{"id":377995,"date":"2025-05-12T14:31:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T12:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=377995"},"modified":"2025-05-12T14:31:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T12:31:17","slug":"nature-paper-claims-to-pin-liability-for-climate-damages-on-oil-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=377995","title":{"rendered":"Nature Paper Claims to Pin Liability for \u2018Climate Damages\u2019 on Oil Companies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From The Daily Sceptic<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by\u00a0Tilak Doshi<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The drumbeat of climate litigation has grown louder in recent years, fuelled by activists and dubious science. In this crusade against major oil and gas companies, \u2018attribution science\u2019 has been a fast-growing field of climate research which is explicitly meant to serve legal ends. According to the World Weather Attribution<\/a> initiative, \u201cUnlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was originally suggested with the courts in mind<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to \u2018Carbon Majors and the Scientific Case for Climate Liability<\/a>\u2018, a paper published in Nature<\/em> last month, it is now possible to quantify the climate damages caused by each of the world\u2019s biggest oil and gas companies. Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin, co-authors of the peer-reviewed paper, argue that \u201cthe scientific case for climate liability is closed\u201d. In their paper, they claim to link oil and gas companies\u2019 CO2<\/sub> emissions to specific weather events and trillions in economic damages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This audacious attempt to pin tort liability on oil and gas giants like Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil rests on shaky economic and scientific grounds and ignores the immense benefits of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the high stakes in the litigious turn of climate change alarmists, this paper\u2019s assertions, flawed assumptions and the embedded activist machinery deserve a thorough debunking<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018Carbon Majors\u2019 Paper: A Blueprint for Climate Litigation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The central assertion of Callahan and Jenkin is that advancements in climate attribution science enable courts to hold fossil fuel companies liable for damages caused by global warming. The authors propose an \u201cend-to-end\u201d attribution framework that links emissions from major oil and gas firms to specific extreme weather events \u2014 such as heatwaves, floods and droughts \u2014 and quantifies resulting economic losses. Using \u201cscope 1\u201d (direct emissions from producing oil and gas) and \u201cscope 3\u201d (consumer emissions from combustion of fuels) data, peer-reviewed climate models (e.g. CMIP6<\/a>) and econometric methods, the paper estimates, for instance, that Chevron\u2019s emissions from 1991 to 2020 caused $791 billion to $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The framework relies on three key steps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n