Ability of 3rd world countries to get billions of UN global warming funds (ie broke US taxpayer funds) hinges on proving CO2 caused their problems

• Which is not possible, but the money is transferred anyway.
  

8/25/10, "Consider this discussion from the New Scientist (emphasis added):

[NCAR's Kevin] Trenberth agrees. "It comes to the question: given that there is a global warming component to an event, is there any way in which you can sue somebody for it? Who do you sue?" He points out, though, that it will always be difficult to rule out natural variation in climate. "It's going to be messy."

It already is. In 2005, victims of hurricane Katrina filed a lawsuit against a group of oil companies, claiming that they had created the environmental conditions in the Gulf of Mexico that strengthened Katrina. The case was dismissed in 2007, after it was ruled that the victims had no standing to sue because the harm could not be traced to individual defendants.
That decision was reversed in 2009.

But in June this year the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit again dismissed the case, this time because it did not have enough judges to form a quorum. In the process, the judges that were present ruled once more that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue.

There is another reason for finding out how much climate change is to blame for various events.

"Hundreds of billions of dollars are potentially available [in a UN fund] to help developing countries adapt to climate change," says [Oxford' Myles] Allen.
Who gets what share of the funds depends on being able to say which regions have suffered most as a result of climate change. For now, at least, that remains an open question.

Read that last paragraph again. The ability of developing countries to access UN funds for adaptation depends upon their ability to attribute specific events to human-caused climate change from greenhouse gas emissions.

• Because such attribution is not possible,

• this makes the entire policy basis of the fund flawed.

Just imagine the absurd notion of well-meaning UN officials coming to Africa explaining that they have the resources to help, say, malaria victims who have the disease as a result of human-caused climate change, but not any of the other victims of the disease."...

• from Roger Pielke Jr. blog, "The Attribution Trap"

• via Climate Depot