Global Warming Lawsuits Becoming a Growth Industry

Can't get anyone to pay attention to your global warming hoax? Sue 'em:

From being a marginal and even mocked issue, climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.

Compensation for losses inflicted by man-made global warming would be jaw-dropping, a payout that would make tobacco and asbestos damages look like pocket money.

Imagine: a country or an individual could get redress for a drought that destroyed farmland, for floods and storms that created an army of refugees, for rising seas that wiped a small island state off the map.

In the past three years, the number of climate-related lawsuits has ballooned, filling the void of political efforts in tackling greenhouse-gas emissions.

Eyeing the money-spinning potential, some major commercial law firms now place climate-change litigation in their Internet shop window.

Seminars on climate law are often thickly attended by corporations that could be in the firing line -- and by the companies that insure them.

But legal experts sound a note of caution, warning that this is a new and mist-shrouded area of justice.

I'm guessing the mist is being caused by global warming.

The problem with running this issue through the courts rather than looking objectively at the science is in court you just have to convince some jurors or perhaps a liberal judge or two of the righteousness of your cause, even if you can't produce science to back it up. Once it's in the courts it becomes subjective, not objective.  Get the right people on the jury and you can get them to award millions, even if the whole thing is based on a hoax.

And in order to avoid massive legal bills, many companies may choose to settle rather than fight the hoax in court.  Yet another reason why we need a loser-pays tort system in this country.