This is an advance for attribution science, which aims to show how much of a natural disaster is attributed to climate change.
In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.
Why make something legal and build your entire society around it and then turn around and retroactively blame them for providing legal goods? Seems insane to me.
Here we are now talking about a specific example of someone doing some math and writing an article about it. This is not a "recent advance", it's a retrospective based on warming that has already happened.
Someone 60 years ago could have (and did!) predict "warming will cause stronger hurricanes, and here's about how much stronger they might get". This article is "here are some hurricanes that happened recently, and here is specifically how much stronger they were than they would have been, due to the warming over the last 60 years"
Doesn't the presence of legal penalties for an action make it even more desirable (for the perpetrator, from a purely practical point of view) to bury information about those actions and cover them up?
Remember: as long as you trust your government, trust the corporations, trust all the information you hear, especially from large and well-known institutions, you'll always be fine.
Never slow down, never stop to think, just keep buying, keep consuming, keep tuning into the same media sources, and NEVER EVER dare to question social consensus!
While I understand the sentiment, blaming ~everyone~ provides no value here, while blaming the institutions who actively misled the world might.
I know, let's say "carbon footprint" and make it sound like every single human has been deliberately stomping all over the environment.
Already in this forum there more than enough people that will viciously defend their right to consume whatever they fancy with "their hard-earned money" and would cry "tyranny" if you suggest there is a limit after which their lifestyle becomes a danger to others.
The equation gets even more muddied if you also consider the responsibility of individuals as labor providers to the corporate entities that are responsible for environmental degradation. Again, people "got to pay the bills" etc.
Sure, there are bad people out there, prime suspects, clear villains. But its mostly bad systems.
I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.
> I can cut my carbon footprint to the bone, and my neighbor will run their two-stroke leaf blower all day because they like the noise it makes.
Personally I reduced our currently measurable monthly CO2 emissions from ~350kg/month to ~15kg/month. They need a lot of (gas powered) leaf blowers to offset that. If thousands or millions of people do it, it'll make a difference. I'm aware of course that not everyone is in the financial position to do what we did. For a lot of people though it's a choice they could make if they're open to changing their lifestyle a little bit.
(I'm not saying our emissions are down to 15kg/month, but that's based on what I can currently measure, transportation, LNG, electricity, etc. Likely they are much higher of course but I gotta start somewhere)
How?
The comment to which I responded implied that this is unfair, that the corporate beneficiaries / polluters should "pay".
Hoping for and/or expecting societal change through mass application of willpower is wishful thinking.
This sounds like the same mechanism for democracy, educating a broad populace and hoping they make the right (best?) choices.
The average American is overweight and doesn’t exercise. They are almost certainly aware they need to reduce their calorie intake and spend at least a couple of hours a week engaging in physical activity. Knowing you ought to change you behavior and actually doing it are completely different issues.
I actually happen to think that both are basically losing battles these days, but the underlying reasons aren’t the same.
in this case, burning oil and coal should be taxed so other sources of energy are incentivized.
the point you highlight is 'your tax is my opportunity' for those who don't care, to paraphrase a certain wealthy man.