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Legal actions against oil companies on effects of global warming?

Playing the climate blame game, New Scientist 11 November 2011 by Fred Pearce A claim that global warming caused the 2010 Russian heatwave could bring closer the day when climate victims can sue oil firms Editorial: ”Climate blame: send for the lawyers“  BLAMING climate change for extreme weather events, like the 2010 heatwave that set the Moscow region of Russia alight in 2010 or the floods that have ravaged the UK since the 1970s (see “Atmospheric rivers cause the UK’s worst floods“), is one of the hottest topics in climate science. The Russian fires are currently the subject of debate, and the stakes are high. Solving the issue could bring closer the day when disaster victims can successfully sue oil and coal companies.

Later this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will review progress on the issue. And next year, UK and US climate scientists plan to launch an annual global assessment of whether humans are to blame for the previous year’s extreme weather events. They could be busy.

A case in point are two separate studies which have taken a closer look at last year’s Russian heatwave. Temperatures up to 10.7 °C above average triggered huge fires in peat bogs, killing an estimated 56,000 people.

Randall Dole of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado, looked at weather data from west Russia going back to 1880 and the atmospheric conditions in place in 2010, and concluded that the record-breaking temperatures were mainly due to natural variability. The immediate cause, he said, was a stationary high pressure system, known as a blocking event, hovering over the area (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2010gl046582).

But in a study published in October, Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany found that there is an 80 per cent chance that the temperature record would not have occurred without climate change (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1101766108).

The two studies are not directly contradictory. Rahmstorf found that while most of the heatwave may have been natural, a significant warming in western Russia over 30 years – probably due to climate change – tipped the natural variability described by Dole into a dangerous red zone…..

Whatever the disputes, the business of attributing blame for weather events is growing. Allen has shown that the European heatwave of 2003, which killed 35,000 people, was made twice as likely to happen by industrial greenhouse gas emissions. His colleague Pardeep Pall found the same for the UK’s floods in 2000, and Martin Hoerling, also at NOAA, has found that the magnitude and frequency of the drying around the Mediterranean is too great to be explained by natural variability alone.

The IPCC is likely to endorse these findings and warn of much worse to come when it launches its report on 18 November….

All this matters, not least because of the potential for legal action against energy companies over damage caused by weather events. In the US, for instance, victims of hurricane Katrina in Mississippi sued an energy company for contributing to the disaster with their emissions.  No such actions have succeeded so far, in large part because it is difficult to pin blame. “….. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228384.200-playing-the-climate-blame-game.html

November 13, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change, Legal