World Weather Attribution

generic for science to assign responsibility

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SIMON CLARK 11 26

SUPER TYPHOON TROP CYCLONE CAT 1-FIVE IN 24 HRS ODETTE RAI PI 12/21 15TH ONE; 8 MIL PPL AFFECTED, 1.4M HOMELESS?

Why this country is making Shell nervous

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A heat dome killed their residents. Now they’re suing Big Oil.

Multnomah County, Oregon, aims to put fossil fuel companies on trial for fueling climate disasters like the deadly 2021 heat dome.

ExxonKnews

Jun 23, 2023

Emily Sanders is the Center for Climate Integrity’s editorial lead. CCI staff writer Isabella Garcia, a Multnomah County resident, contributed to this reporting.*

As we approach the second anniversary of a deadly heat dome that devastated communities throughout the Pacific Northwest, an Oregon county is now suing Big Oil companies and their enablers to hold them accountable for the damage. Multnomah County is the first community to file a climate accountability lawsuit over the heat dome — which officials say killed 69 local residents, scientists say was “virtually impossible” without climate change, and county leaders say was fueled by the fossil fuel industry’s fraud.

Multnomah is charging some of the largest oil, gas, and coal companies — including Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, Koch Industries, Peabody, and others — with lying to “the County, the public, and the scientific community about the catastrophic harm” they knew fossil fuels would cause. The industry’s campaigns of disinformation, they say, delayed climate action for years and left residents to pay the ultimate price while the companies rake in record-breaking profits.

Like numerous other lawsuits filed in the United States to hold fossil fuel, tobacco, opioid, and other industries liable for damages they knowingly caused, Multnomah’s case charges the industry with violating fraud and tort laws, like negligence and public nuisance. The lawsuit says Big Oil should face a jury trial and pay more than $51.5 billion to help the county adapt and cover the costs of past and future climate disasters, including more frequent and extreme heatwaves and wildfires.

After voting yesterday afternoon to take legal action against Big Oil, county officials led hundreds of local residents and climate activists on a march to the Multnomah County Courthouse, where they held a press conference announcing the suit.

“The climate crisis is costing us money today, and will cost us more money in the future as we try to adapt,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said during the press conference Thursday. “We’re not looking for a payout, we’re looking to be paid back.”

Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson is joined by fellow county commissioners in front of the Multnomah County Courthouse to file a climate accountability lawsuit against Big Oil, June 22, 2023. Credit: Isabella Garcia

Here are the highlights:

Multnomah experienced one of the deadliest climate disasters in U.S. history — and they say Big Oil should help pay for the damage.

In June 2021, the Pacific Northwest found itself trapped under an unrelenting heat dome, a phenomenon during which hot air remains in the atmosphere for several consecutive days and nights. In Multnomah County, temperatures rose to 108°, 112°, and 116°Fahrenheit — heat extreme enough to shut down bodily functions. Sixty nine people in the county lost their lives as a result — more heat deaths than have occurred in the entire state of Oregon over the past two decades.

“These were some of the most vulnerable people in Multnomah County, and in 2021 they paid the price that Big Oil ought to be covering for in our communities with their lives,” said Vega Pederson during the county commission’s board meeting introducing the lawsuit.

That harm wasn’t equally distributed, Vega Pederson explained: the elderly, those living alone, those experiencing homelessness, and people living in lower-income neighborhoods without air conditioning made up the majority of the county’s deaths.

Major oil and gas companies and their trade associations, the lawsuit argues, carried out a “scheme to rapaciously sell fossil fuel products and deceptively promote them as harmless to the environment, while they knew that carbon pollution emitted by their products into the atmosphere would likely cause deadly extreme heat events like that which devastated Multnomah County in late June and early July 2021.” Now the county, which experienced three times the typical annual amount of emergency visits from heat-related illness in one week and scrambled to open cooling centers and offer other life-saving provisions during the heat dome, says Big Oil should pay to protect its residents from future extreme heat events.

It’s the first time the oil industry has faced legal action for its role in causing an individual heat wave, which was made at least 150 times more likely by climate change, according to a peer reviewed study. The new charges are reflective of a growing field of attribution science, which can link disasters to climate change and even individual polluters.

