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International Court of Justice (ICJ) has just completed hearings on the climate crisis in a case that could have critical consequences for the survival of future generations. From December 2-13, more than 100 states and organizations argued before the ICJ in landmark litigation that began five years ago when Pacific Islander law students initiated a grassroots movement that persuaded the UN General Assembly to request an advisory opinion from the ICJ.

“In The Hague, most of which lies below sea level, this has been a momentous two weeks,” environmental attorney Richard Harvey, who works for Greenpeace International and watched the historic proceedings, told Truthout. “The Cold War divided the world into East and West but climate change divides it into North and South: corporate petrostates against the Small Island Developing States and the rest.”

“Never before have the U.S., Russia, China, U.K., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and OPEC [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] lined up so explicitly against those who suffer the most from their greed,” Harvey said. “Corporate petrostates shamelessly asserted that peoples’ rights to self-determination, to life and to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment are, in essence, trumped by their right to fossil fuel profits.”

On March 29, 2023, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 77/276 that recognized “climate change is an unprecedented challenge of civilizational proportions and that the well-being of present and future generations of humankind depends on our immediate and urgent response to it.” The resolution directed the ICJ to render an advisory opinion on:

• The obligations of States under international law to protect the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic [caused by humans] emissions of greenhouse gases, now and in the future.

• The legal consequences for States that fail to do this and cause significant harm to present and future generations and other States (particularly small island developing States affected by adverse effects of climate change).

The campaign in the General Assembly was spearheaded by Vanuatu, a constellation of 83 small islands in the South Pacific and one of the states most vulnerable to climate change. The measure that was introduced by Vanuatu and co-sponsored by over 130 states took aim at the primary emitters of fossil fuels, of which the United States is the leading culprit.

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War & Peace

US Militarism Is a Leading Cause of the Climate Catastrophe

US military interventions are not just wars on people — they’re also wars on the climate.

By Marjorie Cohn , TruthoutSeptember 10, 2024

“Today, we find ourselves on the frontlines of a crisis we did not create ⎯ a crisis that threatens our very existence and that of so many other peoples who have come in unprecedented numbers to be heard by this Court,” Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, told the 15 judges. “The outcome of these proceedings will reverberate across generations, determining the fate of nations like mine and the future of our planet.”

The Climate Crisis Is “Existential” for Many Developing Countries

Many states, including Tuvalu, characterized the climate crisis as “existential.” Despite producing less than 0.01 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, Tuvalu is on a trajectory to be the first country completely lost to rising sea levels due to climate change. The Solomon Islands have already lost five islands and others face severe erosion. Several states cited extreme weather events, many quite recent, that have had disastrous consequences for their people.

“The cost of fossil fuel subsidies from States reached an all-time high of US$7 trillion in 2022,” more than 23 times the amount that developing countries strived to secure for climate finance at the recent COP29.

Elizabeth Exposto, chief of staff to the prime minister of Timor-Leste, which is acutely vulnerable to climate change, said, “The climate crisis that we face today is the result of the historical and ongoing actions of industrialised nations, which have reaped the benefits of rapid economic growth, powered by colonial exploitation and carbon-intensive industries and practices.” She also noted, “These nations, representing only a fraction of the global population, are overwhelmingly responsible for the climate crisis, and yet, the impacts of climate change do not respect borders.”

But Margaret Taylor, legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State, dismissed the idea that the worst offenders were most responsible for taking actions to remedy the harm they are causing to the developing states. She asserted that, “States’ current obligations in respect of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions do not vary based on differentiation between categories of States, such as those characterized as ‘developed’ and ‘developing.’”

Like other major emitting states, Russia contended that the 1.5 degrees centigrade temperature limit in the Paris agreement is not legally binding, international responsibility is only triggered at the moment the climate treaties came into force for each state, causation by a single state is impossible to prove, and the primary emitters are not responsible for harm that future generations will suffer.

Even though Palestine is responsible for less than 0.01 percent of global emissions, it suffers severe climate impacts that are intensified by Israel’s illegal occupation. It has led to “the violation of the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to control its territory, to have sovereignty over its resources and to be in command of its climate policies,” Ambassador Ammar Hijazi, permanent representative of the State of Palestine to International Organizations in the Netherlands, told the court.

Palestine’s representatives raised the significant linkage between occupation, militarism and climate justice. “Climate scientists have determined that the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip was responsible for emission of between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in just the first 120 days, which is the period for which there is published data,” Kate Mackintosh argued for Palestine. “This is equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 of the lowest-emitting States.”

“Although the occupying Power has a legal obligation to protect the environment and to conserve the natural resources of the occupied territory for the benefit of the protected population, this obligation is often violated, as the Court has already concluded in relation to Israel’s occupation of Palestine,” Mackintosh added. She was referring to the ICJ’s advisory opinion issued in July which concluded that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal.

