By Paul Homewood
This month’s largesse from the Department of Transport:
I make that a bung of £806 million for the Net Zero black hole.
Still, it’s only taxpayers’ money!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 24, 2025 at 08:45AM
Author: Iowa Climate Science Education
Essay by Eric Worrall
“States … have additional obligations to take the lead in combating climate change by limiting their greenhouse gas emissions …”
The press release;
If anyone has the patience, the full 133 page judgement (mostly in English) is available here (backup copy here).
From the advisory opinion press release + judgement;
…
The climate change treaties set forth binding obligations for States parties to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. These obligations include the following:
(a) States parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have an obligation to adopt measures with a view to contributing to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change;
(b) States parties listed in Annex I to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have additional obligations to take the lead in combating climate change by limiting their greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing their greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs;
(c) States parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have a duty to co-operate with each other in order to achieve the underlying objective of the Convention; (d) States parties to the Kyoto Protocol must comply with applicable provisions of the Protocol;
(e) States parties to the Paris Agreement have an obligation to act with due diligence in taking measures in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities capable of making an adequate contribution to achieving the temperature goal set out in the Agreement;
(f) States parties to the Paris Agreement have an obligation to prepare, communicate and maintain successive and progressive nationally determined contributions which, inter alia, when taken together, are capable of achieving the temperature goal of limiting global warming to 1.5∞C above pre-industrial levels;
(g) States parties to the Paris Agreement have an obligation to pursue measures which are capable of achieving the objectives set out in their successive nationally determined contributions; and
(h) States parties to the Paris Agreement have obligations of adaptation and co-operation, including through technology and financial transfers, which must be performed in good faith.
– Customary international law sets forth obligations for States to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. These obligations include the following:
(a) States have a duty to prevent significant harm to the environment by acting with due diligence and to use all means at their disposal to prevent activities carried out within their jurisdiction or control from causing significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities;
(b) States have a duty to co-operate with each other in good faith to prevent significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment, which requires sustained and continuous forms of co-operation by States when taking measures to prevent such harm.
…
Read more: Same link as above
Despite the court claiming the judgement is advisory, the body of the judgement appears to claim that under the UN charter all members of the UN including the USA have an obligation to respect this ICJ judgement, due to customary respect for a rules the USA has not necessarily explicitly embraced.
b) Duty to co-operate for the protection of the environment 140. The duty to co-operate lies at the core of the Charter of the United Nations. Article 1 of the Charter commits States “[t]o achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian characterø. This obligation has been spelled out in the foundational “Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations (General Assembly resolution 2625 (XXV) of 24 October 1970) (hereinafter the “Declaration on Friendly Relations). The Court has held that “the adoption by States of this text affords an indication of their opinio juris as to customary international law (Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 1986, p. 101, para. 191). That observation also applies to the duty to co-operate in so far as it finds expression in many binding and non-binding instruments relating specifically to the environment. The duty to co-operate is a central obligation under the climate change treaties and other environmental treaties, as discussed below (see paragraphs 214-218 and 260-267). Other examples include Principle 24 of the Stockholm Declaration and Principle 7 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (hereinafter the “Rio Declaration”), which both recognize co-operation as an essential element in the protection of the environment. In view of the related practice of States, the Court considers that the duty of States to co-operate for the protection of the environment is a rule whose customary character has been established (see Climate Change, Advisory Opinion, ITLOS Reports 2024, p. 110, para. 296; MOX Plant (Ireland v. United Kingdom), Provisional Measures, Order of 3 December 2001, ITLOS Reports 2001, p. 110, para. 82).
Read more: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/187/187-20250723-adv-01-00-en.pdf
I’m not a legal expert, but the argument that customary law with respect to international relations carries weight appears to be weak, though not necessarily weak enough to have it immediately dismissed without lots of time and money.
The US Senate did ratify the UN Charter in 1945, though arguably the UN has since granted itself powers which were not part of the original charter. I don’t recall the senate ever ratifying the USA’s alleged climate obligations under that 1945 charter. The claim the USA has a climate obligation under a charter ratified by the US Senate long before the UN got involved in the climate game seems a stretch.
Perhaps the “customary character” argument that states have a duty of compliance is a reference to the acquiescence of previous US administrations to unratified UN extensions of authority. If this is correct, that would make the ICJ advisory an assertion that the USA should shut up and do what they are told.
Obviously this ICJ ruling provides a lot of scope for mischief by NGOs and state governors who disagree with President Trump’s climate policies. I can see this ICJ ruling making a lot of lawyers rich.
Interestingly there has been a recent bump in Lithium prices, from around $8.50 / lb in late June to around $10 / lb today, though the explanations I’ve read claim this is due to a global cleardown of excess inventory rather than speculation the ICJ ruling might boost demand for EVs.
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via Watts Up With That?
July 24, 2025 at 08:06AM
Chris Morrison’s July 2 blog post at The Daily Sceptic, “BBC Complaints Director Takes Six-Month Sabbatical to Learn How to Promote ‘Climate Crisis’,” was reproduced at Anthony Watts’ WUWT site as a guest post the next day. After reading it at WUWT, I simply wanted to put in a comment reply saying I’d had my own encounter with that BBC Complaints Director, Colin Tregear, back in 2021, after I filed a complaint about BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast titled, “‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact.” My BBC complaint detailed how there was no truth to the claim that this draft memo directive was evidence of the fossil fuel industry operating disinformation campaigns. So for my July 3 WUWT comment, I wanted to link straight to the BBC’s page with that false accusation phrase as its title of the broadcast episode within their series of “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” reports, and then mention how BBC concluded that my complaint was meritless . . . . but that title wasn’t there at the BBC’s otherwise unchanged program page.
