It is a technical solution to the problem of apportioning blame. The hope is that such data will provide lawyers with the hard evidence to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change. Rather than draw causal connections between emissions and events, attribution science deals in risks and probabilities: scientists have recently found, for example, that climate change increased the risk of the severe flooding in Western Europe this past summer by at least 20 percent. The field of research that emerged in service of these aims, known as climate change attribution science, quantifies the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in observed changes in natural systems, like rising sea levels, and extreme weather events, like heat waves and hurricanes. As he wrote in a 2003 Nature commentary, it was simply a matter of reconstructing a chain of events that began with the carbon emissions produced by a given fossil fuel company and ended with the role of those emissions in climate-related harms. But Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University, believed a suit would be relatively straightforward. Taking Big Oil to court for climate-related damages was only a thought experiment at that point. Although in 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had issued its clearest statement yet that global warming was caused by human activities, Bush declined to join the Kyoto Protocol and abandoned his campaign pledge to cap carbon emissions, instead issuing a record number of oil drilling permits on public and tribal lands. Two years into the Bush administration and its oil-industry cronyism, any meaningful policy shifts in the near future seemed unlikely. The United States, responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, still had no major carbon regulations in place.
When Myles Allen first proposed suing fossil fuel companies in 2003, the outlook for climate action in the political sphere was bleak.
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