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Smoke from massive wildfires in Canada engulfed the New York City skyline, reducing visibility and casting an orange haze over the city. Selcuk Acar\/Anadolu\/Getty<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n Deadly heatwaves in May smashed records in the UK, France, Spain<\/a>, and parts of North Africa<\/a>. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh saw April temperatures soar to 113-122 degrees Fahrenheit<\/a>. A late spring heat dome in the US marked the hottest March on record<\/a>, and in a 1,000-year July storm, parts of Texas were left reeling after flash flooding killed multiple people<\/a>. That same month, wildfires in Canada turned skies orange and exposed over 106 million North Americans<\/a> to hazardous air quality. In the US alone<\/a>, the catastrophic events of 2026 have killed approximately 17,377 people and cost over $3.2 trillion.<\/p>\n In terms of the sheer scope of heat and extreme weather, 2026 has been a year of climate disasters.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry\u2014by far the greatest contributor<\/a> to global climate change, accounting for approximately 68 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions\u2014is holding firm. In response to a growing tide of litigation seeking to hold it at least partly responsible for the climate crisis, oil and gas groups and their networks<\/a> have accelerated their defenses, fighting<\/a> with their all-too-familiar playbook of discrediting the science linking<\/a> emissions to extreme weather events such as heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, heavy storms and hurricanes. With the help of the Trump administration and industry partners, oil and gas groups have lodged disinformation campaigns targeting specific studies<\/a> and even individual climate scientists<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHow can you show approximate causation in injury?\u201d asked Michael Buschbacher, a partner at Boyden Gray PLLC \u00a0during an October 2025 Federalist Society panel<\/a> on climate litigation. He has supported industry opposition to renewable energy mandates<\/a>, state-level climate liability lawsuits<\/a>, and SEC climate risk disclosure mandates<\/a>. \u201cBad weather is of course not new. So how do you show that emissions from company X cause injury Y from a hurricane or whatever?\u201d He then wondered about the consequences of the suits should they be successful. \u201cWill they reduce global carbon emissions, or will it just be a payday for contingency fee lawyers and opportunity for virtue signaling from progressive politicians?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no level of emissions that does not contribute to changing climate impacts. Every ton matters.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A new peer-reviewed study<\/a> published earlier this month in Earth\u2019s Future suggests that it is possible to demonstrate that \u201cemissions from company X cause injury Y.\u201d It also could potentially provide evidence so industry could be forced to answer for climate impacts. The new methodological framework has, for the first time, drawn a straight line from single corporate emitters like Exxon or Chevron, or even whole countries like the United States, to specific heatwaves and areas of extreme rainfall. By running over 150 simulations across 8 different climate models, the study\u2019s author, Christopher Callahan<\/a>\u2014an Earth systems scientist and assistant professor at Indiana University\u2019s O\u2019Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs\u2014built a statistical model to figure out the relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the odds of extreme heat or rain. He then used real emissions data to calculate the extent to which specific fossil fuel emitters increased the risk of extreme weather.<\/p>\n The study\u2019s results are clear: \u201cThere is no level of emissions that does not contribute to changing climate impacts,\u201d Callahan told me. \u201cEvery ton matters.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The implications of this for an industry struggling to contend with the potential consequences of its actions could be dire. \u201cClimate attribution research seeks to connect greenhouse-gas emissions to specific climate impacts, and increasingly, to particular industries or companies,\u201d wrote Kyle Kohli in Energy In Depth<\/a>, a blog associated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America. \u201cThat makes it especially valuable to climate plaintiffs attempting to overcome one of their biggest legal obstacles: proving causation.\u201d<\/p>\n These new findings are part of a growing field of climate science known as source attribution, which examines \u201cwhether we can link an individual extreme climate event to any individual emitter who contributed to that event,\u201d Callahan said. By looking at global extreme heat and at specific events like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave and Pakistan\u2019s extreme rainfall in 2022, for instance, Callahan used climate models to determine what might have taken place without the carbon dioxide released by certain fossil fuel companies and countries. His conclusions were stark: fossil fuel firms increased the likelihood of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave by 31 percent and extreme rainfall in Pakistan in 2022 by 7 percent.<\/p>\n In the past, source attribution studies linked several climate models that were, in Callahan\u2019s words, \u201ccomputationally difficult,\u201d sometimes taking months to run and requiring vast amounts of computing capacity. \u201cThe approach here is attempting to be particularly simple and particularly lightweight,\u201d Callahan explained. Now, by knowing the proportions between climate change and cumulative emissions, he said, researchers can calculate changes to extreme events based on historical emissions. \u201cWhat this science tells us is that there is a direct relationship between how much an entity emits and\u2026[the] extreme events that alter people\u2019s lives.