US court slashes $8 billion Johnson & Johnson damages
A Pennsylvania court on Friday slashed an $ 8 billion ruling against US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, imposed by a jury because the company failed to warn that a psychiatric drug could cause breast growth in men. The court said the company now only is liable for punitive damages of $6.8 million, although the company still intends to appeal the decision.
The jury in October ordered Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals to pay damages after plaintiff Nicholas Murray told the Philadelphia court that the drug Risperdal, prescribed to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, had made him grow breasts. The company said that although the court "appropriately reduced the excessive punitive damages award, we will continue to move ahead with an appeal of this verdict."
It said it was unable to present the jury with "vital evidence" showing how the drug label "appropriately outlined the benefits and risks associated with the medicine." The company is facing a series of complaints in state courts for failing to properly warn of Risperdal's side effects, including in Pennsylvania, California and Missouri.
The US Food and Drug Administration approved Risperdal for treatment of adults in 1993, and the drug brought in some $737 million (672 million euros) in sales in 2018.
New climate models show carbon dioxide is a more potent greenhouse gas than previously understood, a finding that could push the Paris treaty goals for capping global warming out of reach, scientists have told AFP. Developed in parallel by separate teams in half-adozen countries, the models-which will underpin revised UN temperature projections next year-suggest scientists have for decades consistently underestimated the warming potential of CO2.
Vastly more data and computing power has become available since the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections were finalised in 2013. "We have better models now," Olivier Boucher, head of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace
Climate Modelling Centre in Paris, told AFP, adding that they "represent current climate trends more accurately".
The most influential projections from government-backed teams in the US, Britain, France and Canada point to a future in which CO2 concentrations that have long been equated with a 3C world would more likely heat the planet's surface by four or five degrees.
"If you think the new models give a more realistic picture, then it will, of course, be harder to achieve the Paris targets, whether it is 1.5 or two degrees Celsius," scientist Mark Zelinka told AFP.
Zelinka, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is the lead author of the first peer-reviewed assessment of the new generation of models, published earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters.
For more than a century, scientists have puzzled over a deceptively simple question: if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubles, how much will Earth's surface warm over time?
The resulting temperature increase is known as Earth's "climate sensitivity".
That number has been hard to pin down due to a host of elusive variables. Whether oceans and forests, for example, will continue to absorb more than half of the CO2 emitted by humanity is hard to predict.
But the biggest always been clouds.
"How clouds evolve in a warmer climate and whether they will exert a tempering or amplifying effect has long been a major source of uncertainty," explained Imperial College London researcher Joeri Rogelj, the lead IPCC author on the global carbon budget-the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted without exceeding a given temperature cap.
The new models reflect a better understanding of cloud dynamics in at least two ways that reinforce the warming impact of CO2.
Zelinka said new research had confirmed high clouds in the bottom layer of Earth's atmosphere boost the Sun's radiation-and global heating accentuates that dynamic.
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