Climate Chance is Taking Over Our Courtrooms

Typically oil companies don't care about climate change, but Chevron changed that. - Cartoon Credit: Pace University

Climate change has a lot of action coming up in 2018 in the courtroom. There are plenty of cases with decisions that concern climate change that will have to be made in the near future. In this post, I'll look into one of the biggest and most important court cases that is currently still going on, dealing with oil companies and climate change. 

Five largest oil companies in the U.S. - Credit: Pintrest

This pivotal court case deals with the cities of San Fransico and Oakland, California fighting against the five biggest oil companies in the world: BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Conoco Phillips. The surprising thing that happened recently with this case, that not a lot of people saw coming, was that the Chevron attorney agreed that human activity is causing climate change and that we all need to do something about it soon.

This is a huge step forward for getting all oil companies to realize the fact that humans are at fault for causing climate and it also establishes a climate change victory in court. Theodore Boutrous Jr. said that “from Chevron’s perspective there’s no debate about climate science," and they are 100% onboard with declaring that humans are indeed playing a significant role in causing climate change. Moving forward, hopefully, this successful conclusion by Chevron can be used as leverage in other court cases since the fact that humans have played a role in rising temperatures of our planet has now been established in court. 

At the end of March, the federal judge in California who is covering this case held a five-hour tutorial about what climate change was and the science behind it in order to make sure everyone was on the same page. I found this interesting and think it should be done more in court so that any misunderstanding about the science is eliminated. The judge of this case wanted to make sure he got the science 100% correct, so he invited each city representative and each oil company in separately to present their version of the history of climate change and what it's like now. He wanted to do this rather unorthodox approach so that he could get the science straight first and not have to make any decisions in the courtroom without knowing what exactly was going on.

The politics of climate change have been bouncing around for a long time, sometimes even going in circles ending up at the same place that we started with some of these cases. This case may end up morphing into a battle over who is responsible for climate change. Like I mentioned earlier, there's still a long way to go with this case and a lot to still be decided, so who knows where it will go next.

People protest for climate change - Credit: The Guardian

To give you a little perspective on how far climate change research has come, a lawsuit concerning how heat waves and flooding could be connected back to fossil fuels, faltered ten years ago because not enough research had been done with respect to climate change and its effects. They weren't able to create a strong enough of a connection between the heat waves and flooding to fossil fuels. Now, with the copious amounts of research that we have conducted, the science is much stronger and able to back up claims that climate change causes specific weather events to occur. 

With all of this new research, climate change is being seen more and more in U.S. courts in the recent years. In the 15 years before 2000, there were only six climate-related lawsuits in the United States. However, since 2000 there's been more than 1,000 lawsuits. This trend is also happening in other places around the globe with the number of countries with climate change-related cases doubling from 2014 to 2017. Specific parts of the government are the defendants in most climate change cases, but fossil fuel companies are getting sued more often now having to describe how they contribute to climate change with the things that they do.

It should be very interesting to see how the major court case involving the five largest oil companies turns out and as well as how these recent events will reshape the way we think about climate change in our judicial system.

What Will Climate Change Look Like in the Future? New Interactive Map Shows Us

Screenshot of the interactive map - this setting has the climate change from 6000 years ago until 2079. Credit: University of Cincinnati

An exciting new interactive map was unveiled last week, created by University of Cincinnati geography professor Tomasz Stepinski, that allows users to compare the climates of places all over the world. It uses meteorological data from over five decades and from over 50,000 weather stations around the world to display where and how much our climate has changed anywhere on our planet. The part that's even more interesting, in my opinion, is the ability to have a visual representation of what parts of the world will experience the most climate change over the next 50 years.

The future climate change filter - prediction of climate change until 2079. Brown and white areas will be affected the most and green area affected the least. Credit: University of Cincinnati

The user can clearly see the areas of our planet that are predicted to be affected most by climate change (the white and brown areas) making them realize that there are places on our planet that are being affected in different and worse ways by climate change than others are. Stepinski also hopes that his interactive map can kickstart a lot of research, not only about climate change but also looking into the climate diversity that we have on our planet from one location to another. Users can easily see what locations have contrasting climates and what locations have similar climates from anywhere on the globe.

The plot that pops up when you click anywhere on the interactive map. Credit: University of Cincinnati

Another unique aspect of this tool is that it not only includes temperature, but also precipitation. Many people only consider temperature and global warming when they think about climate change. However, our planet's climate is comprised of many different factors besides temperature with precipitation being another predominant one. In fact, if you click anywhere on land on the interactive map it will display a nice plot of temperature vs. precipitation, with two different lines representing the two years that you're comparing.

This map project also made an appearance in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, highlighting the impacts that it could have on the meteorology sector.

