WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - "Attribution science" - defined as a branch of climatology that attempts to link and quantify extreme weather events to the human influence on climate - is expected to be in focus at the 26th world summit on climate change (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland where world leaders, including President Biden and a cadre of his cabinet members, have gathered.
Energy expert Robert Bradley, CEO and founder of Institute for Energy Research, said the subject is getting attention because it's a key public relations strategy for activists "despite its obvious limitations."
"Attribution is key in the legal/tort community," Bradley told Legal Newsline. "This is a major strategy to try to link the amorphous concept of climate change to individuals affected by extreme weather—and those otherwise influenced."
But Bradley expects the climate summit to be a political failure, and hopes that as a result climate science will be more scientific and less political.
Earlier this year, an Energy in Depth article quoted a report by multiple climate specialists who lamented that attribution science is not as infallible in the courtroom as expected. The report stated that attribution science has failed to pin climate damage on defendants in "even the more flexible causation tests."
The report's authors are academics who have been outspoken in their support of climate litigation; the experts admitted that attribution science claims often die in court after evidence proves insufficient. One of the authors is Friederike Otto, a German climatologist who stated that attribution science was created for use in court.
"Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind," she said, according to EE News.
Otto drew a comparison between climate liability lawsuits currently facing traditional energy producers and earlier litigation against major tobacco companies, which relied on science showing the harmful health effects of smoking (Climatewire, March 10).
"You can say that smoking cigarettes increases the likelihood of developing cancer, and you can actually quantify how much, and therefore those who sell tobacco and say it's wonderful for you are liable," she said. "And this is the same idea behind the event attribution."
Attribution science was created to provide "scientific" basis for implementing big reduction in CO2 standards; the idea first began to surface in a 2014 peer-reviewed article by Rick Heede of the Climate Accountability Project in Colorado, known as the "Carbon Majors" article, which linked 25% of global emissions from 1965 to 2015 to 28 different "suable" companies.
Bradley says there are fundamental problems with this approach.
"Extreme weather has always been with us, so attributing it to a new factor is problematic," he explained. "Long-term data on weather extremes is not suggestive of sudden jumps in many cases, and what we see today could be different in the future for reasons that are not captured in models because of unknown or sub-grid-scale physics."
American climatologist and former Georgia Institute of Technology — School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences chairwoman Dr. Judith Curry points out that historical data of extreme weather indicates that earth has survived even worse extreme weather events, and that elimination of fossil fuel emissions isn't going to prevent such extreme events.
Climate models, Bradley said, are notoriously subjected and speculative for the globe. Subdividing its conclusions will only be equally if not more problematic.
"In this sense, climate models may be worse than nothing," he stated, referencing his June American Institute for Economic Research report that charges the establishment with overestimating global warming—and pulling a curtain over such miscalculations.
Gerald North, former Texas A&M University climatology department head, described the complexity of climate change and the crudeness of the models that fall short.
"We do not know much about modeling climate. It is as though we are modeling a human being. Models are in position at last to tell us the creature has two arms and two legs, but we are being asked to cure cancer," North said in the summer report.
Bradley questioned whether a positive trend in extreme weather events should also be attributed to anthropogenic climate change.
"It is a tipoff that the philosophy of deep ecology (nature is optimal and fragile) colors attribution science," he said.
Anti-fossil-fuel policy, Bradley said, is anti-weather-protection policy. Fossil fuels are the most stable answer to extreme weather events from natural or man-made factors; wind and solar energy, according to Bradley, are "very limited and iffy in emergencies," because these energy alternatives "are very dilute and intermittent versus the mineral energies that are cheaper, reliable, and far more abundant."
"The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels," Alex Epstein wrote in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. "In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability."
Attribution science is a card played often, Bradley said, and it will continue to be played often, particularly at COP26 which is being attended by leaders from nearly every country, economists and environmentalists. It launched Oct. 31 and runs through Nov. 12.
"My hope, and even expectation, is that with the political fail of COP26, climate scientists and others will feel less pressure to conform and [rather] do straight scientific research, that climate science will be less politicized and more scientific," Bradley said. "Climatology remains a very unsettled field of inquiry."