Where there's smoke, there's fear?

The smoky haze that has settled over the Flathead Valley in recent days can lead one to ponder the "carbon footprint" of Mother Nature, in contrast with the carbon emissions of various industries and governments that are likely to be defending themselves from global warming lawsuits in the near future.

Presumably, forest-fire smoke is considered part of what climate scientists call "background" emissions - in other words, the carbon that has always been produced by nature rather than humans.

One of the big tasks of climate science is measuring or modeling human emissions that come on top of background emissions, and determining their significance.

This is where the whole debate gets interesting. And yes, there is a debate, despite the all-so-certain rhetoric used by climate alarmists who want to clamp down on all human emissions through the heavy hammer of big government regulations and litigation - economic consequences be damned.

One has to wonder how carbon emissions from forest fires and volcanoes worldwide, every year, stack up against emissions from human activity. What we're seeing in Montana this summer is a heavy haze that has literally stretched across the state for weeks. Climate scientists measure carbon emissions in tons, and that's easy to visualize when you are looking at colossal smoke columns rising over the horizon, fanning outward in carbon-laden smoke plumes that can be seen from space. How will these "background" emissions be considered in a predicted wave of climate change litigation?

In a recent column in the online Examiner publication, UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge writes, "trial lawyers are gearing up to turn global warming into their next pot of gold … Indeed, the prospect of a boom in global warming litigation is prompting law firms to begin setting up units specializing in climate change issues."

Bainbridge goes on to ask the question: "How can one firm - or even one industry - be blamed for a global phenomenon that took decades to arise? Making causality findings and apportioning responsibility in this context is ludicrous."

Keep those smoke plumes in mind, and consider that the Montana Environmental Information Center has threatened litigation to stop the development of a coal-to-fuels plant near Roundup. What might the carbon emissions of that plant amount to every year, compared to the yield of forest smoke every summer in Montana?

Other environmental litigants are posturing for litigation that mixes climate change with the Endangered Species Act (the argument being that government policies contribute to climate change that reduces habitat, therefore the government isn't doing enough to protect threatened and endangered species).

And environmental litigants are using the National Environmental Policy Act to challenge federal projects such as timber sales on the grounds that "cumulative effects" on climate change have not been adequately assessed in environmental impact statements.

Shouldn't state and federal governments be given some credit - carbon credits, that is - for the costly and often herculean efforts to suppress wildfires, year in and year out? Without those efforts, after all, the "natural" carbon output from forest fires would be exponentially higher than it is now. And presumably, climate change would be accelerated as a result.

Allowing courts to decipher climate change and assign blame is ridiculous. Letting climate change seep into American case law will be disastrous.

Bainbridge contends that it is a "classic example of why tort reform is a pressing need," because litigation costs "are having a dramatic impact on the U.S. economy" with tort costs estimated at $880 per citizen in 2005.

We entirely agree, and when the smoke clears this summer, we certainly hope that common sense will begin to prevail in discussions of global warming as well as tort reform.