If an oil pipeline breaks, you can easily point to who was responsible for the spill. However, climate change is a global problem, caused by global emissions that have uneven impacts. To sue someone, you have to prove that they caused you measurable harm. By its very nature, climate change is a difficult problem for courts to untangle.
With increasing specificity and speed, scientists have been able to tell us how much worse climate change made an extreme weather event.
Except that has changed. With increasing specificity and speed, scientists have been able to tell us how climate change intensified an extreme weather event. Now we can learn the effects almost in real-time. For instance, within weeks of the extreme heat wave in Europe this summer or the flooding from Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017, researchers published working papers explaining how much worse they were made by climate change. (Europe’s heat wave was 10 times more likely because of warming, and in Houston there was 38 percent more rainfall.) Still another paper analyzed how climate change fueled California’s 2012-2014 drought (up to 27 percent worse). Yet another focus of research looks at how much, say, Exxon’s historic pollution is responsible for today’s climate impacts—another area of attribution science called source attribution.
“The court room is a new frontier around addressing climate change, and I think there’s a relatively small number of scientists including myself who are engaged,” says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist with the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. “But as these cases emerge and proliferate, there’s an opportunity for attribution science to inform climate law…This work is at an early proof-of-concept stage.”
As E&E News noted last month, environmental lawyers expect “the next wave of climate litigation is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.'”
The lawyers working on advancing climate liability cases in the courts see the advances in the science as integral to building their cases against governments for inaction, and major fossil fuel polluters for misleading the public and investors. It helps them explain why plaintiffs have standing to sue, and how the corporations and governments turned a blind eye to the robust evidence before them.
Exxon Isn't the Only Fossil Fuel Giant Getting Its Ass Sued
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Originally Posted by Annahlee
