Climate change: How to win more global warming lawsuits
The fight against global warming is rapidly moving into the courtrooms. In the past few years, in landmark cases in the Netherlands, Germany and France, courts have agreed that state and corporate entities have a duty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and demanded they adopt more aggressive policies. A Dutch court, for example, ordered the government to reduce emissions to 25% below 1990s levels, forcing it to go beyond its proposed goal of 17%.
These rulings mark an encouraging shift. Over the decades, plaintiffs have brought — and lost — more than a thousand major cases accusing governments and private companies of causing specific damages through climate emissions.
One reason this dismal record may be changing is that plaintiffs are making more persuasive arguments. But they could be doing even better. According to a recent a study of arguments put forth in 73 recent or ongoing cases, plaintiffs are generally failing to use the up-to-date science capable of linking climate emissions to direct harmful consequences.
“Attribution” — the term scientists use to describe the evidence linking human behavior to global warming — isn’t as easy as it might seem. Proving that some flood or storm damage is due to climate change, and not just a freak event of normal weather, means showing that such an event would have been much more unlikely in a world in which climate change wasn't happening. To do that, scientists have to rely on good statistical understanding of the normal climate system and weather — if warming weren’t happening — and make a clear distinction from what is actually happening now.
Collecting that historical data and building those scientific models has been difficult. But researchers have persisted. In 2018, a
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