Harvey’s aftermath could see climate lawsuits

After disasters in the United States like Hurricane Harvey, lawyers get busy with lawsuits seeking to apportion blame and claim damages. This time, a new kind of litigation is likely to appear, they say — relating to climate change. That’s because rapid scientific advances are making it possible to precisely measure what portion of a disaster such as Harvey can be attributed to the planet’s changing climate.

Such evidence could well feed negligence claims as some victims of the hurricane may seek to fault authorities or companies for failing to plan for such events, according to several lawyers interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“As extreme weather events and related damages and other impacts increase in severity... courts will increasingly be called upon to seek redress for damages suffered,” said Lindene Patton, a risk-management lawyer with the Earth & Water Group, a Washington-based specialty law firm.

Hurricane Harvey last week brought unprecedented destruction as incessant rain and winds of up to 130 miles per hour caused catastrophic damage, making large swathes of Texas and Louisiana uninhabitable for weeks or months.

Images of soldiers and police in helicopters and special high-water trucks rescuing Texans stranded by floodwater brought back painful memories of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana a decade ago.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a contention by scientists and the UN’s World Meteorological Organization that the historic rainfall from Harvey was linked to climate change.

Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events. This time around, scientists are increasingly confident they can come up with answers.

Their tool is a new science, known as event attribution, which determines what proportion of a specific extreme weather event can be blamed on climate change.

It has been making fast progress over the last five years in part due to dramatic advances in computing power, said Daniel Horton, a climate scientist at Northwestern University in Illinois who has worked on climate change attribution studies.

“The development of event attribution is a big deal,” he said in a phone interview.

Last year, scientists from organisations around the world working with World Weather Attribution (WWA), a programme coordinated by US-based research and journalism organisation Climate Central, established that torrential rain that had flooded Louisiana in the summer had been made about twice as likely due to man-made climate change.

Now, a group of scientists at Oxford University in England say they plan to measure how much of Hurricane Harvey’s intensity bears the fingerprints of climate change.

“There is such a high interest in Harvey,” said Friederike Otto, the lead scientist at Oxford for WWA.

The process involves a network of computers performing thousands of possible weather scenario runs after data from sea surface to atmospheric concentration of planet-warming greenhouse gases has been entered in a model, she said by phone.

If other WWA partners prioritise the project in their own laboratories, it could take between a few months to a year to reach a conclusion, said Otto, who is also the deputy director of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute.

The prospect of attributing portions of extreme weather events to climate change has lawyers suggesting that a new kind of litigation is emerging. For Patton, the level of certainty reached in attribution analyses means extreme weather victims will increasingly be able to seek compensation on grounds that damages they sustained were foreseeable.

—