global warming academic essay

Essay on Global Warming – Causes and Solutions

500+ words essay on global warming.

Global Warming is a term almost everyone is familiar with. But, its meaning is still not clear to most of us. So, Global warming refers to the gradual rise in the overall temperature of the atmosphere of the Earth. There are various activities taking place which have been increasing the temperature gradually. Global warming is melting our ice glaciers rapidly. This is extremely harmful to the earth as well as humans. It is quite challenging to control global warming; however, it is not unmanageable. The first step in solving any problem is identifying the cause of the problem. Therefore, we need to first understand the causes of global warming that will help us proceed further in solving it. In this essay on Global Warming, we will see the causes and solutions of Global Warming.

Causes of Global Warming

Global warming has become a grave problem which needs undivided attention. It is not happening because of a single cause but several causes. These causes are both natural as well as manmade. The natural causes include the release of greenhouses gases which are not able to escape from earth, causing the temperature to increase.

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Further, volcanic eruptions are also responsible for global warming. That is to say, these eruptions release tons of carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming. Similarly, methane is also one big issue responsible for global warming.

So, when one of the biggest sources of absorption of carbon dioxide will only disappear, there will be nothing left to regulate the gas. Thus, it will result in global warming. Steps must be taken immediately to stop global warming and make the earth better again.

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Global Warming Solutions

As stated earlier, it might be challenging but it is not entirely impossible. Global warming can be stopped when combined efforts are put in. For that, individuals and governments, both have to take steps towards achieving it. We must begin with the reduction of greenhouse gas.

Furthermore, they need to monitor the consumption of gasoline. Switch to a hybrid car and reduce the release of carbon dioxide. Moreover, citizens can choose public transport or carpool together. Subsequently, recycling must also be encouraged.

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For instance, when you go shopping, carry your own cloth bag. Another step you can take is to limit the use of electricity which will prevent the release of carbon dioxide. On the government’s part, they must regulate industrial waste and ban them from emitting harmful gases in the air. Deforestation must be stopped immediately and planting of trees must be encouraged.

In short, all of us must realize the fact that our earth is not well. It needs to treatment and we can help it heal. The present generation must take up the responsibility of stopping global warming in order to prevent the suffering of future generations. Therefore, every little step, no matter how small carries a lot of weight and is quite significant in stopping global warming.

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FAQs on Global Warming

Q.1 List the causes of Global Warming.

A.1 There are various causes of global warming both natural and manmade. The natural one includes a greenhouse gas, volcanic eruption, methane gas and more. Next up, manmade causes are deforestation, mining, cattle rearing, fossil fuel burning and more.

Q.2 How can one stop Global Warming?

A.2 Global warming can be stopped by a joint effort by the individuals and the government. Deforestation must be banned and trees should be planted more. The use of automobiles must be limited and recycling must be encouraged.

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Global Warming - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Global warming refers to the long-term increase in Earth’s average temperature due to human activities, primarily the emission of greenhouse gases. Essays on this topic can discuss the scientific evidence supporting global warming, its impacts on weather patterns, sea-level rise, ecosystems, and human societies. Moreover, possible mitigation and adaptation strategies, as well as international agreements like the Paris Accord, can be explored. A vast selection of complimentary essay illustrations pertaining to Global Warming you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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Global warming is a widespread phenomenon than threatens human existence. By definition, the term refers to the gradual increase of average temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere, surface, seas, and oceans. Such fluctuations cause ice caps to melt, sea levels to rise, weather patterns to change, and animal species to go extinct. Even worse, all these shifts have a detrimental effect on human health and behavior. But do we know what’s causing it and how we can prevent it until it’s too late? The primary reason underlying temperature rise lies in the excessive quantities of carbon dioxide released into the air. This further leads to climate change and slowly turns our planet into a scary furnace and a dead-end for humanity. To help tackle this pending danger, teachers often assign global warming argumentative essay topics to students. Making young people aware of the problem at an early age is a critical step in finding a solution. In addition, the more students research environmental issues, the more eager they get to preserve our unique homes and natural habitats. Furthermore, there are still dilemmas and controversies on whether the greenhouse effect is man-caused on not. To this end, a properly researched argumentative essay on global warming can clarify many doubts. And besides having a scientific nature, these papers are also very informative and enable young people to raise their voices and express their opinion. Be it delivered as a written summary or public speech, your research paper about global warming can urge the community to act. To do so, you must outline your work to stand out and leave an impact on your audience. In short, consider framing a thesis statement that raises the most imminent issues. Once you draft the thesis, you can continue with a neat introduction explaining the background of the phenomenon. The body paragraphs of your writing will ideally consist of a few arguments and a counter argument to give your paper depth and value. Finally, the conclusion should summarize your points and provide ground for further research and actions. If you need high-quality persuasive essay examples about global warming, look no further. PapersOwl has some of the best titles on the wide net for you to tap into, including argumentative, cause and effect, and descriptive papers.

