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Lawyer versus climate scientist
Yesterday the AAAS Meeting saw the
re-enactment of a scene John Grisham would be proud of. Ken Alex of the State
of California Attorney General Office cross-examined climate scientist Myles
Allen of Oxford University, UK, in a mock trial to try and discredit Allen’s
work. The aim was to show what might happen if someone decided to sue a coal
company or power station for harm caused by climate change.
Allen was on the stand because he has
researched the attribution of phenomena such as the floods that hit Oxford in
2000 to climate change. In that case he and colleagues used a twin ensemble
approach to show that climate change had doubled the risk of flooding.
“Climate science has never really
been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that it would be if it ever came to
court,” said Allen. “I’m not even pretending [my research] is
trial-ready at this stage.”
While many scientists say its naïve to
blame climate change for an individual weather event, Allen reckons that’s like
a banker saying that it’s naïve to blame poor risk management for a
catastrophic loss. “It’s just plain wrong,” he said. “If you do
something that increases the risk of an event you can be blamed for it
occurring.”
The experience provided an insight into
how the uncertainty levels inherent to climate science could appear to a jury.
Alex explained how he’d question all the assumptions used in the climate models
Allen employed in his research and try to attack them as a house of cards.
- If you’d like to donate time
from your personal computer to Allen’s research, which uses distributed
computing, head to http://attribution.cpdn.org.
