Mongabay: Study in Nature lays out new pathway to assess climate liability of fossil fuel majors

The new framework only addresses temperature increase and extreme heat disasters. Other climate change-intensified extreme weather events, like 2024’s Hurricane Helene that inundated Appalachian Mountain communities would require far more complex scientific assessments. A North Carolina plaintiff, for example, who wanted to sue fossil fuel firms for their role in the disaster would need to prove in court how extreme heat warmed the Gulf of Mexico to record levels, causing Helene to pick up excessive moisture, intensifying the storm and creating 1000-year floods. Drawing such connections may become possible in the future. Image courtesy of NCDOTcommunications.

I’ll let my editor, Glenn Scherer, in his summarizing bullet points, describe this story of mine:

  • In recent decades a growing number of lawsuits have been launched by states, cities and other government entities to hold fossil fuel companies financially liable for the climate harm caused by the greenhouse gas emissions their products produce.
  • But those efforts often come up against challenging legal arguments made by the companies saying that their actions and emissions cannot be scientifically linked to specific climate change-driven extreme weather events.
  • Now, fast-advancing attribution science is offering answers to those legal arguments. A new study — published in Nature — has created a framework that connects the emissions over time of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies — BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom — to rising temperatures and specific heat-related climate disasters.
  • Researchers say that, in time, this framework for assigning attribution and financial damages could be extended to specific fossil fuel companies and a range of climate change-intensified extreme events such as hurricanes, flooding, sea-level rise and wildfires. The framework has yet to be tested in court.