Outside legal counsel Roger Worthington holding up a printed copy of the lawsuit in front of the Multnomah County Courthouse, June 22, 2023. Credit: Isabella Garcia

The case charges new defendants with climate deception.

Multnomah County is suing at least two new defendants that haven’t yet appeared in other climate accountability cases: the Western States Petroleum Trade Association, and the notorious consulting firm McKinsey and Company, which the suit says aided the fossil fuel companies in their efforts to “sow ‘scientific’ and public doubt in furtherance of their ceaseless, ravenous quest for more wealth.”

McKinsey is a global consulting firm that has worked with at least 43 of the world’s largest polluters and made tens of millions in profits from two of the biggest offenders — top clients Chevron and Saudi Aramco, according to the complaint. “McKinsey’s claims of commitment to environmental protectionism stand in stark contrast to the millions of dollars it has earned assisting its fossil fuel and mining company clients in promoting themes to deny the existence and/or gravity of [anthropogenic climate change]”, the lawsuit reads.

Climate activists marched with county leaders to file the climate accountability lawsuit in Oregon state court, June 22, 2023. Credit: Isabella Garcia

Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) is the oldest petroleum trade association in the U.S., which represents fossil fuel companies operating in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. WSPA members include Exxon, Shell, Chevron, and BP, and the group “has engaged in a climate deception/misinformation campaign in Oregon to continue to further the business objectives of its carbon polluting members,” according to the complaint.

Multnomah County is the first local government to sue Big Oil since the Supreme Court cleared a path for similar climate accountability suits to move toward trial.

When the U.S. Supreme Court this spring refused to hear fossil fuel industry petitions to prevent similar cases from moving toward trial in state court, many predicted that it was just a matter of time until more communities filed suit. Multnomah County’s lawsuit is strong evidence that we can expect many more local governments to turn to the courts to make Big Oil pay.

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Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions | Climate crisis | The Guardian

the Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.

New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the industry’s devastating impact on the planet.

The analysis, by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, the world’s leading authority on big oil’s role in the escalating climate emergency, evaluates what the global corporations have extracted from the ground, and the subsequent emissions these fossil fuels are responsible for since 1965 – the point at which experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by both industry leaders and politicians.

The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO₂e) since 1965.

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What is the polluters project?

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Those identified range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell – to state-owned companies including Saudi Aramco and Gazprom.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

3:46

Why we need political action to tackle the oil, coal and gas companies - video explainer

Twelve of the top 20 companies are state-owned and together their extractions are responsible for 20% of total emissions in the same period. The leading state-owned polluter is Saudi Aramco, which has produced 4.38% of the global total on its own.

Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, said the findings shone a light on the role of fossil fuel companies and called on politicians at the forthcoming climate talks in Chile in December to take urgent measures to rein in their activities.

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“The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price – in the form of a degraded planet – so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits. It is a great moral failing of our political system that we have allowed this to happen.”

The global polluters list uses company-reported annual production of oil, natural gas, and coal and then calculates how much of the carbon and methane in the produced fuels is emitted to the atmosphere throughout the supply chain, from extraction to end use.

It found that 90% of the emissions attributed to the top 20 climate culprits was from use of their products, such as petrol, jet fuel, natural gas, and thermal coal. One-tenth came from extracting, refining, and delivering the finished fuels.

The Guardian approached the 20 companies named in the polluters list. Eight of them have replied. Some argued that they were not directly responsible for how the oil, gas or coal they extracted were used by consumers. Several disputed claims that the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known as far back as the late 1950s or that the industry collectively had worked to delay action.

Most explicitly said they accepted the climate science and some claimed to support the targets set out in the Paris agreement to reduce emissions and keep global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

All pointed out efforts they were making to invest in renewable or low carbon energy sources and said fossil fuel companies had an important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. PetroChina said it was a separate company from its predecessor, China National Petroleum, so had no influence over, or responsibility for, its historical emissions. The companies’ replies can be read in full here.

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The latest study builds on previous work by Heede and his team that has looked at the historical role of fossil fuel companies in the escalating climate crisis.

The impact of emissions from coal, oil and gas produced by fossil fuel companies has been huge. According to research published in 2017 by Peter Frumhoff at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US and colleagues, CO₂ and methane emissions from the 90 biggest industrial carbon producers were responsible for almost half the rise in global temperature and close to a third of the sea level rise between 1880 and 2010. The scientists said such work furthered the “consideration of [companies’] historical responsibilities for climate change”.

