Science & technology | The blame game

The Philippines wants big companies to accept responsibility for a devastating typhoon

Did the big emitters help to cause extreme weather?

Picking up the pieces

“I AGONISE WAITING for the word for the fate of my very own relatives… I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing from the storm.” With these words, Yeb Sano, the Philippines’ representative to the 2013 UN climate summit in Warsaw, Poland, became the unexpected figurehead of those talks. Three days earlier, on November 8th, supertyphoon Haiyan had barrelled into his country, cutting off all communication with the outside world. More than 6,000 people died in the storm.

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Mr Sano’s emotional appeal to his fellow delegates drew a direct line between climate change and Haiyan. Whether the damage caused by extreme weather events can be linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases is one of the hottest topics in climate science. And that debate leads directly to another: if this link can be established, who bears the responsibility?

Both of these questions are at the centre of an inquiry by the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, whose latest hearings took place in London earlier this month. It is the first time a human-rights commission has heard evidence on whether large emitters violate basic human rights by causing climate change.

Addressing the hearing from Geneva, Benjamin Schachter, who acts for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on such matters, said that the impacts of climate change “directly and indirectly threaten the full and effective enjoyment of a range of human rights, including the rights to life, water and sanitation, food, health, housing, self-determination and development.” Certain studies support this. Felix Pretis of the University of Oxford has shown that even 1.5°C of warming (relative to pre-industrial times) will reduce economic growth in some regions, and that the tropics will feel this impact more than other parts of the world. Some studies predict that a rise in the number of heat-related deaths in many parts of the world, South-East Asia among them, will outweigh any reduction in the number of cold-related deaths.

Storm force

And then there are the impacts of extreme weather events, which have the potential to kill thousands. Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, who has led research into whether specific weather events can be attributed to broader climate trends and who testified at the hearings, cited a 2015 study led by Izuru Takayabu of Japan’s Meteorological Research Institute. This used climate models to simulate supertyphoon Haiyan with and without human greenhouse-gas emissions. The former accurately reproduced the actual events, in terms of the weather patterns, wind speeds and storm surge. By comparison, in 15 out of 16 simulations without industrial emissions, the storm was weaker.

The study suggests human emissions are likely to have increased wind speeds, which resulted in a storm surge that was 20% higher than it might have been in the absence of climate change. It was this storm surge that proved particularly devastating. “It’s not true that but for human influence this event could never have happened,” Dr Allen told the hearings. “But through this study you can see that human influence has exacerbated [the events].”

Conclusions such as these are relatively familiar. Where the hearings become more unusual is in investigating the link between the damage caused by climate change and the behaviour of large industrial companies. This is predicated on recent efforts to trace greenhouse-gas emissions back to large corporate and state-owned producers of fossil fuels and cement, dubbed the “carbon majors”. The latest analysis by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), a non-governmental organisation that works with companies, cities and states to measure their environmental impact, published in 2017, found that 100 of them had produced just over half of emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

According to Dr Allen, who also gave evidence in a case earlier this year in which seven Californian cities and counties sued big oil and gas firms for damage resulting from rising sea levels, one issue is whether the companies could have taken another course of action. In other words, did they know the damage that their activities were causing and, given the need for energy to run modern societies, what options were available at the time to mitigate emissions?

Both questions are hotly contested. Last year, for example, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University published a study of documents from Exxon and Mobil, which merged in 1999 to form ExxonMobil. Their review concluded that more than 80% of peer-reviewed studies written by the firm’s own researchers acknowledged that climate change was happening. ExxonMobil described the study, which accused the company of misleading the public about climate science, as “inaccurate and preposterous”.

As for whether companies could have taken action to avoid their emissions at a time when oil, coal and natural gas were the primary sources of energy, Dr Allen estimates that had emissions ceased entirely in the 1980s, roughly 40% of the warming being seen today relative to pre-industrial times could have been averted. That presupposes that alternative sources of energy were available. They were not.

Some, including Dr Allen, have argued that fossil-fuel companies could have captured CO{-2} and stored it before it reached the atmosphere. The processes for stripping CO{-2} from a mixture of gases and then pumping it underground were known about well before the 1980s. Some companies used them to enhance oil recovery. But it was not until the 1990s that the first carbon capture and storage (CCS) project for the explicit use of avoiding CO{-2} emissions took off. That was in the North Sea, in response to a Norwegian carbon tax. “In my opinion, oil companies could have had carbon capture and storage operating in the 1980s, easily,” says Stuart Hazeldine of the University of Edinburgh, who leads a research initiative on CCS. But that is not quite the same question as whether the companies should have done so, given their responsibilities to their investors and the absence of regulatory pressure.

The Philippine hearings will come to a close in December in Manila. The commission does not have the power to compensate victims of typhoons or to sanction emitters of carbon dioxide. According to Roberto Cadiz, one of the commissioners, that isn’t even the point. His wish is to open a dialogue about possible solutions to climate change that includes the industrial emitters. So far, however, only one side of the story is being heard. The emitters have declined to participate.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "The blame game"

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