As deadly wildfires ravaged the Los Angeles area on January 9, destroying thousands of buildings and displacing tens of thousands of residents, Columbia University hosted the first day of a conference on attribution science and climate law. The conference, co-sponsored by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Columbia Climate Institute, brought together scientists, legal experts, policymakers and advocates to explore how advances in climate attribution science impact litigation, policy and governance.
Attribution science is a rapidly growing field that seeks to explain how human-induced climate change exacerbates and affects the frequency of extreme weather events. The devastation in California is yet another reminder of the urgency of these discussions and the urgent need for science-driven legal and policy solutions to the climate crisis.
Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabine Center, kicked off the meeting by recalling the event’s origins. “The seeds for this collaboration were planted eight years ago after Donald Trump was elected,” he said. Berg recounts how his discussions with climate scientist Professor Radley Horton and legal scholar Jessica Wentz inspired an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the potential of attribution science to inform legal frameworks.
Berg highlighted current pressing issues, characterized by environmental regression and the accelerating impacts of climate change around the world. “This area has gone from niche to necessity,” he said, citing the increasing reliance of courts (from international courts to national jurisdictions) on attribution research and its critical role in corporate liability.
Understand the science of attribution
Rather than identifying cause and effect, the science of attribution raises key questions about the extent to which climate change magnifies the severity or likelihood of events such as hurricanes, heat waves and droughts. For example, one of the first major studies in attribution science analyzed the 2003 European heat wave, linking human activity to an increased likelihood of damaging events.
By comparing observed weather patterns with simulations of a world unaffected by anthropogenic warming, scientists are uncovering the fingerprints of climate change with increasing precision. While natural variability continues to play a role, attribution science highlights how the climate crisis is exacerbating once-rare events, making them more frequent and damaging.
Horton, a professor at the Columbia Climate Institute, introduced the morning session, focusing on the legacy and contributions of Ben Sant and Gavin Schmidt, whose work was groundbreaking in detecting and attributing human impacts on the climate system.
Santer pioneered the field of climate “fingerprinting,” tracing the evolution of attribution science from the cautious conclusions of the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 1990 to today’s clear evidence linking human activity to climate change .
“By 2013, we moved from ‘very likely’ to ‘extremely likely’ and now to ‘definitely’—human fingerprints are all over the climate system,” Santer told the audience.
Meanwhile, Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, provided a broader perspective on attribution science. “Detection identifies changes; attribution explains cause and effect,” he said. He explains how consistency between models, data and physics among variables such as temperature, precipitation and sea level rise allows scientists to more accurately attribute specific effects of human activity.
Provide legal background
The afternoon session explored the science of attribution in a legal context and how it can be used to ensure justice and accountability for climate impacts. In a panel on Government Duties and Fundamental Rights moderated by the Sabine Center’s Maria Antonia Tigre, speakers shared global perspectives on climate litigation.
Andrea Rogers of Our Children’s Trust highlights the case for youth-led action in the United States. In Montana, youth plaintiffs successfully argued that the state’s failure to address climate change violated their constitutional rights.
“Courts have often held that climate change is too big to solve, but in Montana the judiciary affirmed that every ton of emissions matters,” Rogers said.
Sharing insights from Europe and South Korea, Denis van Berkel, legal counsel at the Urgenda Foundation, said courts are increasingly asking governments to quantify their “fair share” of reductions under frameworks such as the Paris Agreement. exhaust volume.
Climate justice advocate Pooven Moodley discusses the important interplay between indigenous wisdom and scientific evidence, describing the landmark case in Ecuador where the Sarayaku people successfully argued for forest recognition as ” “living entity”.
“[Legal cases] We start to combine human rights and the environment,” he said. “This is the next frontier and many of us are involved in activities that push the boundaries of the law even further.”
Jason Smerdon, professor of climatology at Columbia Climatology Institute, talks about the challenges of attributing droughts to human activity, especially in areas like the American Southwest. He highlighted the difficulty of defining drought in a world where baseline conditions are changing due to long-term aridification trends.
“The signal in the Southwest is more of an aridification signal than a discrete event. We will have wet and dry periods, but the overall trajectory is expected to become drier over time. When the baseline changes, How we describe these discrete events is a challenge both scientifically and legally,” Smerdon said.
The combination of science and law
The second day of the conference highlighted the challenges of integrating scientific evidence into legal frameworks.
Berg opened the session by raising the issue of the scientific and legal challenges of incorporating attribution science into courtrooms, noting the difficulty of finding research directly relevant to litigation.
In response, political scientist Nauê Bernardo Pinheiro de Azevedo highlighted two of Brazil’s main obstacles: misinformation and the country’s vague legal framework.
Aisha Saad, associate professor at Georgetown University Law Center, also emphasized the role of judicial education in bridging the gap.
“The politicization of climate science has always been predicated on biases and assumptions in popular perception. While unavoidable, it can be mitigated. The IPCC report, for example, provides an edge in the climate context, providing credibility and depth,” she said.
Attributing impacts to specific emitters
Christopher Callahan, Earth systems scientist and postdoc at Stanford University, discusses the challenges of linking specific fossil fuel emission sources to measurable climate damage, citing examples such as the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave that caused State Multnomah County files lawsuit against major fossil fuel companies.
“The heat dome was a direct and foreseeable result of the defendants’ conduct,” Callahan said, emphasizing the chain of causation between emissions and economic harm. His work utilizes reduced complexity climate models and model scaling to demonstrate how local hazards such as extreme heat are directly related to global temperature changes driven by specific emission sources.
“In the tropics, the damage associated with specific changes in extreme heat is greater. The hotter it is, the greater the damage caused by specific heat waves.
His analysis revealed the disproportionate burden borne by vulnerable regions, where losses exceeded 1% of GDP over 30 years. Furthermore, he warns that the climate community is ignoring many impacts.
“We are only focusing on the extreme heat at work and not the catastrophic flooding, hurricanes and wildfires in Los Angeles this week. Any non-market effects are not factored into our GDP growth-focused calculations.
“We no longer need to debate whether a link can be made between a specific emission source and certain effects,” added Marshall Burke, an associate professor at Stanford University. However, he said, determining the scale of these effects remains complex and requires a combination of powerful Statistical models and researcher choice.
Both Callahan and Burke emphasized the long-term nature of climate impacts, with Burke warning: “For a ton emitted in 1990, only about one-fifth of the damage occurred in 2020. Four-fifths of the damage Still ahead of us.
In a final reflection session, panelists called for collective action and highlighted synergies between different forms of knowledge. “Indigenous knowledge combined with attribution science can create powerful legal narratives that challenge corporate and government inaction,” Moodley said.
Vishal (Vishy) Manve is a recent graduate of the Columbia Climate Institute and works at the intersection of policy, sustainability and climate communications.
