How can we be sure Judge Silas Reid exists? Maybe he's a hoax perpetrated by an amalgam of judges posing in his courtroom as part of a massive conspiracy. If that's true, then his rulings are entirely invalid and can be ignored.
Who is to say his rulings weren't just natural phenomena? A Gust of wind perhaps? You can't rule it out.
What's more, you can't actually prove he exists. Like, maybe there's a body in the robe in the courtroom making decisions, but that's just one phenomenon. We can't possibly conclude that all of the examples of Judge Silas Reid are connected somehow. A loving God wouldn't ever do that.
This was in jury instructions, so he was saying the fact of a climate crisis is irrelevant to their deliberations and not to consider it when evaluating their guilt.
It is a stretch to say that their motivation for protesting could never be relevant.
Not so long ago, we had protests which were illegal because the police refused to give them a permit. The protests were because a policeman had raped and killed a woman. The conduct of the police was simultaneously what made the protest illegal and also what they were protesting about.
In this case, the motivation is that the government is failing in its basic duty to protect the lives and future of its citizens (all of them), and it's the government that has passed legislation to make protest illegal.
I would think that the relevance of their motivation was already sorted out during the proceedings.
The defence probably brought it up and the prosecution then probably objected on the grounds that motivations were not being argued, only actions. Hearing those arguments may have gone as far as the submission of briefs and even a separate hearing.
In any case, if the conclusion was that the prosecution's arguments were better than the defence's, then the judge may have been compelled to address that in instructions to the jury.
My reading was that the Judge was saying that, whether the climate crisis existed or not, it was irrelevant to the deliberations. This doesn’t necessarily call into question the existence of a climate crisis or give insight into the judge’s opinions. Still, the convictions in light of the UN report are chilling.
Goes to show how ill informed people are.
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.