Representatives from the Dominican Republic said that damages from climate change violate the fundamental right to survival — a right recognized by the ICJ in its advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons.

The Risks of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Have Been Known Since at Least the 1960s

Regenvanu from Vanuatu emphasized that “the unprecedented risks created by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have been known since at least the 1960s,” citing an address by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson in 1965: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

Referring to the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Regenvanu noted, “For many peoples, including in Vanuatu, the prolonged and systematic failure of the COP process has cost them their well-being, their cultures and even their lives. There is an urgent need for a collective response to climate change grounded not in political convenience but in international law.”

Jorge Viñuales from the Melanesian Spearhead Group stated that emissions of greenhouse gases have increased more than 50 percent since 1990. He cited a report by the International Monetary Fund that “the cost of fossil fuel subsidies from States reached an all-time high of US$7 trillion in 2022,” more than 23 times the amount that developing countries strived to secure for climate finance at the recent COP29.

Fossil fuels account for 80 percent of global primary energy. Nearly 80 percent of historical greenhouse gases have come from the Group of 20 (G20), while developing countries contributed only 4 percent.

In its directive to the ICJ for an advisory opinion, the General Assembly resolution referenced several relevant sources of international law, including the UN Charter; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; UNFCCC; the Paris Climate Agreement; the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; the duty of due diligence; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the principle of prevention of significant harm to the environment; and the duty to protect and preserve the marine environment.

The Leading Greenhouse Gas Emitters Tried to Narrow Climate Change Law

Nevertheless, the leading greenhouse gas-emitting states argued that their international legal obligations did not go beyond those set forth in the UNFCCC and Paris agreement, an international treaty on climate change adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in 2015 and entered into force in 2016.

But the overwhelming majority of states told the court that international law governing climate change also includes customary international law and human rights law.

“As the majority of the submissions have highlighted, for islands like Samoa, climate change is more than an environmental issue,” Peseta Noumea Simi, chief executive officer in Samoa’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said. “It is a health, food security, economic, social, cultural, human rights and security concern. As large ocean States, it fundamentally affects our ability to draw sustenance from the pristine oceans and seas that surround us.”

The Solomon Islands called for international legal protection for refugees displaced by climate change under international refugee law.

Some, like Ecuador, maintained that states which have significantly harmed the climate system, including harm caused by private contractors under its jurisdiction, must also be held accountable.

The Union of Comoros argued that breaches of the legal obligations owed to the international community as a whole (erga omnes) require reparations, including cessation of illegal acts, compensation for damage and loss, and financial support. Many of the states agreed that reparations must be paid, including restitution, compensation and satisfaction (for moral damages such as mental and emotional suffering). Some, including the African Union, mentioned debt cancellation (or at least debt relief) and structural reparation. Vietnam, which continues to suffer the effects of the U.S. military’s spraying of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, suggested restorative measures for the national environment.

A Favorable Advisory Opinion From the ICJ Would Carry Great Moral Weight

During his first term, President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris agreement. President Joe Biden then rejoined the treaty in 2021. Now, Trump is preparing once again to leave the Paris agreement and has promised to increase fossil-fuel production.

Although an advisory opinion from the ICJ is not legally binding, it carries great moral weight. It could help climate activists hold polluting states accountable by providing legal support for climate litigation against their governments. Politicians could cite it to support the imposition of sanctions against states that fail to comply with their legal obligations. And diplomats could use it as a minimum standard in the next global climate change negotiations.

“The ICJ’s opinion will be published in 2025, just as the court celebrates its 80th birthday,” Harvey told Truthout. “I sincerely hope our colleagues threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air and deadly temperature increases will find its opinion a cause for celebration.”

On the last day of the hearings, Vishal Prasad, director of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, presented the ICJ with the “People’s Petition: A Collective Climate Justice Call for the ICJ,” which quoted a young woman from the Micronesian island of Kiribati: “The ocean, once a nurturing mother, has become a vengeful giant, swallowing the land it once cradled. It no longer only gives life — it now takes it, inch by inch. Where it once offered sustenance, it now brings destruction, its rising tides a cold and unrelenting force that pulls homes, cultures, and futures into its depths.”

Prasad invoked the memory of his ancestors, who were guided across the Pacific islands by the stars, telling the judges: “Just as the wayfinders of the Pacific held the wisdom to guide us through the vast ocean to safe harbour, you hold the knowledge and the responsibility to guide the international community to ensure the protection of our collective future. And you can do this simply by applying international law to the conduct responsible for climate change.”