It’s possible – just potentially possible – that as the result of my complaint, I managed to live rent-free long enough in someone’s mind at the BBC that they ultimately felt compelled to bury their fatal mistake of failing to check the veracity of the accusations supplied to them (plural!) by their guest in that episode, ex-Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davies.
The backstory here is a bit long, over the span of eight of my GelbspanFiles blog posts:
1) 7/31/2020, “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh: ‘How They Made Us Doubt Everything’ Episode 6 ‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact’” — where I laid out the fatal faults with the accusations (plural) in the BBC podcast report about ‘leaked memos’ supposedly proving the fossil fuel industry deceiving the public by employing skeptic climate scientists ‘shills’ who spread disinformation.
2) 8/5/20, “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh, Pt 2: ‘I don’t remember this stupid ad.’” — the late radio show host reacts to the BBC podcast report and a particular false line in it concerning him.
3) 10/6/20, “BBC ( sort of … ) Corrects Radio 4…” — the BBC’s correction explained nothing while making one error bigger and inadvertently admitting that their Radio4 report guest – Kert Davies – had a bit of a credibility problem.
4) 7/9/2021, “Status Update: my complaint to BBC … ” — in which the senior editorial staff at Radio 4 basically only dug a deeper hole for themselves, via what is described as the Stage 1 part of the BBC Complaints system.
5) 8/18/21, “BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit Responds” — BBC Complaints Director Colin Tregear’s lengthy direct reply to me, “therefore do not believe there are grounds to uphold this aspect of your complaint. There is no further right of appeal against this decision within the BBC’s complaints process but if you do wish to take the matter further, it is open to you to ask the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom…”
6) 8/24/21, “I Appeal for a Reconsideration of BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit ‘Final Decision’” — after I jumped through several hoops just to get the appeal into the BBC system.
7) 9/17/21, “BBC Executive Complaints Unit’s Response to my Appeal for a Reconsideration of their ‘Final Decision’” — BBC Complaints Director Tregear replies twice to tell me to take my complaint one step higher to the British agency overseeing broadcasts, Ofcom
8) 11/8/21, “Ofcom Complaint” — in which I succinctly explain how a rejected, never-used document cannot serve as evidence of actions operating in the directives of the document.
Emphasis on the date of my last blog post in that series. That was the end of the line. No response from anyone at Ofcom, no indication anywhere that I could find that any action was taken to correct the situation or to admit fault. If any action had been taken, nobody told me about it.
Did the industry pay scientist shills to deceive the public? If so, prove it, but the “reposition global warming” memos are inadmissible as evidence, as are the never-implemented “victory will be achieved” memos, the two pillars that BBC report was built on. At GelbspanFiles, I have detailed how both memo sets were never implemented anywhere.
The huge problem now for the BBC is this:
See what happened there? The specific name on the page for this episode was “How They Made Us Doubt Everything Episode 6 ‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact’,” and now it is “The Tobacco Playbook: 6. From Fact to Theory” — tantamount to an admission by BBC to the world that there was something dicey with the original title. That problem was precisely what I detailed repeatedly in my complaint submissions to the BBC.
Why does it look like the BBC seemingly admitted to fault with their report? Using the Internet Archive crawl scans of that page, nothing in the text changed in that page from its start in mid-2020 until a point between 7/14/22 and 6/14/24, where the number count of the episodes updated from “6 of 10” to “6 of 17.” However, between 6/14/24 and when I myself prompted the Internet Archive crawl of the page on July 3, 2025, the number count changed from “6 of 17” to “13 of 17” . . . . along with the massively self-damaging rewording of the title.
Point being, that title change happened minimally 2½ years after my complaint to BBC was deemed by BBC’s Colin Tregear to have ‘no grounds to uphold this aspect of [my] complaint” about the “reposition global warming” memos being literally worthless to serve as evidence proving industry disinformation campaigns happened.
I never received a solitary word from the Ofcom organization. Would they have decided to overturn Tregear’s decision and upheld my complaint 2½ years later? I very much doubt that.
If BBC Complaints Director Colin Tregear needs to take a 6 month sabbatical to learn anything, it is what the reality of the climate issue actually is, on its science and its false accusations against skeptic climate scientists.
The “reposition global warming” memos has been the mainstay since Day 1 — on through Ross Gelbspan’s book and Al Gore’s movie and the U.S. “ExxonKnew” lawsuits and weeks-old U.S. Senate testimony — for the accusation about the fossil fuel industry employing shill experts to undercut the ‘science consensus’ of man-caused global warming.
The BBC made the cracks in that accusation grow bigger. When that whole accusation falls apart, the cracks in the whole climate issue get exponentially bigger. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; we may end up seeing one of the biggest collapses of a political ideology in history if the whole thing falls apart.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
July 24, 2025 at 07:41AM
From the July 23, 2025 edition of Rob Schmitt Tonight on Newsmax.
via JunkScience.com
July 24, 2025 at 05:01AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 