Loser of the Week

King Charles makes a bid, but the climatistas just have too much going for them

King Charles III made a bloody fool of himself on his recent visit to Canada, when he declared at the beginning of his address to Canada’s parliament:

"I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation."

Oh good grief, where to begin?

First, this may reinforce Trump’s desire to make Canada America’s 51st state, so he can give a speech that begins, “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the British Commonwealth.”

King Charles III & Climate King Michael Mann

Second, if the British monarch is going to get into the land acknowledgment business, shouldn’t he start closer to home with acknowledgments to the Celts and other Viking remnants overrun in the Norman Conquest of 1066? Talk about settler colonialism!

Third, about that British monarch thing: shouldn’t King Charles acknowledge that the current House of Windsor is more German than British?

Never mind, because the real Loser of the Week are the climatistas, who just can’t give it up. From NPR naturally:

A lawsuit filed in a Washington state court claims oil companies are responsible for the death of a woman in Seattle during a record-breaking heat wave several years ago.

The case marks the first time oil companies have been sued over the death of a person in a "climate disaster," according to the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group.

Julie Leon, 65, was found unresponsive in her car on June 28, 2021 — the hottest day in Seattle's history. The temperature in the city that day peaked at 108 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time Leon died of hyperthermia, her internal temperature had risen to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in King County Superior Court.

So let me get this straight: a woman falls asleep in her car on a hot summer day with the windows closed, and her death is the fault of oil companies, even though she purchased the legal product herself? (Yes, I know the NPR story doesn’t report that she was inside a closed up car, but it is unlikely her internal temperature could have reached that high with the windows open.) Why not sue General Motors for every highway fatality in a GM model car?

Maybe she should have sued backyard grill makers while she was at it. Behold Mother Jones:

As your neighbors fire up their barbecues this Independence Day, the most popular day in America to grill, they won’t just send the scent of tri-tip or grilled corn over the fence in your direction—they’ll also send smoke. As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote about here, even the “cleanest” gas grills emit pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every hour they’re used. So how many emissions can we expect from dinner barbecues on the 4th?

Roughly eighty percent of American households own barbecues or smokers, according to the Hearth, Patio, and Barbecue Association. If . . . each household used its grill for an hour on the 4th of July, then we’d get a calculation like this:

(56.425M gas grills*5.6 pounds of CO2) + (38.85M charcoal grills*11 pounds CO2) + (9.25M electric grills*15 pounds CO2 ) = 882 million pounds of CO2. That’s roughly as many emissions as burning 2145 railcars of coal, or running one coal-fired power plant for a month.

My rough calculation is that 882 million pounds of CO2 produced 1.4 trillion cheeseburgers and hot dogs.

Honorable mention for Loser of the Week: the unmanly Michael Mann, whose libel suits against National Review, Mark Steyn, and CEI keep boomeranging on him. From The College Fix:

It’s been a bad week for University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.

The week before last he got heat for posting on social media (regarding a federal judge’s ruling on dismantling the Dept. of Education) that “If Trump doesn’t comply, we’re in second amendment territory.”

After being called out for the seeming call to violence against the president, Mann deleted the post, but responded with “The second amendment refers to the right of the people to rise up and defend democracy. To argue this is a threat against Trump is very dishonest.”

But Mann perhaps is best known for his over-a-decade-old libel lawsuit against National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn for referring to his methodologies as “fraudulent” and “intellectually bogus.”

Mann initially won, being awarded $1 million by a court last year.

However, three years before a court ruled that National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute were not liable for defamation. Mann said he would appeal.

Then this January, DC Superior Court Judge Alfred Irving ordered Mann to pay National Review over $500,000 for its legal fees, and this was followed in March by a reduction of Mann’s “grossly excessive” $1 million award … to just $5,000.

Finally, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that just over a week ago, Irving ordered Mann to pony up $477,000 for the legal fees of the CEI and Simberg.

So much winning.