Indeed, Vanuatu’s Regenvanu told the ICJ, “Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”

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https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/27/headlines/vanuatu_to_ask_for_icj_opinion_on_climate_crisis

Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu is asking the International Court of Justice to weigh in on the rights of its people to be protected from the climate catastrophe. Prime Minister Bob Loughman addressed the U.N. General Assembly Saturday.

Prime Minister Bob Loughman Weibur: “Limiting warming to near 1.5 degrees will be beyond reach. The issues are increasingly eluding the control of individual national governments.”

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/18/climate-denial-co2-coalition-trump-morner-funding-sea-level-research-dodgy-journals

A climate science denial group with links to President Trump’s administration has been funding work to sow doubt that low-lying islands in the Pacific are at risk from rising sea levels.

The two researchers being funded — one of which is a well-known climate science denier — have targeted little known “open access” journals with dubious quality controls to get their work published, DeSmog has found.

The CO2 Coalition funded the work and in March 2017 sent well-known climate science denier Nils-Axel Mörner to Fiji with Pamela Matlack-Klein, who has described herselfas having a degree from the “Oceanographic Center of Nova Southeastern University, Dania, Florida, in 1983” and writes a weekly newspaper column.

Trump Admin Links to the CO2 Coalition

Among the CO2 Coalition’s members is Kathleen Hartnett White — an energy and environment fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation who is Trump’s nominee to chair the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House group that helps coordinate environmental policy across the administration.

Trump has renominated Hartnett White, who also rejects any risk of human-caused climate change, after Senate hearings failed to confirm her for the post. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has said she is “wildly unqualified” for the role because she “outright rejects basic science.”

Retired Princeton physics professor William Happer, a director of the CO2 Coalition, was touted as a possible chief science advisor to the Trump White House. Happer also denies that increased levels of CO2 will be a problem for the planet. The CO2Coalition was caught in a sting by Greenpeace, in which Happer offered to route money from work for a ficticious fossil fuel company through the organization.

Telling Fiji Not to Worry

Mörner has produced at least six journal articles on the back of the Fiji trip, several co-written with Virginia-based researcher Matlack-Klein, and acknowledged the funding of the CO2 Coalition on several occasions. Matlack-Klein’s affiliation is given as the “Portuguese Sea Level Project, Appomattox, Virginia” but DeSmog could find no public record of the project. Klein did not respond to emails.

Mörner used his research to claim that concerns that Fijians had about rising sea levels were misplaced, and used the then-approaching United Nations climate talks hosted by Fiji (but held in Germany) last fall  to publicize his work, writing an open letter to the country’s Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama.

DeSmog sent emails to Mörner, Klein, and Happer, who signs the CO2 Coalition’s tax forms, with questions about the research, but received no responses.

One leading Australian scientist, the geophysicist Professor Kurt Lambeck, reviewed several of the papers and said in his view, none would have been accepted to a recognized scientific journal with solid peer-review procedures.

Little Academic Standing

Mörner has been targeting fringe journals with official-sounding names but highly questionable quality controls, in order to publish the papers.

All the journals are “open access,” which means the scientists pay for their work to be published and the results are available to the public for free.

In October 2017, Mörner presented his findings alongside Matlack-Klein, at a climate meeting in Rome which, as DeSmog revealed, was hijacked by Mörner, who was on the organizing committee, and who listed several climate science deniers as speakers.

Kurt Lambeck, Professor of Geophysics at the Australian National University, said all of the papers had appeared in journals “of little academic standing” and that “none would have passed the reviewing process for more reputable journals.”

He said that two papers which appeared in journals published by a company called “Scientific Research Publishing” were “trivial” and added “no insight into either the evidence for sea-level change nor on coastal erosion processes” beyond what was already well known.

He said: “It is well understood that human influences are one of the most important contributors to changes in coastal erosion and does not need restatement in a scientific paper.”

A third paper was published in a little-known online journal with the title International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences. Lambeck said this paper should have been “rejected out of hand” because Mörner had presented no evidence to back up his claim.

In the paper Mörner argued that ocean levels were being driven by changes in solar winds that changed the rotation of the earth, causing ocean masses to shift towards or away from the poles depending on conditions on the sun. This, Mörner claimed, was the likely explanation for ocean levels around Fiji for 500 years.

Lambeck says he first heard Mörner make this general argument in 1979 during a symposium presentation where it was pointed out to him that the impacts of his proposed mechanisms were “improbable” but, even if they were present, were “orders of magnitude too small” to be effective on sea levels.

Lambeck says that significantly, in order for Mörner to make his arguments about changing sea levels, he had ignored other well-known research in respected journals. In particular, Mörner overlooks the findings that major changes in sea level had historically been driven by melting ice sheets and glaciers and also, in more recent times, by thermal expansion of the oceans.

Academic Paper or Angry Email?

