Lethal Heating: 12/28/17

28/12/2017

Climate Change Cases Predicted To Make A Legal Splash In 2018

Reuters - Sophie Hares | Sebastien Malo

NEW YORK / TEPIC, MEXICO: A clutch of high-profile legal cases over responsibility for the effects of climate change will be fought out in courtrooms next year as claims stack up against both governments and some of the world’s biggest oil and energy companies.
Lawsuits in the United States brought by young activists and several Californian cities are most likely to make waves, but legal action by a Peruvian farmer in Germany and Greenpeace in Norway could also cause ripples, said lawyers and academics.
“There is a trend towards more litigation around climate change, and probably the lack of political action in the United States may increase that trend,” said Sophie Marjanac, a London-based lawyer at non-profit environmental law group ClientEarth. “Where there’s an abdication of leadership on climate action, I think the courts will have a greater role to play," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Lawyers and campaigners are closely watching the looming legal battles they say could set the stage for fresh claims against major oil and industrial companies and pressure governments to ramp up action on climate change.

JULIANA V UNITED STATES
With US President Donald Trump and his cabinet members named as defendants, the Juliana v United States case brought by 21 young activists from Oregon is set to be one of the most closely followed in 2018.
In the federal case, scheduled for trial in February, the plaintiffs hope to establish that the government’s climate change policies have failed to protect their constitutional right to live in a habitable environment. The case remains locked in legal limbo, however, as the government tries to block it from proceeding.
Lawyers and academics say Juliana builds on the groundbreaking Urgenda case brought by hundreds of Dutch citizens in 2015, which saw the government ordered by a district court to accelerate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. However, that outcome is now being appealed, with a decision likely early next year.
Elsewhere, a January judgment is expected in a case brought by Greenpeace Nordic and environmental group Nature and Youth against Norway, which they claim has breached its pledge to combat climate change by granting oil and gas exploration rights.

HISTORY REPEATING?
Some lawyers and researchers say claims seeking specific damages from energy and industrial companies for actions that may have contributed to climate change could have a bigger impact than constitutional cases.
A successful ruling against a heavyweight corporate could potentially unleash a wave of similar claims, say case watchers, who reference long-running fights against tobacco, asbestos and pesticide manufacturers over harm to human health.
At least seven Californian cities and counties have brought lawsuits against major fossil fuel companies. San Francisco and Oakland are seeking billions of dollars to help protect against rising sea levels they blame on climate change. “Why should taxpayers and impacted communities alone bear the growing costs of climate impacts when fossil fuel companies have played an outsized role in making the problem worse?” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, after Santa Cruz city and county both filed lawsuits this month.
Tracy Hester, a lecturer at the University of Houston Law Center, said such claims could “redefine the rules of the game”. “They’re essentially not trying to bring a global claim that’s going to lock up all these issues in one court... they’re different in that they’re seeking damages,” he said.
Trump’s move to pull out of the Paris climate change accord and roll back environmental regulations means campaigners are increasingly resorting to litigation, as they did under former President George W. Bush, said case watchers.

MITIGATION NOT LITIGATION
While climate-related suits are not new, scientific advances could bolster plaintiffs as they try to pin responsibility for climate change on particular polluters.
A German court has agreed to hear evidence in a case brought by Peruvian farmer SaŴl Luciano Lliuya against RWE AG, asking the power giant to pay to reinforce a lake above his village dangerously swollen by glacial melt he says is caused by global warming the company contributed to. Yet, while there has been a steady rise in cases seeking to hold corporations and governments to account, few make it to court and legal action is largely limited to richer countries.
Despite a few exceptions—including a farmer who successfully sued Pakistan’s government in 2015—mitigating rather than litigating against climate change is favoured in poorer countries where legal success is less likely, according to Cosmin Corendea, a legal expert at the United Nations University in Bonn.
But the knock-on effect of rulings on companies and governments could eventually be felt around the world, including in countries already struggling with climate change impacts. “The decision of the court echoes,” said Corendea. “It’s important in climate change litigation to have this kind of momentum.”

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The 10 Most Important U.S. Climate Stories In 2017

Climate Central - Abbey Dufoe

Following a year of weather extremes, disasters and policy clashes, we asked our readers to help us pick out the most important climate stories from the U.S. in 2017. Here's what you said.

HURRICANES
This was a brutal year for hurricanes in the U.S. A trifecta of storms (Harvey, Irma and Maria) battered Florida, the Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico, causing deaths and widespread destruction, driving many from their homes. Climate change is fueling hurricanes by increasing their rainfall, wind speeds, and storm surges. Our World Weather Attribution team was among the groups of scientists that found climate change increased the amount of flooding rainfall from Harvey.

SEA-LEVEL RISE SCIENCE
Sea-level rise projections got worse for U.S. coastal communities. New research factoring in the projected effects of warming on Antarctic ice outlined new scenarios for Gulf Coast and East Coast cities, where more than 10 feet of sea-level rise is possible in places this century. Sea-level rise could be kept to less than two feet if we aggressively curb our greenhouse gas emissions, reducing risks and impacts.

U.S. GOVERNMENT
The Trump administration worked to reverse climate protections this year, seeking to replace the Clean Power Plan and eventually withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The administration has been removing the phrase “climate change” from government websites and it greenlighted construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. All the while, hundreds of thousands of people marched for science and the climate, and states and cities and nations abroad vowed to fight harder to slow global warming.

TESLA
2017 was the year of Tesla co-founder Elon Musk. From a battery factory in Nevada, to South Australia where his batteries are helping a wind farm provide reliable power, to a new energy grid in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Tesla has taken the lead in producing batteries for energy storage and to power electric cars. And it has developed new all-electric semi trucks and solar shingles!