Essays About Global Warming Let’s face it: the global climate change is real, and we are the only generation to let it kill us withing a century or keep the planet safe and sound for as long as we can. Where do we start if we chose Option #2 or if we are deeply convinced that all that is a Big Corporation Myth for us to shop more but differently? We should start with a research paper about global warming. Who Should it Concern Usually, the paper takes into account all the stakeholders, but sometimes they can be narrowed to a particular group of people, field, domain, or geographic region. For instance, the fires in the Amazon will most likely touch the human civilization in general, but it might have various outcomes for the Brasilian political system or trading relations between the countries. To what extent are we conditioned by media when it comes to global problems? Can we find a true answer in the post-truth society? Why Use the Examples The essay on global warming may come with different topics, explore a variety of effects of global warming for the whole ecosystem, and outline possible human-centric causes and consequences of inactivity. Whether you need an argument-based text (argumentative essay) or want to convince someone to follow your way of thinking (persuasive essay), your task is to approach the problem holistically and as detailed as you can. The examples below are given for you as an introduction to the complex nature of the issue and also to see whether a particular one can be tweaked specifically for your topic.

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A problem built into our relationship with energy itself. Photo by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum

Deep warming

Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. waste heat could radically alter earth’s future.

by Mark Buchanan   + BIO

The world will be transformed. By 2050, we will be driving electric cars and flying in aircraft running on synthetic fuels produced through solar and wind energy. New energy-efficient technologies, most likely harnessing artificial intelligence, will dominate nearly all human activities from farming to heavy industry. The fossil fuel industry will be in the final stages of a terminal decline. Nuclear fusion and other new energy sources may have become widespread. Perhaps our planet will even be orbited by massive solar arrays capturing cosmic energy from sunlight and generating seemingly endless energy for all our needs.

That is one possible future for humanity. It’s an optimistic view of how radical changes to energy production might help us slow or avoid the worst outcomes of global warming. In a report from 1965, scientists from the US government warned that our ongoing use of fossil fuels would cause global warming with potentially disastrous consequences for Earth’s climate. The report, one of the first government-produced documents to predict a major crisis caused by humanity’s large-scale activities, noted that the likely consequences would include higher global temperatures, the melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels. ‘Through his worldwide industrial civilisation,’ the report concluded, ‘Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment’ – an experiment with a highly uncertain outcome, but clear and important risks for life on Earth.

Since then, we’ve dithered and doubted and argued about what to do, but still have not managed to take serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which continue to rise. Governments around the planet have promised to phase out emissions in the coming decades and transition to ‘green energy’. But global temperatures may be rising faster than we expected: some climate scientists worry that rapid rises could create new problems and positive feedback loops that may accelerate climate destabilisation and make parts of the world uninhabitable long before a hoped-for transition is possible.

Despite this bleak vision of the future, there are reasons for optimists to hope due to progress on cleaner sources of renewable energy, especially solar power. Around 2010, solar energy generation accounted for less than 1 per cent of the electricity generated by humanity. But experts believe that, by 2027, due to falling costs, better technology and exponential growth in new installations, solar power will become the largest global energy source for producing electricity. If progress on renewables continues, we might find a way to resolve the warming problem linked to greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, large-scale societal and ecological changes might have helped us avoid the worst consequences of our extensive use of fossil fuels.

It’s a momentous challenge. And it won’t be easy. But this story of transformation only hints at the true depth of the future problems humanity will confront in managing our energy use and its influence over our climate.

As scientists are gradually learning, even if we solve the immediate warming problem linked to the greenhouse effect, there’s another warming problem steadily growing beneath it. Let’s call it the ‘deep warming’ problem. This deeper problem also raises Earth’s surface temperature but, unlike global warming, it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases and our use of fossil fuels. It stems directly from our use of energy in all forms and our tendency to use more energy over time – a problem created by the inevitable waste heat that is generated whenever we use energy to do something. Yes, the world may well be transformed by 2050. Carbon dioxide levels may stabilise or fall thanks to advanced AI-assisted technologies that run on energy harvested from the sun and wind. And the fossil fuel industry may be taking its last breaths. But we will still face a deeper problem. That’s because ‘deep warming’ is not created by the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s a problem built into our relationship with energy itself.

