MYLES ALLEN takes no prisoners. Few lay into the sluggishness of politicians or the self-serving pronouncements of big-oil CEOs with more vigour than the chief climate modeller at the University of Oxford. That’s just as well, since he is fighting science’s corner in two vital areas: the scientific attribution of extreme weather to climate change, and the attribution of climate change to corporate emissions. He wants to join the dots and show the world – and particularly the courts – where the culpability lies for global warming.
I catch Allen in the wake of hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The evidence is clear, he says, that “climate change increases the risk of such intense, short-duration rainfall events”. As a result, he wants the contribution of climate change to be pointed out in every weather report. “It’s time meteorologists put our estimates of the impact of climate change into their weather forecasts.”
Allen is frustrated by the scientific and political caution that prevents this happening. Climate scientists should be more direct, he says – asking and answering the questions that get to the heart of the issue. “I spent the first 15 years of my career as a climate modeller pointing out how complicated things were, and then the next 10 years atoning for that [by stressing how] it’s really very simple.” Yes, the uncertainties in climate science should be acknowledged, he says, but amid the caution, “people miss the fact that our best estimate of the human contribution to global warming is actually: all of it”.
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With extreme weather becoming ever more likely, Allen reckons the climate road will only get bumpier. He fears a climate meltdown: runaway climate change, a mega-disaster or the breakdown of a major feature of the climate system, such as the Asian monsoon. He likens this to the financial crash of 2008. “The story of both would be the same,” he says, “with very profitable industries building up big risks for society that don’t appear in their accounting.” He notes that aid budgets, rather than big-oil profits, are being used to restore infrastructure in the Caribbean after Hurricane Irma.
If a climate crash comes, we may look back with as much incredulity as we now view the bankers’ rollercoaster ride to global disaster. “That’s why the conversation about those risks has to start when events like hurricanes Harvey and Irma make them suddenly visible,” he says. Because people generally care about the weather today, not decades from now.
For more than a decade, Allen has been calling for a direct approach to fighting climate change. Rather than trying to get reluctant governments to redesign their energy systems or create carbon-trading schemes, he wants to hold fossil fuel firms accountable in law for the downsides of their emissions and hit them where it hurts, like the tobacco companies.
In 2005, he called for action against “the 20 or so coal and oil companies” responsible for most carbon dioxide emissions in New Scientist. Since then, legal cases have been brought, but they have failed “because judges decided that because governments were regulating CO2, the courts had no role”.
Despite such setbacks, big oil is still firmly in his sights. Allen’s most recent paper listed fossil-fuel companies in order of what he has calculated is their responsibility for CO2 emissions. Saudi Aramco tops the list, closely followed by Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP and Gazprom. His team’s meticulous modelling showed, for instance, that 30 per cent of the sea level rise since 1880 is down to just 90 carbon emitters. “Their products are warming the planet. They need to be held to account.”
The election of Donald Trump brought with it further challenges for climate researchers. The most disappointing moment in Allen’s career came when Trump’s administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, refused to agree that CO2 was the main driver of climate change. “That really was a depressing setback. We did that science in the 1990s. It was difficult to find recent papers to contradict Pruitt because nobody thought we had to do that stuff anymore.”
Even so, he finds an intriguing silver lining in Trump’s crusade against climate science. “The law could come to our rescue. The US withdrawal from the Paris accord may change things for American companies.” Why? If there is no government-level emissions regulation in the US, he says, then legal liability could return. “Concern over that may be why the large fossil fuel companies in the US were arguing against withdrawal,” he says.
This thought leaves him more optimistic that something will be done about climate change beyond current reliance on governments to fight it. “Paris was strong on aspiration, but the progress since has been minimal.” He believes more in the power of courts, economics and public pressure – and above all in being direct. For that reason, he is frustrated by the efforts of environmentalists to turn climate change into a grand debate about how the world gets its energy, or the ethics of consumption and capitalism. Just ban greenhouse gas emissions and be done with it, he says, and require those who make and burn fossil fuels to prevent emissions in whatever way they choose – with carbon capture and storage likely to play a key role.
He has no time for gesture politics. “If I had to pick out a group who I am most frustrated with, it would not be the fossil fuel industry; it would be the environment movement for their demonisation of the fossil fuel industry.” Big oil isn’t going away any time soon, he says, so environmentalists need to stop holding their noses and engage with it. When the giant US coal companies Peabody Energy and Arch Coal hit hard times last year, Allen called for one of the many cash-rich environmental NGOs in the US to buy them. “They could have taken a substantial share of coal reserves into the hands of people committed to stabilising climate. Sadly that opportunity passed.”
“There may be a silver lining in Trump’s crusade against climate science”
While life as a climate scientist comes with built-in disappointments, Allen remains warily optimistic. “I’m completely confident the world will fix climate change during the 21st century,” he says, “but I’m not convinced it will get fixed in a particularly rational way. And it will probably be substantially more painful than it need be. It’s very frustrating.”
If a legal landscape should develop that promises to turn some of that pain back on the oil industry, Allen will be waiting with his scientific ammunition. “Paris recognised the need for net-zero emissions. So the owners of fossil-fuel assets now need to explain how those assets are going to be used in a net-zero world. If they don’t, we come back to liability.” In other words: see you in court.
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is a professor of geosystem science in the University of Oxford’s school of geography and the environment, and head of the Climate Dynamics Group in the university’s physics department
This article appeared in print under the headline “Time to play the weather blame game”
