Why We Need To Start Assigning Blame for Climate Change

It’s time for a new age of accountability

Image licensed from Shutterstock

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Few ordinary people anticipated that the forecasted rainfall in Spain’s Valencia region would escalate into one of the most devastating flash floods in Europe’s modern era. But, unfortunately, it did.

As of now, the death toll stands at 214 and is likely to climb higher as many remain missing, displaced, or are critically injured. Those who survived described the event as ‘a nightmare’ and ‘worse’ than the ‘tsunami movie.’

The most tragic part? People were only properly warned as it was happening. In Paiporta, where at least 62 lost their lives, the official alerts came after the worst had already happened. But warnings alone, even if timely, aren’t enough either. Most recently, we saw this happen in the US, where two powerful hurricanes, Helene and Milton, took hundreds of lives and inflicted billions of dollars in damages. Some people didn’t evacuate because they couldn’t. But some because they believed they could handle the crisis.

It seems like a considerable number of people here, in the Global North, still haven’t grasped the severity of the climate crisis, viewing it as a remote danger impacting only poor people somewhere far, far away. Meanwhile, our government officials and, to some extent, the media are reluctant to even link these catastrophic events to climate change and the activities driving it. Even the hosts of the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference, Azerbaijan, have recently urged participating countries not to ‘waste time’ assigning blame over global warming. (Though, to be fair, what else could we expect from a country whose economy depends heavily on fossil fuels? It’s like relying on a wolf to keep count of the sheep.)

Still, with so many lives lost and so much destruction, not to mention our future hanging in the balance, it should be a no-brainer that we must ‘waste time’ to blame climate change for what’s happening and then hold those most responsible to account, shouldn’t it?

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For a while, it was difficult to isolate any one catastrophe and confidently attribute it to climate change. In fact, it wasn’t until two decades ago, in 2004, that climate researchers Myles Allen, Dáithí Stone and Peter Stott conducted the very first study establishing a connection between an extreme weather event — the 2003 European heatwave that resulted in at least 30,000 deaths — and our changing climate.

Luckily, this was merely the beginning of a rapidly developing area of climate science called ‘extreme event attribution.’ I first came across it while reading the latest book by investigative journalist Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First. In a nutshell, attribution studies connect the dots between individual weather events and climate change, sometimes even quantifying the resulting economic damages. In some cases, research groups can now complete their analyses almost immediately after an event. Or even while it’s still happening.

A decade ago, Friederike Otto and Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, two prominent figures in climate science, co-founded World Weather Attribution, a project aimed at uniting scientists committed to doing this work. Not all of the events they investigate are caused or amplified by climate change — as perhaps could be expected — but a significant number are. They found, for instance, that the deadly heatwaves across Europe, North America, and China in July 2023 would have been ‘extremely rare or even impossible’ without human-caused global warming. They also reported that the series of intense storms in Western Europe during the 2023–2024 autumn and winter seasons were about 20% heavier precisely due to climate change.

Most recently, the researchers conducted a quick analysis of the extreme downpours in Spain and found that the climate emergency made them roughly 12% more intense and twice as likely to occur.

These insights are crucial to understanding how climate change impacts weather. It essentially alters the events we may once have considered ‘normal’ or seasonal — floods, storms, heatwaves, drought, wildfires, etc. — and makes them more destructive, more frequent, and, ultimately, deadlier.

As Goodell puts it in The Heat Will Kill You First:

Extreme event attribution is a tool that can profoundly reshape public conversation about the climate crisis. Instead of framing the crisis as a future event, something that will impact our children and grandchildren and generations to come, as it often is, Otto’s work is proof that it is happening now, in real time. Among other things, real-time attribution will likely turn out to be a vital tool in court, opening the door to legal remedies for Allen’s original question of legal liability: Who is responsible for trashing the climate, and how can they be held responsible?

This is yet another important aspect of this work. Attribution studies do more than just reveal climate change’s impact on weather — they can help us trace extreme events back to specific human actions and the real culprits behind them.

Because what we’re seeing worldwide today is not the wrath of vengeful gods delivering floods, wildfires, and droughts as punishment for our disobedience and love for bad reality TV, or the outcome of government-controlled ‘weather manipulation technology’, as some American politicians have recently claimed.

It’s the byproduct of unchecked human activities by entities and individuals who can — and should — be held liable for it.

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It was actually a woman, an American scientist Eunice Foote, who was the first to warn about the dangers of excessive levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and explain how it could raise global temperatures. And she did so in 1856, decades before cars or coal-fired power plants even existed. (And several years before John Tyndall, an Irish scientist, demonstrated the same effect and became known as the man who ‘discovered’ it. Yet another example of the Matilda Effect.)

Of course, we failed to listen to Foote’s early warning.

Or to the many other scientists who came after her, like Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller, who in 1959 warned the oil industry that its emissions would bring devastating consequences for our world.