F inding new ways to harness more energy has been a constant theme of human development. The evolution of humanity – from early modes of hunter-gathering to farming and industry – has involved large systematic increases in our per-capita energy use. The British historian and archaeologist Ian Morris estimates, in his book Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (2015), that early human hunter-gatherers, living more than 10,000 years ago, ‘captured’ around 5,000 kcal per person per day by consuming food, burning fuel, making clothing, building shelter, or through other activities. Later, after we turned to farming and enlisted the energies of domesticated animals, we were able to harness as much as 30,000 kcal per day. In the late 17th century , the exploitation of coal and steam power marked another leap: by 1970, the use of fossil fuels allowed humans to consume some 230,000 kcal per person per day. (When we think about humanity writ large as ‘humans’, it’s important to acknowledge that the average person in the wealthiest nations consumes up to 100 times more energy than the average person in the poorest nations.) As the global population has risen and people have invented new energy-dependent technologies, our global energy use has continued to climb.

In many respects, this is great. We can now do more with less effort and achieve things that were unimaginable to the 17th-century inventors of steam engines, let alone to our hominin ancestors. We’ve made powerful mining machines, superfast trains, lasers for use in telecommunications and brain-imaging equipment. But these creations, while helping us, are also subtly heating the planet.

All the energy we humans use – to heat our homes, run our factories, propel our automobiles and aircraft, or to run our electronics – eventually ends up as heat in the environment. In the shorter term, most of the energy we use flows directly into the environment. It gets there through hot exhaust gases, friction between tires and roads, the noises generated by powerful engines, which spread out, dissipate, and eventually end up as heat. However, a small portion of the energy we use gets stored in physical changes, such as in new steel, plastic or concrete. It’s stored in our cities and technologies. In the longer term, as these materials break down, the energy stored inside also finds its way into the environment as heat. This is a direct consequence of the well-tested principles of thermodynamics.

Waste heat will pose a problem that is every bit as serious as global warming from greenhouse gases

In the early decades of the 21st century , this heat created by simply using energy, known as ‘waste heat’, is not so serious. It’s equivalent to roughly 2 per cent of the planetary heating imbalance caused by greenhouse gases – for now. But, with the passing of time, the problem is likely to get much more serious. That’s because humans have a historical tendency to consistently discover and produce things, creating entirely new technologies and industries in the process: domesticated animals for farming; railways and automobiles; global air travel and shipping; personal computers, the internet and mobile phones. The result of such activities is that we end up using more and more energy, despite improved energy efficiency in nearly every area of technology.

During the past two centuries at least (and likely for much longer), our yearly energy use has doubled roughly every 30 to 50 years . Our energy use seems to be growing exponentially, a trend that shows every sign of continuing. We keep finding new things to do and almost everything we invent requires more and more energy: consider the enormous energy demands of cryptocurrency mining or the accelerating energy requirements of AI.

If this historical trend continues, scientists estimate waste heat will pose a problem in roughly 150-200 years that is every bit as serious as the current problem of global warming from greenhouse gases. However, deep heating will be more pernicious as we won’t be able to avoid it by merely shifting from one kind energy to another. A profound problem will loom before us: can we set strict limits on all the energy we use? Can we reign in the seemingly inexorable expansion of our activities to avoid destroying our own environment?

Deep warming is a problem hiding beneath global warming, but one that will become prominent if and when we manage to solve the more pressing issue of greenhouse gases. It remains just out of sight, which might explain why scientists only became concerned about the ‘waste heat’ problem around 15 years ago.

O ne of the first people to describe the problem is the Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson, who discussed the issue of waste heat in a paper titled ‘Long-Term Global Heating from Energy Usage’ (2008). He concluded that our technological society may be facing a fundamental limit to growth due to ‘unavoidable global heating … dictated solely by the second law of thermodynamics, a biogeophysical effect often ignored when estimating future planetary warming scenarios’. When I emailed Chaisson to learn more, he told me the history of his thinking on the problem:

It was on a night flight, Paris-Boston [circa] 2006, after a UNESCO meeting on the environment when it dawned on me that the IPCC were overlooking something. While others on the plane slept, I crunched some numbers literally on the back of an envelope … and then hoped I was wrong, that is, hoped that I was incorrect in thinking that the very act of using energy heats the air, however slightly now.

