The judge for California v. Chevron was led to believe by plaintiffs that five oil companies had in their possession a “smoking gun” document that would prove them culpable of contributing to climate change and conspiring to cover up their actions.

The only problem: this “damning” document was simply a publicly available slideshow by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 1995.

“There was [supposedly] a conspiratorial document within the defendants about how they knew good and well that global warming was right around the corner,” Judge William Allsup said. “Well, it turned out it wasn’t quite that. What it was, was a slide show that somebody had gone to the IPCC and was reporting on what the IPCC had reported, and that was it. Nothing more.”

The plaintiffs were left with the burden of trying to claim a widely-reported slideshow with baseless findings was proof of a so-called “conspiracy.”

But it gets even better: Judge Alsup asked a university oceanographer one of the more potent questions one could pose to a climate alarmist: “What do you think caused the last Ice Age?”

Of course, any answer that follows describes planet-altering climate events that occurred naturally, independent of human enterprise.

Don’t forget the point of this trial is to pin responsibility for climate change on oil companies, a tough premise to demonstrate after your witness provides a lecture on how sea levels used to be 30 feet higher when humans still wore loincloths.

Perhaps the plaintiffs should have sought counsel with Arnold Schwarzenegger who recently said he was going to sue big oil for “first-degree murder.”