In the US legal system, a "nuisance" isn't just an annoyance, it's a term of art used to describe either the use of one's own property in a manner that interferes with another's use of theirs ("private nuisance"), or doing something that hurts the community writ large ("public nuisance").
For example, a private nuisance might be like a neighbor's dog that barks 24/7 or cigarette smoke that drifts up into your child's bedroom, while a public nuisance would be if a company dumps toxic waste into a river. The dozens of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies on the grounds that the carbon pollution from their product represents a public nuisance that's raising sea levels, worsening extreme weather and otherwise hurting public health, are known as "climate nuisance" suits. The climate is the subject of the public nuisance lawsuits. If you're talking to someone who knows all about it, you'd refer to them as "climate nuisance" lawsuits.
It's also worth noting that "nuisance lawsuits," are not at all the same thing as "frivolous lawsuits." A frivolous lawsuit (or motion, or pleading, etc.) is one that wastes the court's and other parties' time, money, and resources with no reasonable legal or factual basis for success and attorneys can be sanctioned for filing such a lawsuit. It's Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and every lawyer learns it in their first semester of law school.
We say all this, because a story that Fox News ran this week (by dedicated climate disinfo guy Thomas Catenacci) accuses Leonardo DiCaprio of funding climate nuisance lawsuits. The Catenacci story, republished at the NY Post and picked up by the Washington Examiner tries real hard to turn some emails to and from academics talking about climate lawsuits into a scandal by calling a funding recipient a "dark money group," (despite the story coming from a dark money group and former tobacco lawyer now funded by the fossil fuel industry). But the person who apparently replaced Catenacci at the Daily Caller clearly needs an explainer.
Kay Smythe, "news and commentary writer" at the Daily Caller, headlined her copy+paste version of Catenacci's story as: "REPORT: Leo DiCaprio Used Dark Money To Annoy People With Climate Lawsuits."
The Caller's staff apparently either itself thinks, or wants its readers to think, that the point of these lawsuits isn't to hold companies accountable to clean up and repay the public for the damage caused by their pollution, but is instead just annoying them with "nuisance climate-related lawsuits," using the term in the colloquial sense instead of the accurate legal sense it's being used in the FOIA'd academic emails that form the basis of the attempted hatchet job.
In their zeal to look clever, the Daily Caller confused the term "nuisance" for "vexatious" or "frivolous". For Smythe and any non-legalese-speakers in the audience, here's a sentence using the terms accurately: Chris Horner, who fed this story to Catenacci about the emails referencing the DiCaprio foundation support climate nuisance lawsuits holding fossil fuel companies accountable, is better known for getting paid by fossil fuel companies to target climate scientists with baseless or frivolous and harassing or vexatious FOIA lawsuits demanding they release their emails in an attempt to rerun the Climategate disinfo playbook.
Given that the Daily Caller is less known for hiring smart reporters than it is for repeatedly hiring racist white nationalists, we can't say we're surprised.
But since they were just copying the work of Catenacci without actually adding anything of value, it is impressive that they nonetheless found a way to make the sad little story of DiCaprio actually doing something decent with his money even more asinine!
