2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #15

A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 7, 2024 thru Sat, April 13, 2024.

Story of the week

Our story of the week is about adults in the room setting terms and conditions of good behavior. Here it's not parents telling children what to do but instead the widely adopted, mutually agreed system of coercive behavior modification we call "rule of law." Legislators providing courts of justice with laws to apply are how we formalize overcoming widely harmful selfish actions— or negligent inactions. These are our proxy adults telling us what we can't do or must do— our aspirations for better nature given teeth. We could wish that we were all so perfect as to never need grownup guidance of a kind leading to fines or imprisonment, but if anything can serve to illustrate how this isn't realistic it's our failure to confront accountability for fossil fuels and what happens when nobody is willing to say "no."

Belatedly, in step our appointed adults— in this case the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Three articles we shared this week covered an important decision handed down by this court with respect to Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland. The court finds that Switzerland is negligent in pursuing climate mitigation plans and hence is harming human rights protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This is an extremely important precedent, an overdue acknowledgement of human rights being climate-connected. But the outcome is all the more remarkable given the ECtHR's previous agility in reasoning its way to tossing applicants' cases centered on human rights as they pertain to climate matters. Notably, the court has also just rendered unfavorable judgments  on two other climate-connected cases, in ways that sometimes seemed to defy common sense. The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law provides a short article providing context helping us to understand this single verdict as a sea change, in its introduction to a symposium on the topic.

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before April 7

April 7

April 8

April 9

April 10

April 11

April 12

April 13

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

Posted by BaerbelW on Sunday, 14 April, 2024


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