Can the legal system catch up with climate science?
A few decades ago, it wasn’t realistic to attribute individual events—even heat waves—to the general warming trend driven by human-caused climate change. Now, there are peer-reviewed methods of rapidly detecting humanity’s fingerprints in the wake of weather disasters like hurricanes or climate-driven wildfires.
In today’s issue of Nature, Dartmouth’s Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin argue that we’ve reached a similar level of sophistication regarding another key question: What are the economic damages caused by individual climate events? They argue that we can now assign monetary values to the damage caused by emissions that can be traced back to individual companies. They found that “The global economy would be $28 trillion richer … were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors.”
They argue that this method might provide legal ammunition for those interested in seeking climate damages in court: “By revealing the human fingerprint on events previously thought to be ‘acts of God,’ attribution science has helped make climate change legally legible.”