Hopefully, this new visual representation of climate change in the past and into the future will help more people realize how quickly our world's climate is changing right now and that something has to be done as soon as possible so we can slow down our changing climate. Obviously, science has proved that the Earth's climate is constantly changing, which is normal, but not over this short of a time period. The climate of a certain location usually changes over a time scale such as a half-million years, but when these climate changes start happening in around 100 years or less, we are venturing into uncharted territory since our planet has never experienced anything like this before.

Finally, the climate change predictor tool of this map will hopefully be able to also help with the planning for extreme weather phenomena. The places that are predicted to see the greatest impacts from climate change and be the most negatively impacted by it are also the places where we could see the most extreme weather happening. More hurricanes could hit these locations, or they will be more prone to flooding, or they could be more impacted by more tornadoes in the future depending on how much their climate is predicted to change and where they are located. Knowing these predictions ahead of time can be helpful for emergency managers to plan for extreme weather events that are more likely to happen in the future. 

Credit: National Climate Assessment

Additionally, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has partnered with the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies and many other organizations to produce the National Climate Assessment. They have been producing this report on a yearly basis for the past several years, but I believe the 2014 version has the most information and the most modern/user-friendly website. Littered with easy to find information and eye-popping images and graphs, this website is filled with everything you need to know about climate change in the United States.

Prediction of how much the temperatures will rise with the higher emissions model. Credit: National Climate Assessment

I want to focus on the "future climate" section of the website where map projections/models show what parts of the United States will be affected by certain aspects of climate change. Throughout the United States, by 2070 it appears that if we reduce the number of emissions we release, we are estimated to increase temperatures by 4-5 degrees Fahrenheit compared to the period from 1970-1999. However, temperatures could increase as much as 8-9 degrees Fahrenheit for the majority of the United States if we continue to increase global emissions.

Green areas show a positive precipitiation change and brown areas show a negative precipitation change with the higher emissions model. Credit: National Climate Assessment

Precipitation will also change in terms of where and how much of it falls. With increased emissions, winters and springs are projected to be wetter for the northern half of the United States and drier for the southern half of the U.S. compared to the 1970-1999 period. Summers are predicted to have less precipitation falling from the sky for the majority of the United States contributing to more drought problems.

The northeast coastline is expected to see between 0 and 2 feet of sea level rise per century and you can see the sea level rising in Philadelphia with the graph on the right. Credit: National Climate Assessment

Another interesting aspect of this website is that you can go region by region throughout the country, where each region has its own webpage with information about how climate change will specifically affect that part of the country. For instance, in the Northeast, scientists say that heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise (causing coastal and river flooding) will be the impacts of climate change that people living in the Northeast will be most impacted by. Climate change related events will contribute to stressing the existing infrastructure to a point where it needs to be replaced and more hurricanes could impact the Northeast over the next century.

Now that these great visual tools and expansive resources are being created, they just need to get out there so more people can see them and understand them. Hopefully, these tools and resources will help to educate more people that the impacts of climate change are much closer than many think.

The Risk of Climate Change on Our Wallets

Credit: Cirm.in

As with many things in life, risks are associated with decisions. Risk of failure. Risk of lost money. Risk of lost lives. Similarly, there's a risk in preparing for the weather of the future. Weather risk management, an option within the department of meteorology here at Penn State, deals with the business side of meteorology. Weather risk managers need to be able to manage the financial

consequences that can occur after bad weather and natural disasters. Insurance companies, food companies such as MARS candy, and many other companies are hiring weather risk managers so that they can be better prepared for the future and make sound financial decisions.

However, these events are usually short-term, only lasting a few days or possibly up to a week. For instance, they would try to figure out the risks associated with a hurricane that was going to impact the coast. But now, climate scientists and meteorologists should be looking at the broader picture and considering where climate change fits into the puzzle. Decisions need to be made as to what needs to be done in order to prepare properly financially so that our economy can withstand the effects climate change will have on it over many years to come.

Climate Change Risk Management Steps -
Credit: Four Twenty Seven

Last year, for the first time, a majority of powerful global investors recognized the financial risks of climate change. A study by the Asset Owner Disclosure Project found that 40% of asset owners and only 6% of asset managers had scored a zero for managing and disclosing climate risks. This indicated that the majority of the market gets it - something needs to be done now in order to be best prepared for what climate change will bring us tomorrow. The report concluded that “the scales have tipped," since 60% of asset owners are now acting in some way to do something about the climate risks they face.

Those that haven't jumped on board yet are being left behind and, in the case of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), facing lawsuits. The CBA is being sued for misleading shareholders over the risks climate change presents to their business interests. The claim argues that climate change causes financial risks to the bank, both as a business and to its customers, and they failed to report these risks to investors. This demonstrates an important shift in the world's understanding of climate change. A few years ago we would have been debating about the existence of climate change and if it is something we should actually be worrying about. Now that most of the world has come to accept that climate change is real, companies and banks are expected to think about the risks and outcomes associated with climate change and how that will impact the business and the consumer.