The transformation of energy into heat is among the most ubiquitous processes of physics

Chaisson drafted the idea up as a paper and sent it to an academic journal. Two anonymous reviewers were eager for it to be published. ‘A third tried his damnedest to kill it,’ Chaisson said, the reviewer claiming the findings were ‘irrelevant and distracting’. After it was finally published, the paper got some traction when it was covered by a journalist and ran as a feature story on the front page of The Boston Globe . The numbers Chaisson crunched, predictions of our mounting waste heat, were even run on a supercomputer at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, by Mark Flanner, a professor of earth system science. Flanner, Chaisson suspected at the time, was likely ‘out to prove it wrong’. But, ‘after his machine crunched for many hours’, he saw the same results that Chaisson had written on the back of an envelope that night in the plane.

Around the same time, also in 2008, two engineers, Nick Cowern and Chihak Ahn, wrote a research paper entirely independent of Chaisson’s work, but with similar conclusions. This was how I first came across the problem. Cowern and Ahn’s study estimated the total amount of waste heat we’re currently releasing to the environment, and found that it is, right now, quite small. But, like Chaisson, they acknowledged that the problem would eventually become serious unless steps were taken to avoid it.

That’s some of the early history of thinking in this area. But these two papers, and a few other analyses since, point to the same unsettling conclusion: what I am calling ‘deep warming’ will be a big problem for humanity at some point in the not-too-distant future. The precise date is far from certain. It might be 150 years , or 400, or 800, but it’s in the relatively near future, not the distant future of, say, thousands or millions of years. This is our future.

T he transformation of energy into heat is among the most ubiquitous processes of physics. As cars drive down roads, trains roar along railways, planes cross the skies and industrial plants turn raw materials into refined products, energy gets turned into heat, which is the scientific word for energy stored in the disorganised motions of molecules at the microscopic level. As a plane flies from Paris to Boston, it burns fuel and thrusts hot gases into the air, generates lots of sound and stirs up contrails. These swirls of air give rise to swirls on smaller scales which in turn make smaller ones until the energy ultimately ends up lost in heat – the air is a little warmer than before, the molecules making it up moving about a little more vigorously. A similar process takes place when energy is used by the tiny electrical currents inside the microchips of computers, silently carrying out computations. Energy used always ends up as heat. Decades ago, research by the IBM physicist Rolf Landauer showed that a computation involving even a single computing bit will release a certain minimum amount of heat to the environment.

How this happens is described by the laws of thermodynamics, which were described in the mid-19th century by scientists including Sadi Carnot in France and Rudolf Clausius in Germany. Two key ‘laws’ summarise its main principles.

The first law of thermodynamics simply states that the total quantity of energy never changes but is conserved. Energy, in other words, never disappears, but only changes form. The energy initially stored in an aircraft’s fuel, for example, can be changed into the energetic motion of the plane. Turn on an electric heater, and energy initially held in electric currents gets turned into heat, which spreads into the air, walls and fabric of your house. The total energy remains the same, but it markedly changes form.

We’re generating waste heat all the time with everything we do

The second law of thermodynamics, equally important, is more subtle and states that, in natural processes, the transformation of energy always moves from more organised and useful forms to less organised and less useful forms. For an aircraft, the energy initially concentrated in jet fuel ends up dissipated in stirred-up winds, sounds and heat spread over vast areas of the atmosphere in a largely invisible way. It’s the same with the electric heater: the organised useful energy in the electric currents gets dissipated and spread into the low-grade warmth of the walls, then leaks into the outside air. Although the amount of energy remains the same, it gradually turns into less organised, less usable forms. The end point of the energy process produces waste heat. And we’re generating it all the time with everything we do.

Data on world energy consumption shows that, collectively, all humans on Earth are currently using about 170,000 terawatt-hours (TWh), which is a lot of energy in absolute terms – a terawatt-hour is the total energy consumed in one hour by any process using energy at a rate of 1 trillion watts. This huge number isn’t surprising, as it represents all the energy being used every day by the billions of cars and homes around the world, as well as by industry, farming, construction, air traffic and so on. But, in the early 21st century , the warming from this energy is still much less than the planetary heating due to greenhouse gases.

Concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO 2 and methane are quite small, and only make a fractional difference to how much of the Sun’s energy gets trapped in the atmosphere, rather than making it back out to space. Even so, this fractional difference has a huge effect because the stream of energy arriving from the Sun to Earth is so large. Current estimates of this greenhouse energy imbalance come to around 0.87 W per square meter, which translates into a total energy figure about 50 times larger than our waste heat. That’s reassuring. But as Cowern and Ahn wrote in their 2008 paper, things aren’t likely to stay this way over time because our energy usage keeps rising. Unless, that is, we can find some radical way to break the trend of using ever more energy.

O ne common objection to the idea of the deep warming is to claim that the problem won’t really arise. ‘Don’t worry,’ someone might say, ‘with efficient technology, we’re going to find ways to stop using more energy; though we’ll end up doing more things in the future, we’ll use less energy.’ This may sound plausible at first, because we are indeed getting more efficient at using energy in most areas of technology. Our cars, appliances and laptops are all doing more with less energy. If efficiency keeps improving, perhaps we can learn to run these things with almost no energy at all? Not likely, because there are limits to energy efficiency.

Over the past few decades, the efficiency of heating in homes – including oil and gas furnaces, and boilers used to heat water – has increased from less than 50 per cent to well above 90 per cent of what is theoretically possible. That’s good news, but there’s not much more efficiency to be realised in basic heating. The efficiency of lighting has also vastly improved, with modern LED lighting turning something like 70 per cent of the applied electrical energy into light. We will gain some efficiencies as older lighting gets completely replaced by LEDs, but there’s not a lot of room left for future efficiency improvements. Similar efficiency limits arise in the growing or cooking of food; in the manufacturing of cars, bikes and electronic devices; in transportation, as we’re taken from place to place; in the running of search engines, translation software, GPT-4 or other large-language models.

Even if we made significant improvements in the efficiencies of these technologies, we will only have bought a little time. These changes won’t delay by much the date when deep warming becomes a problem we must reckon with.

Optimising efficiencies is just a temporary reprieve, not a radical change in our human future

As a thought experiment, suppose we could immediately improve the energy efficiency of everything we do by a factor of 10 – a fantastically optimistic proposal. That is, imagine the energy output of humans on Earth has been reduced 10 times , from 170,000 TWh to 17,000 TWh . If our energy use keeps expanding, doubling every 30-50 years or so (as it has for centuries), then a 10-fold increase in waste heat will happen in just over three doubling times, which is about 130 years : 17,000 TWh doubles to 34,000 TWh , which doubles to 68,000 TWh , which doubles to 136,000 TWh , and so on. All those improvements in energy efficiency would quickly evaporate. The date when deep warming hits would recede by 130 years or so, but not much more. Optimising efficiencies is just a temporary reprieve, not a radical change in our human future.

Improvements in energy efficiency can also have an inverse effect on our overall energy use. It’s easy to think that if we make a technology more efficient, we’ll then use less energy through the technology. But economists are deeply aware of a paradoxical effect known as ‘rebound’, whereby improved energy efficiency, by making the use of a technology cheaper, actually leads to more widespread use of that technology – and more energy use too. The classic example, as noted by the British economist William Stanley Jevons in his book The Coal Question (1865), is the invention of the steam engine. This new technology could extract energy from burning coal more efficiently, but it also made possible so many new applications that the use of coal increased. A recent study by economists suggests that, across the economy, such rebound effects might easily swallow at least 50 per cent of any efficiency gains in energy use. Something similar has already happened with LED lights, for which people have found thousands of new uses.

If gains in efficiency won’t buy us lots of time, how about other factors, such as a reduction of the global population? Scientists generally believe that the current human population of more than 8 billion people is well beyond the limits of our finite planet, especially if a large fraction of this population aspires to the resource-intensive lifestyles of wealthy nations. Some estimates suggest that a more sustainable population might be more like 2 billion , which could reduce energy use significantly, potentially by a factor of three or four. However, this isn’t a real solution: again, as with the example of improved energy efficiency, a one-time reduction of our energy consumption by a factor of three will quickly be swallowed up by an inexorable rise in energy use. If Earth’s population were suddenly reduced to 2 billion – about a quarter of the current population – our energy gains would initially be enormous. But those gains would be erased in two doubling times, or roughly 60-100 years , as our energy demands would grow fourfold.