WILDFIRES
California is battling its largest wildfire on record right now, but this wildfire season wasn’t just bad for the Golden State. Wildfires burned more than 9.5 million acres across the U.S., destroying neighborhoods and releasing dangerous smoke pollution. The Western wildfire season is 105 days longer than it was 45 years ago as climate change fuels more and bigger blazes.

THIRD HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD
2017 is likely to be the third-hottest year on record for the U.S., behind 2016 and 2012. This record heat is particularly astounding considering the absence of an El Niño, which usually boosts global temperatures. If the final data matches expectations, five of the 10 hottest years on record will have come since 2006.

SOCIAL INJUSTICE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
The homes of Americans were destroyed or threatened by extreme weather and rising seas, with the poor hit the hardest. Hundreds of thousands of people had to flee Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, relocating to Florida and other areas. Thousands more in New Jersey and Louisiana are hoping for federal help as they grapple with the ongoing effects of flooding linked to rising seas and climate change-fueled storms.

SOLAR ENERGY SHINES
Production of clean energy climbed as prices continued to come down. In March, 10 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from wind and solar, with help from Texas (America’s number 1 wind provider) and California (the largest solar producer). Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded in the summer that solar energy can now be as cheap as power from new coal plants in the U.S.

TRANSPORTATION POLLUTION
Your car is contributing to the biggest source of U.S. emissions. Transportation recently overtook electricity generation as the biggest source of greenhouse gases from the U.S., as coal power plants were retired and replaced with renewables and natural gas facilities.

HEAT WAVES
It may be winter right now, but don’t forget about extreme heat, which is the number one weather-related killer. Climate change made a February heat wave across much of the eastern U.S. three times more likely. In June, another heat wave in the Southwest prevented planes in Arizona from taking off. Danger days are surging from Power, Montana to New York City, and a dramatic rise in dangerous heat and humidity will continue in the summertime.

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Climate Change Is Going To Drive Thousands Of Refugees To Cooler Countries

Futurism - Lou Del Bello

By the end of the century, climate change may drive 660,000 additional asylum seekers per year toward Europe. Growing mass migration is only one of the social and environmental consequences of increasing temperatures.

Creative Commons

Climate Threat Multiplier
Climate change doesn’t just warm the air and melt glaciers. It acts as a “threat multiplier,” playing on the vulnerabilities of ecosystems and communities in ways that we are yet to fully understand.
Migration is a case in point: the way it’s changing, and is projected to change in the future, highlights how the impacts of climate change on one place spill over to other parts of the world. A new study in Science finds that as crops fail in agricultural regions of the world, more people will seek asylum in Europe in the coming decades. If the current warming trends were to continue, the research predicts that by 2100 Europe will receive around 660,000 extra applicants each year.
The authors analyzed the relation between localized changes in weather and the number of asylum applications by that country’s migrants between 2000 and 2014, discovering that when temperatures in the source country changed from a moderate average of 20° C (68° F), applications increased.
They modeled future migration patterns by comparing present trends against the global warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They found that under a pathway where the concentration of greenhouse gases does not significantly decrease, and global temperatures increase by 4.8° C (8.6° F), asylum applications are likely to rise by 188 percent by the end of the century.

Speaking with the BBC, lead author Wolfram Schlenker, of Columbia University, acknowledged the uncertainty that comes with such models: “We basically have to assume that the relationship we uncovered between 2000 and 2014 is going to remain unchanged for the next 80 years,” he said.
He explained that “there are many reasons for why it could go either way. We could start adapting to warmer temperatures, so the impacts would be less, but if you shock people every year with the same thing, it could be much worse. We could be under or overestimating the effects.”

Breaking Point
While our resilience as a species means we can adapt to a great deal of change — by upgrading our infrastructure or breeding heat-resistant crops, among other actions — we too eventually reach a breaking point. New research in Environmental Research Letters finds that by 2100, rising temperatures combined with increased humidity will make some areas of the world uninhabitable for humans.
Humans cool their bodies by sweating. As sweat evaporates off the skin, it disperses the excess heat; but in an air thick with moisture, this process is slowed down or halted altogether. Under these conditions, organs start to fail, eventually leading to death. Previous papers have identified this upper limit as a sustained temperature of 35° C (95° F).
The new study maps the areas of the planet most at risk to experience not only greater heat but also higher density of vapor in the air. Among the regions likely to be affected are the Amazon, western and central Africa, northern India, eastern China and the southeastern part of the United States.
“It’s not just about the heat, or the number of people. It’s about how many people are poor, how many are old, who has to go outside to work, who has air conditioning,” said study coauthor Alex de Sherbinin, of Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, in a statement. He said that even if the weather does not lead to a sudden collapse of the affected human systems, working in farms or in non air conditioned environments may lead to chronic health problems such as kidney disease — another case of climate change as a threat multiplier. It is likely that over time, many will eventually seek a new home elsewhere.
Although the science is not conclusive, there is evidence that climate change-induced drought might have exacerbated the social unrest that led to some of the most brutal conflicts of this century, including the Syrian war. The science of extreme weather attribution is developing fast, but there is still a long way to go before we can identify with certainty the role played by climate change in any extreme event.
What scientists now know is that what happens in one particular part of the planet will most likely trigger a cascade of consequences that will be felt far away. These are not only environmental consequences, but also social, and will increasingly involve the movement of large numbers of people. As mass migration is already causing tensions all over the world, leaders will have to find new strategies to manage the growing nomad communities of the future.

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