Energy efficient buildings - Credit: CMFE News

We can see businesses beginning to make smart decisions already by investing in sustainable developments and sustainable solutions. Buildings and transportation methods are becoming more energy efficient, better for the environment, and able to withstand the consequences that global warming may produce.

However, there are still the countries and people out there that don't have climate change anywhere on their radar since they don't think that it will be a problem that will affect them personally. For instance, many people who are saving for retirement aren't aware of a possible risk of a climate-induced financial crisis and therefore aren't allocating funds for this purpose just in case. Similarly, some countries have a very short-term approach, so they don't necessarily see the benefits of doing things today that might not benefit them until 25 or 30 years into the future.

If we take a look at some of the impacts that climate change has on our economies today we realize that the costs associated with extreme weather events are increasing. Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma are all now in the top five in terms of the costliest hurricanes on record. Climate scientists are fairly confident that climate change will cause an increase in the severity and possibly even the number of extreme weather events, creating even higher costs for natural disasters, such as hurricanes, moving forward.

Sea-level rise simulation - Credit: GLOBE-Net

Rising sea levels are another part of climate change that many cannot deny, so let's take a look at a study that estimates the cost of sea levels rising one meter. Low-lying coastal regions support 30% of the global population, and about this same chunk of the global economy. Even putting a portion of these coastal regions underwater would come with astronomically high financial costs. The study found that in the US, by 2050, more than $106 billion worth of existing coastal property could be below sea level and that future flood losses in major coastal cities around the world may exceed $1 trillion dollars per year as a consequence of sea level rise by 2050.

The economic impacts go on and on... including higher temperatures driving up electricity bills and contributing to droughts and coastal cities having to possibly relocate. The connection between the science and the economics of climate change is rather clear. Now, something just needs to be done about it.

We Need to Change the Way We Communicate Climate Change

Trump, Trump, Trump. It's quite literally all that people, especially the media, talk about these days. Now, this is far from a politics blog, but we do need to realize that the way in which we communicate climate change issues to the general public greatly influences what the public thinks about these very important topics. And unfortunately, in 2017 according to Media Matters, broadcast news coverage devoted 79% of its climate change coverage to statements or actions by the Trump administration. Furthermore, they specifically focused on the president's decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and debating if Trump actually thinks human-caused climate change is fake. Let's remind ourselves, people, that this is the same guy that has posted many of his silly tweets trying to convince everyone that human-caused climate change is fake.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013

This is just painful to read and realize that people are supposed to trust their president.....yeah right. Believe in science and trust the scientists for once in your life Mr. Trump. Anyways, back on track with the media issues that we face. The graph below does a fantastic job of depicting the striking amounts of the media's climate change coverage that was devoted to talking about Trump's administration's decisions about climate change.

This striking graph shows just how much air time is being devoted to Trump. Credit: Media Matters

This is very valuable TV time that could be spent in so many other more constructive ways, such as educating people about climate change or informing them of the effects that we're already dealing with today. Additionally, even with 2017 being one of the worst years for weather and climate disasters, national broadcast networks rarely talked about or demonstrated to the viewers that there is indeed a link between climate change and extreme weather events. Hurricanes Maria, Irma, and Harvey provided perfect platforms to leverage the correlation of extreme weather events to climate change. People could see the impacts and the damage first-hand from these hurricanes, so connecting these disasters to climate change might encourage a few more viewers to realize how important it is to try to reduce human-caused climate change. But instead, we just talked about Trump some more.

A graph shows that Trump played a huge role in what was said about climate change this past semester.

Additionally, most of the TV networks' climate change coverage was about climate change denial. This, of course, stems from the ideals of the Trump administration but was also exemplified when networks such as CBS and PBS brought guests on shows who flat-out denied that human activity causes climate change. That's only going to create more uncertainties and debate among the public, not help to solve problems related to climate change that need to be solved. Additionally, by focusing on all of these negatives (which it seems like the media overall has a knack for) they neglected to point out some of the positives within the field of climate science, such as new research findings or different ways we can work to solve climate change.

Clearly, the way that we're currently communicating climate change to the general public is not working. Climate change has ballooned into a political issue where people are choosing sides without looking at the facts and many people still don't really understand what is happening. So what's next?

Scientists are positive that climate change is real and that humans are the main cause - we've filled libraries with facts and research about all this. But sometimes facts don't work. We tend to only focus on issues that are personal, abrupt, and facing us now. Unfortunately, for most people, climate change does not check all of these boxes. The map below shows results from Yale's Study on Climate Change Communication about the percentage of adults who think climate change will harm them personally. More than 50% of American's don't think that it's their problem - rather, that it's a problem for future generations.

