Phrases like ‘action against climate change’ and ‘climate protection’ are uttered without any clear idea of what, if anything, they might mean. Natural variation at all timescales is an ongoing process, but difficult to measure or predict with any accuracy. Warming has followed the lengthy Little Ice Age, but now some countries – even those with glaciers and ‘snow-capped’ peaks like Switzerland – are being saddled with a legal obligation to attempt to put the brakes on that, by swallowing the argument that a trace gas in the atmosphere is the main source of a supposedly solvable problem of slightly rising temperatures.
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Switzerland, known for pristine countryside and snow-capped [sic] peaks, is facing scrutiny of its environmental policies after becoming the first country faulted by an international court for failing to do enough against climate change, says Phys.org.
The European Court of Human Rights’s ruling last week highlighted a number of failings in Swiss policies, but experts stressed that the wealthy Alpine country was not necessarily doing much worse than its peers.
“The judgment made it really clear that there are critical gaps in the Swiss domestic regulatory framework,” said Tiffanie Chan, a policy analyst at the London School of Economics and Political Science specializing in climate change laws.
“But it’s definitely not a Switzerland-only case,” she told AFP.
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