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Comment by JonnyaiR | Hacker News Reader

They aren't suing the German Government because they say it's responsible for Global Warming, they're suing because the German Government publicly announced Goals for CO2 reduction till 2020 by 40% which they failed to deliver by a wide margin.

By the way the scientific consensus is that CO2 is the biggest contributor to global Warming, proven time and time again.

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I imagine that the "consensus" has been proven, sure.

"scientific consensus" is not a thing. Also, "proven time and time again"? Just to let you know, water vapour is a much larger contributor.

Sure, sue because the Government lied. Why don't you vote them out? Can you sue them?

Yes, water vapor is a contributor - but at an equilibrium rate determined by the temperature! In the narrow band of temperature we live in, increases in CO2 drive an increase in vapor which magnifies their effect.

There's even a nice explainer in IPCC AR5 about this ("FAQ 8.1"): https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapt...

> Currently, water vapour has the largest greenhouse effect in the Earth’s atmosphere. However, other greenhouse gases, primarily CO2, are necessary to sustain the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere. Indeed, if these other gases were removed from the atmosphere, its temperature would drop sufficiently to induce a decrease of water vapour, leading to a runaway drop of the greenhouse effect that would plunge the Earth into a frozen state. So greenhouse gases other than water vapour provide the temperature structure that sustains current levels of atmo-spheric water vapour. Therefore, although CO2 is the main anthropogenic control knob on climate, water vapour is a strong and fast feedback that amplifies any initial forcing by a typical factor between two and three. Water vapour is not a significant initial forcing, but is nevertheless a fundamental agent of climate change.

Yes, consensus.

From NASA’s https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/#

"The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

J. Cook, et al, "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters Vol. 11 No. 4, (13 April 2016); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002

Agreed that the point of science isn’t consensus. It’s ok.

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