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Source attribution is a subset of the larger, well-established attribution science<\/a> field, which has helped us understand how much climate change is shaping our world by comparing the climate conditions we face today to a hypothetical Earth devoid of human influence. In 2004, for example, a team of scientists found that human influence doubled<\/a> the risk of the 2003 heatwave that had swept Europe. But source attribution helps answer more granular questions about what specific actions are having what specific effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n For over half a century<\/a>, industry has known of and misled the public about its role in human-caused planetary warming, deliberately sowing doubt<\/a> to undermine scientific evidence. Now oil and gas groups are facing a wave of lawsuits. Over 40 cases in the United States filed by states, municipalities, and tribal governments have been brought against Big Oil since 2017<\/a>. At least five of these lawsuits have entered the discovery phase\u2014marking a turning point that could force oil executives to hand over key documents and testify under oath on what they knew about climate change and when they knew it. Grist<\/a> reported in July that the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil lobbying group, stated that one of its top priorities for 2026 was to \u201cstop extreme climate liability policy.\u201d<\/p>\n Callahan has no illusions about how his research fits into the current legal and political climate, describing it as \u201ca pretty live question in conversations around climate liability lawsuits.\u201d But how will attribution science play out in a legal context? Some experts<\/a> argue that it will \u201c\u2018[rock] the courtroom,\u201d while others<\/a> say key decisions will most likely hinge on legal issues rather than the science itself. \u201cOur responsibility as scientists,\u201d Callahan said, \u201cis not to never do science that is relevant to the political conversation. We should follow the results of our questions wherever they lead and report them regardless of what they are.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In recent years, industry has cast doubt on plaintiffs\u2019 use of attribution science in the courtroom. \u201cThey have an attribution theory, but that\u2019s just a crude measure of how much oil and gas companies sold,\u201d said Chevron lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., in a 2024 litigation webinar<\/a>, \u201cbut that doesn\u2019t tell you anything about anything.\u201d A recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report<\/a> has inflamed that debate. A June investigation by Politico revealed a secret opposition campaign<\/a> waged by oil industry allies to discredit the report\u2019s findings. The campaign came just months after Republican attorneys general successfully forced the removal of a NAS climate sciences chapter from a reference manual for federal judges, which the Academies officially pulled earlier this month<\/a>. A NASA scientist who asked to remain anonymous called the academy\u2019s decision to pull the chapter \u201cpathetic. If they cannot stand up for science, then who is going to?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But the scientific consensus on the NAS extreme weather report is aligned. \u201cI thought it was a great report,\u201d said Michael Mann<\/a>, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist. \u201cIt didn\u2019t pull any punches.\u201d Others, like Kristina Dahl<\/a>, a climate scientist and vice president for science at Climate Central, said the report was \u201ca really excellent roundup of the state of the science.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Reports like the Academies\u2019 extreme weather event attribution study and Callahan\u2019s research on emitter impacts help illustrate how far the field has come. \u201cWe all live in a world that\u2019s been shaped by a fossil fuel-based economy,\u201d Dahl said, \u201cso I think studies like this can shed light on why we are where we are, and why we have the range of choices available to us that we have, and can also give us a sense of how different the world would be.\u201d<\/p>\n Kim Cobb<\/a>, an expert in observational climate studies at Brown University, says we\u2019re gaining something \u201cextremely valuable\u201d in Callahan\u2019s study. \u201cThis would have been a pipe dream 10 years ago; it simply wouldn\u2019t be possible.\u201d For Jim Hurrell<\/a>, the chair of the Academies\u2019 NAS report and a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, there\u2019s lots of room for advancement in the field, and that\u2019s what excites him most. \u201cThis science could be really useful to help communities plan for the future,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Separating the future of attribution science from the politicization attached to it has proved to be impossible recently. The Trump administration\u2019s cuts to funding for scientific programs, monitoring systems, and scientific personnel, alongside ongoing industry attacks, will continue to affect the field\u2019s advancement. In the end, Yann Quilcaille<\/a>, a climate scientist from ETH Z\u00fcrich noted, \u201cWe need to act quickly, and we have the solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Smoke from massive wildfires in Canada engulfed the New York City skyline, reducing visibility and casting an orange…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-603622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}