too vicious lawyers who will make mince-meat out of them.
The importance of this latest article
OK, this latest article is starting at the edges – it’s changing the perception of liability. but it is a very important event because it shows:
- People are seriously beginning to think about suing
- That means the tide has turned and people are beginning to believe they can win a court battle for compensation.
- It can only get worse – because once one set of lawyers realise that there’s a bountiful harvest in this area of law – the idea will quickly spread.
Now the only questions left are these: how quickly will the lawyer-sharks smell blood? Will they spot the easy prey floundering in the sea and at what point will they move in for the kill? And last but not least – exactly who will they attack – because like this case – it is not necessarily the obvious victims who are the first ones to be attacked – nor in the obvious places.
I wonder if your comment that “most sceptics are engineers” shouldn’t be the other way round – i.e. “most engineers are sceptics”. I would like to think that the sceptics are a broad based group from many and diverse backgrounds.
In the early 1970s I changed from chemical engineering to automotive engineering and was involved in work on NVH (noise, vibration, harshness) research with the object of reducing the dBA levels in four wheeled light tin boxes without recourse to masses of heavy sound deadening materials and isolation of the bodywork from the running gear with copious quantities of rubber bushes.
One route that was tried was noise cancellation and the conversion of audible energy to subsonic (<20HZ) inaudible energy. It was observed that this caused all sorts of problems, the most important being serious loss of concentration at speeds equivalent to those used on motorways. Anyone remember those concertina motorway pileups so popular around that period?
As a matter of interest, that period was when I was first subjected to the intricacies of computer modelling…
A good place to find information about infrasound is the regulations concerning the design. testing and commissioning of air conditioning and ventilation equipment. Anyone remember 'Sick Building Syndrome'?
All this information is out there in the world for the enlightenment of those who seek it, I noticed recently that the off-shore rigs were having trouble with scour undermining the piles, a phenomenon that has been understood by bridge builders for millennia to my certain knowledge.
We had a survey of sceptics showing most are engineers. There’s also anecdotal evidence that most engineers are sceptics and there’s good reason to believe engineers are very likely to be sceptics, but without doing the proper research – we don’t have the necessary evidence.