Yale's Program on Climate Change Communication map of people who think global warming will harm them personally. Credit: Yale

Climate change is something that happens gradually over time and always seems to be in the future, not clearly defining the impacts that it will personally have on us. This is why it's tough for many Americans to realize that climate change is something that we need to do something about NOW (it's the "everything seems fine to me" approach, where people don't realize something is wrong until it's too late to act in order to solve it).

And this is where the media comes into play. Climate change is often talked about in the future tense; not with any urgency that effects are being felt right now. If more people communicate better with each other about the complex problem that climate change is, maybe, just maybe we can convince more people to do something about climate change NOW.

Placing the (Specific) Blame on Climate Change

National Academy of Sciences report on
climate change attribution - Credit: The
National Academies Press

In the fascinating and rapidly expanding field of climate science, it was recently announced that scientists can now blame individual natural disasters on climate change. This breakthrough will be beneficial in multiple ways to realize how human-caused climate change impacts natural disasters and to know which extreme weather events can be directly linked to climate change.

According to Scientific American, the idea of attributing a single weather event to climate change began in 2003, with a climate expert at the University of Oxford, Myles Allen. At that time, about fifteen years ago, the main understanding among scientists was that even though it was believed that climate change had a significant impact on the weather, there was no way to determine the exact influence of climate change any individual event. The reasoning behind this thinking was that there are just so many factors that play a part in affecting the weather, including normal climate fluctuations, that it would be extremely difficult to pinpoint the blame on climate change.

Myles Allen - Credit: Environmental
Change Institute

Allen suggested that with a better understanding of the climate system, we might be able to attribute extreme weather events to climate change. He also proposed that if this breakthrough occurred, the public would be able to blame greenhouse gas emitters for causing the damage of climate-related events. This would be a huge step forward to help limit greenhouse gas emissions even further and realizing which extreme weather events have climate changes' "fingerprints" all over them.

Fortunately, eighteen years since Allen's idea, extreme event attribution is now not only possible but a major part in one of the most rapidly and expanding subfields of climate research. New reports and papers seem to be published weekly about attributing climate change to extreme weather events. It's been like opening up the floodgates; there's been an explosion of research recently.

World Weather Attribution's logo -
Credit: Twitter

The field has become so closely monitored that many reputable sources report research about attributing specific weather events to climate change. For instance, if you go to Climate Central's homepage and scroll down, you'll see a list of recent weather events that have been looked at closely to see if climate change played a role in their occurrence or severity. They even have a research paper about events as recent as the cold temperature outbreak that occurred from late December 2017 through mid-January 2018, where they conclude that cold outbreaks are getting less frequent due to climate change, but they are still likely to occur in North America every year. More research has been posted on their website of other extreme weather cases that scientists did find to be caused by climate change, such as Hurricane Harvey's Record-Shattering Rainfall (all of these are very interesting to read). This is all part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project, which was started in 2014, and its goal is to provide climate change attribution results in real time when natural disasters are in the news, relief organizations are paying attention, and funds for relief might be easier to mobilize. This way, in the immediate aftermath of the natural disaster, citizens and government officials will be able to know if this was something that was caused by anthropogenic climate change or not.

BAMS yearly report on the impacts of climate
 change on extreme weather - Credit: AMS

Additionally, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) and the National Academy of Sciences each issue their own reports on the impacts of climate change on the past year's extreme weather events and how the science is doing behind all of these claims.

As this relatively new field still grows, the impacts that it will have on our society are still being realized. For instance, legal experts say that climate change attribution studies could play a large role in lawsuits against companies, industries, and governments.

But possibly the most important impact of this field of climate change attribution is that it will help capture the public's attention in ways that long-term projections for the future climate of our planet cannot. When most people hear the common climate change phrases that "2017 was one of the warmest years on record," that "sea levels are rising 3.4 mm per year," or that "we will limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius," people either don't really understand them and the ramifications of them or they just simply don't care. However, I believe, and many scientists and researchers think, that being able to attribute specific weather events to human-caused climate change will help to make the general public more aware of the plethora of impacts of climate change. People will realize that the impacts of climate change can already be felt right now; we don't have to wait another 20 years. When they see a hurricane or a tornado or a wildfire destroy a city (maybe even the city that they live in), and then that event gets attributed to anthropogenic climate change, people may realize that climate change is impacting them right now (and that something needs to be done to stop or slow down climate change).

I think that Myles Allen sums it up nicely by saying, "I think the public and many policymakers don't really take those 100-year forecasts very seriously. They are much more seriously interested in the question of what is happening now and why—which boils down to attribution." I'm very interested in following this emerging field of climate science to see where it goes and how much of an impact it has on our society in the future.