Heede said: “These companies and their products are substantially responsible for the climate emergency, have collectively delayed national and global action for decades, and can no longer hide behind the smokescreen that consumers are the responsible parties.

“Oil, gas, and coal executives derail progress and offer platitudes when their vast capital, technical expertise, and moral obligation should enable rather than thwart the shift to a low-carbon future.”

Heede said 1965 was chosen as the start point for this new data because recent research had revealed that by that stage the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by industry leaders and politicians, particularly in the US.

In November 1965, the president, Lyndon Johnson, released a report authored by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which set out the likely impact of continued fossil fuel production on global heating.

In the same year, the president of the American Petroleum Institute told its annual gathering: “One of the most important predictions of the [president’s report] is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”

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Heede added: “Leading companies and industry associations were aware of, or wilfully ignored, the threat of climate change from continued use of their products since the late 1950s.”

The research aims to hold to account those companies most responsible for carbon emissions, and shift public and political debate away from a focus just on individual responsibility. It follows a warning from the UN in 2018 that the world has just 12 years to avoid the worst consequences of runaway global heating and restrict temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

An activist outside the Houses of Parliament in London, 2015. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty

The study shows that many of the worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.

A study earlier this year found that the largest five stock-market-listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m each year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change.

Heede said the companies had a “significant moral, financial, and legal responsibility for the climate crisis, and a commensurate burden to help address the problem”.

He added: “Even though global consumers from individuals to corporations are the ultimate emitters of carbon dioxide, the Climate Accountability Institute focuses its work on the fossil fuel companies that, in our view, have their collective hand on the throttle and the tiller determining the rate of carbon emissions and the shift to non-carbon fuels.”

Explore more on these topics

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https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/

PARTNERS

whenever an extreme weather or climate-related event occurs, the media and decision-makers ask the question to what extent it is influenced by climate change. For a few years now the scientific community has been able to answer that question for relatively simple extremes: hot and cold extremes, extreme precipitation and drought. This emerging field of climate science is called Extreme Event Attribution and was assessed to yield reliable estimates of changing risks of extreme weather by the US National Academy of Sciences. Scientific studies, going through peer-review are usually published a year or longer after an event occurred, when the public has moved on and questions about rebuilding or relocating have been answered without taking scientific evidence on the role of climate change into account.

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, a collaboration between climate scientists at Imperial College London in the UK, KNMI in the Netherlands, IPSL/LSCE in France, Princeton University and NCAR in the US, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, IIT Delhi in India and climate impact specialists at the Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC) around the world, has been founded to change this, and provide robust assessments on the role of climate change in the aftermath of the event. The initiative is led by Drs Friederike Otto at Imperial College, and Sjoukje Philip and Sarah Kew at KNMI.

Since WWA started in 2014, the group has developed methods to do extreme event attribution quickly but thoroughly. Read a detailed description of the methods and links to the peer-reviewed studies developing these methods.

The first step is to decide which events to analyse. For this, an objective trigger criterium has been developed by the RCCC, although less impactful events of importance to one of the partners can also be tackled. The expected outcome of the attribution analysis plays no role. Given the go-ahead, the meteorological characteristics of the event are defined choosing the metrics that are as salient to the impacts as possible, in collaboration with local experts whenever possible. Long, homogeneous observational time series are analyzed to obtain an estimate of the observed changes (the detection step). To attribute the change to anthropogenic emissions (or not), as many climate models as possible are being used. The performance of these models to determine which represent the extreme realistically is evaluated before computing how the probability of these kind of events changes due to anthropogenic climate change. These estimates are combined with the observed trend in a synthesis that produces a coherent attribution statement. In addition trends in vulnerability and exposure that contributed to the impact are analysed. The methodology has been peer-reviewed and published, and summarised in our article Pathways and pitfalls in extreme event attribution.

Finally, these results are disseminated through media channels, making our expertise available to provide additional explanations and context. If you are interested in receiving our press material please contact Leo Barasi.

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climate change increased rainfall associated with tropical cyclones hitting highly vulnerable communities in Madagascar, Mozambique & Malawi

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