Hurricanes have long battered the coasts. Because of a Fifth Circuit decision written by a Clinton-appointed judge, lawyers can also batter smokestack industries in court every time a hurricane hits.

This shocking appellate decision, Comer v. Murphy Oil USA, 2009 U.S. App. LEXIS 22774 (5th Cir. Oct. 16, 2009), allowed a lawsuit to proceed against companies in the energy, fossil fuels and chemical industries. This lawsuit insists that these industries contribute to an alleged man-made global warming that somehow “added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina.”

In Massachusetts v. E.P.A., 549 U.S. 497 (2007), the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court embraced the theory of man-made global warming, despite the fact that the world has not warmed in a decade. Quite the contrary, the world is cooling, and record low temperatures have been recorded in many areas; snow just fell for the first time in mid-October in Pennsylvania. The Corn Belt experienced its coldest July in 115 years and there has been an increase of 26% in Arctic ice. The public recognizes what liberal intellectuals deny: only 36% of Americans now believe in global warming due to humans, down from 47% last year. http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=28147497786687

But the fact of global cooling matters not to proponents of wealth distribution, more government control, and litigation against deep pockets. A class action was brought in the notoriously pro-plaintiff Mississippi, and if successful its attorneys stand to make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from it. Id. at 522 n.18. The Court repeated his claim that “rising ocean temperatures may contribute to the ferocity of hurricanes.” Id. at 521-22.

Yet long before global warming theories, climatologists predicted that a hurricane would wipe out New Orleans, which is located precariously below sea level. On the same Gulf coast, the town of Galveston, Texas, was decimated by a hurricane in 1900 that killed between 6,000 and 12,000 residents; another devastating hurricane hit it again 15 years later. These pre-global warming hurricanes were far more deadly than Hurricane Katrina.

But once the Supreme Court connected the dots between alleged man-made global warming and “the ferocity of hurricanes,” the legal cause-and-effect of abusive litigation was inevitable. Now the Fifth Circuit has opened the floodgates to even more of it. The trial court had dismissed this lawsuit orally from the bench. The trial judge noted that Congress could allow such a lawsuit and provide guidance as to how it should be handled, but without that direction there is too little for a court to go on in addressing the matter. Plaintiffs lacked standing and their arguments were non-justiciable, the trial judge ruled. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit ruled that plaintiffs do enjoy full legal standing to pursue this case, and that the trial court must allow this case to continue.

Most people prefer warmer weather, as demonstrated by millions who move to the South. Given the fact that the world is getting colder, instead of punishing companies perhaps we should be thanking them if they can somehow muster a tiny bit of global warming.