From the What Goes Around… Department today we hear news* that the bearded weirdies at Greenpeace are being taken to court by some property owners who are definitely not fans of the tree-huggers.

Two years ago Greenpeace published a book called Photoclima which showed what they thought would happen to Spanish geography in about 100 years due to climate change. In a fairly tacky example of Photoshopping, they showed La Manga del Mar Menor in Murcia almost swallowed by the sea.

On Tuesday Greenpeace were in the dock following a complaint from a property owner in the area supposedly inundated by water in the picture. His investment is in ruins because the site is, according to Greenpeace, completely doomed.

In theory their artwork was based on forecasts of rising sea levels produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on UN Climate Change (IPCC). However the court was told that Greenpeace “misrepresented” the data from the IPCC, says Jose Angel Abad, a lawyer for the aggrieved party.  An expert report endorsed by the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Murcia concludes that “for them to be certain the estimates in the photomontage [Greenpeace] would require a rise in sea levels that range between 9.47 meters and 10.47 meters.“

However according to the Spanish Environment Ministry the latest IPCC projections indicate that global warming will cause a “possible rise in sea level” in between “13 and 68 inches“. In fact, “for the coasts of East and Southern Spain available data indicate a general trend of stability or slight decline in mean sea level.”

Based on the predictions of the UN, “one can consider that a rise of about 50 centimeters by the end of the century is a reasonable scenario,” the ministry said. “A pessimistic scenario far less likely but not ruled it would be a rise of about 1 meter, corresponding to the maximum of some predictions […] This situation seems less likely in the south and east coast in the North.“

The complainant therefore wants a “public correction” of false and alarmist predictions, Greenpeace to admit that they willfuly distorted the data, and the tree-huggers to pay out 36,000 euros in damages. Greenpeace in turn say that they were threatened with legal action totalling over 30 billion euros after the publication of the report and that they are happy to be only down to two trials for relatively small amounts.

The trial began yesterday in the Court of First Instance No.33 in Madrid and will be fun to watch.

* Only in Spanish, sorry.