Climate Change and Causation: Joining Law and Climate Science on the Basis of Formal Logic
![handle is hein.journals/bufev27 and id is 59 raw text is:
CLIMATE CHANGE AND CAUSATION: JOINING LAW AND
CLIMATE SCIENCE ON THE BASIS OF FORMAL LOGIC
Petra Minneropt and Friederike Ottott
I. INTRODUCTION
A strict application of legal tests to find the cause of an event,
combined with a traditional emphasis on finding the necessary cause
in a counterfactual inquiry and a judicial demand of certainty, sets a
high threshold for making causal statements. Often, this threshold of
the but for test has been found to be over-exclusionary.1 In the
context of climate change, the emerging field of probabilistic event
attribution provides significant information to explain past events and
to forecast future events related to anthropogenic climate change.2
This field of climate science focuses on making robust statements
about the role of climate change, quantifying changes in the likeli-
hood of extreme weather events and attributing these to greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions or even certain emitters. For example, one
T Lecturer at the University of Dundee, School of Social Sciences, Law; Visiting
Lecturer, China University of Politics and Law, Beijing.
TT Associate Professor and Acting Director of the Environmental Change
Institute, University of Oxford.
1 Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services [2002] UKHL 22, [2003] 1 AC (HL) 32
(On occasions the threshold 'but for' test of causal connection may be over-
exclusionary. Where justice so requires, the threshold itself may be lowered. In
this way the scope of a defendant's liability may be extended.); see also March v
Stramare (E & MH) (1991) 171 CLR 506 ([there are] convincing reasons
precluding its adoption as a comprehensive definitive test of causation in the law
of negligence.).
2 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change art. 1(2), Mar. 21,
1994, 1771 U.N.T.S. 107 (defining climate change as a change of climate which
is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of
the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability
observed over comparable time periods.); UNITED NATIONS INTERGOVERNMEN-
TAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE, SPECIAL REPORT: GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.50C
544 (2018) (referring to climate change as a change in the state of the climate that
can be identified ... by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties
and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/bufev27&div=5&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Climate Change and Causation: Joining Law and Climate Science on the Basis of Formal Logic
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most