But here’s another thing some people might not realise: many — if not all — of the biggest fossil fuel offenders have long understood the damage their actions were causing as well. In 1982, an official at the oil corporation Exxon issued an internal report highlighting that the global warming tied to fossil fuel emissions could ‘cause flooding on much of the US East Coast.’ Today, it’s estimated that this company alone has contributed roughly 3.4–3.7% of global temperature rise since 1882, 2% of sea level rise, and 4.8–5.5% of total carbon dioxide concentrations above pre-industrial levels.

In 1988, another oil giant, Shell, released a confidential report titled The Greenhouse Effect, which similarly acknowledged fossil fuels’ potential impact, including rising sea levels, ocean acidification, and human migration. However, the report also quantified the company’s own contribution to global emissions, warning that ‘by the time global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilise the situation.’

A few other industry giants, including trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute, initially recognised similar risks, too, only to later try to downplay them. Most importantly, though, they maintained and even expanded their activities, fully aware that they were harming the environment and risking numerous lives.

This is also the angle some advocacy groups and prosecutors take now. Just last month, Public Citizen and the prosecutors network Fair and Just Prosecution published a prosecution memorandum detailing the big oil companies’ deliberate role in fueling extreme weather events. It could potentially lead to ‘reckless endangerment’ charges in New York State — a charge for conduct creating a substantial risk of causing harm or death — and open the door for individual oil executives to face prosecution as well.

Across the US, dozens of other cities and states have already filed similar civil lawsuits against major oil companies. Worldwide, a total of 2,666 climate litigation cases have been filed in recent years by both individuals and NGOs looking to hold companies and governments accountable for their contributions to the ongoing crisis. But although there have been a handful of landmark judgements, most claimants struggle to get positive results. For now. Hopefully, climate laws will only become clearer and stronger — the upcoming hearing of The International Court of Justice could help with that — and one day, we might be able to hold those responsible for environmental and societal harm fully liable.

Just imagine if we could do that.

If, say, a company like ExxonMobile could be sued for 3 or 5% of the damages from every single climate-fueled disaster.

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A few months ago, Nate Loewentheil, founder of a venture capital firm that invests in clean energy, proposed in a New York Times guest essay that we should build a ‘climate wall of shame’ that would list the names of all the public figures who actively denied the existence of climate change and stood in the way of action addressing it.

Well, I’d say we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just some individuals — all the corporations and political groups that have either massively contributed to the acceleration of the climate crisis or tried to mislead the public about it belong there, too. We also shouldn’t disregard the role of our social, economic, and political systems in all of this. If it weren’t for the neoliberal capitalist ethos that incentivised greed and growth for the sake of growth, alongside the patriarchal glorification of ruthless dominance over nature — not coincidentally often symbolised as Mother Nature — we wouldn’t be where we are today. Or if the voices of those who tried to warn us — like Eunice Foote — were heard and appreciated decades ago.

I often wonder how future generations will judge our actions — and inactions — when it comes to the climate crisis. They’ll likely think we were utterly deranged to prioritise short-term profits over lasting survival.

As a young millennial, I already feel this way, actually.

The world my generation inherited is one already weighed down by the consequences of gross past and present negligence, and where climate crises are no longer some distant threats but present realities, even if not everyone seems fully aware of them. It’s daunting to think that the US, the self-proclaimed ‘leader’ of the world, has now elected a president who vowed to deregulate the oil and gas industry, increase the production of fossil fuels and scrap climate protections, and over half the country is cheering on him.

But the science couldn’t be clearer on this. As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, we will witness extreme weather events increasingly unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And these events, in turn, are set to worsen all kinds of existing inequalities because climate change essentially acts as a massive threat multiplier — it adds weight to every issue we already face, especially for the most vulnerable.

This is why connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, as attribution studies do, is so crucial. People everywhere have the right to know that the flood, drought, or any other disaster coming to their region won’t be like any other event before — it will be worse. Much, much worse. But accountability is also essential here. We might be all in this together, but we’re not all equally responsible. In the past six years, just 57 companies — mostly based in wealthy, industrialised nations — have produced 80% of global emissions, while countries in the Global North are collectively responsible for a whopping 92% of all emissions.

Without proper accountability, we can’t hope to reshape these harmful corporate and individual behaviours or drive genuine commitment to change. Nor we can hope to achieve justice for those already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.

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I was in Valencia just a few months ago. It’s a lovely city, with a stunning coastline and an enormous green space, Turia Park, running through its centre. But because the region gets very little rain, Valencia and its surrounding area have relied on a network of irrigation canals for over 1000 years, which has already led to flooding a few times.

Only the flood risks Valencians now face — and will continue to face in coming years — are on an entirely different scale.

Pointing this out and assigning blame isn’t a ‘waste of time.’

It’s one of the most impactful ways to spend the time we’re running out of.

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