A fourth paper reads more like an angry email to a colleague than a scientific journal article. It starts with a reference to a story in “The Mail” that Mörner claimed had shown that global temperature records held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were being manipulated to show global temperatures were rising.

Mörner is referring to claims supposedly made by a former NOAA employee, John Bates, and reported in the Daily Mail. Mörner does not refer to the many scientists who dismissed the claims of fraud — including Bates himself. He also ignores how the Independent Press Standards Organization ruled that the Daily Mail had “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article” and “had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements,” a ruling which resulted in a 659-word correction to the article.

In this paper Mörner goes on to claim that sea level records derived from satellite measurement are also being nefariously and unethically manipulated, but offers no evidence.

Lambeck says that in this paper, Mörner quotes mainly from his own writings and ignores other multiple technical analyses that have carefully considered how issues with satellite and tide gauge measurements have been identified and checked. He also ignores the specific rebuttals by recognized experts in the field, refuting the very conclusions he had made.

“To simply compare the globaly average trend with a few short tide gauge records is something that no reasonable person would consider,” Lambeck said.

Lambeck concluded that Mörner was “not handicapped by knowledge of physical processes, not interested in testing his hypotheses even by simple order of magnitude calculations, nor in trying to understand what others may have written.”

'Predatory' Publishers?

So-called “open access” publishing brands have boomed in recent years, with hundreds of new titles appearing.

Many journals are based in either China or India and have names that resemble other, more legitimate journals.

Some people have characterized these journals as “predatory” due to the fees involved, in return for copy-editing services that are of questionable quality and, judging from the quality of some of the work which appears, a peer-review system that exists in name only.

Academics submitting research to these journals have to pay a fee for them to appear, creating a potential conflict where the publisher earns more cash when they encourage more researchers to publish.

This has seen journals spamming researchers around the world, encouraging them to submit articles, join editorial boards, or speak and attend conferences.

To avoid academics being caught out, many organizations have issued guidelines to members, such as the Council of Science Editors, The Royal Society of New Zealand, the World Association of Medical Editors, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

In addition, academics have reported being named on editorial boards without their knowledge. One major publisher, OMICS International, based in Hyderabad, India, claims to run more than 700 peer-reviewed journals.

Open Access Publishers Caught in Stings

Mörner targeted five publishers for his work on the “Fiji New Sea Level Project,” which he wrote was “supported by a kind grant from the CO2 Coalition.”

The International Journal of Engineering Science and Invention offers to publish papers for just $75. The journal has no contact address, but is published by “Invention Journals” and has a Gmail address as a contact. The journal’s website and the publisher’s website were registered by a “Chetan Sharma” in Uttar Pradesh, India.

One Mörner paper, repeating identical arguments and observations from other papers, appeared in the Journal of Aquaculture & Marine Biology, published by MedCrave Group.

MedCrave Group’s published mailing address in Edmond, Oklahoma, matches that of a parcel service.

One MedCrave journal — Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal — was exposed in a sting operation in April 2017, when an editor wrote a fake case report based on an episode of Seinfeld using the name of a character that appeared in the TV show. The paper was accepted and published by the journal, but was later removed.

Scientific Research Publishing, where two of Mörner’s articles appeared, was one of five publishers reviewed by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall, whose blog used to document and list suspected predatory journals until it was taken down in 2017. Scientific Research Publishing now discloses its origins as being in China.

Juniper Publishing Group, which published another of Mörner’s Fiji papers, lists a residential property in Simi Valley, California, as its contact address. The website was registered using a privacy service, concealing the name of the website creator. Beall has described Juniper as “rotten to the core” and a publisher “to be avoided by all researchers.”

Juniper was caught in another hoax, this time from Australian public health professor Mike Daube who created a fake academic profile based on the credentials of his pet dog and an affiliation with a fake veterinary school. Juniper’s “Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine” was one journal to accept “Dr. Olivia Doll” as a member of its editorial board.

Daube provided a picture of “Dr. Doll” to the journals — an image of Australian pop star Kylie Minogue. On its website, Juniper says the publisher “have been established with the aim of spreading quality scientific information to the research community throughout the universe.”

Another journal targeted by Mörner was the International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences, published by Graphy Publications, which gives an address in Bangalore, India, as a contact.

A barely legible webpage describing the journal’s aims says: “We encourage authors, who always have shown more interest to publish his work in the prestigious journals, and avail them the freely to the scientific community.”

Both Mörner and Matlack-Klein gave presentations to a conference for climate science deniers held in London in 2016 which was organized by the so-called Independent Committee on Geoethics (a group apparently set up to investigate climate scientists for fraud).

Mörner was a founder of that group, which includes as members two other Australia-based climate science deniers who reject the evidence of rising sea levels and have similarly targeted obscure journals with their work.

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