S o, why aren’t more people talking about this? The deep warming problem is starting to get more attention. It was recently mentioned on Twitter by the German climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, who cautioned that nuclear fusion, despite excitement over recent advances, won’t arrive in time to save us from our waste heat, and might make the problem worse. By providing another cheap source of energy, fusion energy could accelerate both the growth of our energy use and the reckoning of deep warming. A student of Rahmstorf’s, Peter Steiglechner, wrote his master’s thesis on the problem in 2018. Recognition of deep warming and its long-term implications for humanity is spreading. But what can we do about the problem?

Avoiding or delaying deep warming will involve slowing the rise of our waste heat, which means restricting the amount of energy we use and also choosing energy sources that exacerbate the problem as little as possible. Unlike the energy from fossil fuels or nuclear power, which add to our waste energy burden, renewable energy sources intercept energy that is already on its way to Earth, rather than producing additional waste heat. In this sense, the deep warming problem is another reason to pursue renewable energy sources such as solar or wind rather than alternatives such as nuclear fusion, fission or even geothermal power. If we derive energy from any of these sources, we’re unleashing new flows of energy into the Earth system without making a compensating reduction. As a result, all such sources will add to the waste heat problem. However, if renewable sources of energy are deployed correctly, they need not add to our deposition of waste heat in the environment. By using this energy, we produce no more waste heat than would have been created by sunlight in the first place.

Take the example of wind energy. Sunlight first stirs winds into motion by heating parts of the planet unequally, causing vast cells of convection. As wind churns through the atmosphere, blows through trees and over mountains and waves, most of its energy gets turned into heat, ending up in the microscopic motions of molecules. If we harvest some of this wind energy through turbines, it will also be turned into heat in the form of stored energy. But, crucially, no more heat is generated than if there had been no turbines to capture the wind.

The same can hold true for solar energy. In an array of solar cells, if each cell only collects the sunlight falling on it – which would ordinarily have been absorbed by Earth’s surface – then the cells don’t alter how much waste heat gets produced as they generate energy. The light that would have warmed Earth’s surface instead goes into the solar cells, gets used by people for some purpose, and then later ends up as heat. In this way we reduce the amount of heat being absorbed by Earth by precisely the same amount as the energy we are extracting for human use. We are not adding to overall planetary heating. This keeps the waste energy burden unchanged, at least in the relatively near future, even if we go on extracting and using ever larger amounts of energy.

Covering deserts in dark panels would absorb a lot more energy than the desert floor

Chaisson summarised the problem quite clearly in 2008:

I’m now of the opinion … that any energy that’s dug up on Earth – including all fossil fuels of course, but also nuclear and ground-sourced geothermal – will inevitably produce waste heat as a byproduct of humankind’s use of energy. The only exception to that is energy arriving from beyond Earth, this is energy here and now and not dug up, namely the many solar energies (plural) caused by the Sun’s rays landing here daily … The need to avoid waste heat is indeed the single, strongest, scientific argument to embrace solar energies of all types.

But not just any method of gathering solar energy will avoid the deep warming problem. Doing so requires careful engineering. For example, covering deserts with solar panels would add to planetary heating because deserts reflect a lot of incident light back out to space, so it is never absorbed by Earth (and therefore doesn’t produce waste heat). Covering deserts in dark panels would absorb a lot more energy than the desert floor and would heat the planet further.

We’ll also face serious problems in the long run if our energy appetite keeps increasing. Futurists dream of technologies deployed in space where huge panels would absorb sunlight that would otherwise have passed by Earth and never entered our atmosphere. Ultimately, they believe, this energy could be beamed down to Earth. Like nuclear energy, such technologies would add an additional energy source to the planet without any compensating removal of heating from the sunlight currently striking our planet’s surface. Any effort to produce more energy than is normally available from sunlight at Earth’s surface will only make our heating problems worse.

D eep warming is simply a consequence of the laws of physics and our inquisitive nature. It seems to be in our nature to constantly learn and develop new things, changing our environment in the process. For thousands of years, we have harvested and exploited ever greater quantities of energy in this pursuit, and we appear poised to continue along this path with the rapidly expanding use of renewable energy sources – and perhaps even more novel sources such as nuclear fusion. But this path cannot proceed indefinitely without consequences.

The logic that more energy equals more warming sets up a profound dilemma for our future. The laws of physics and the habits ingrained in us from our long evolutionary history are steering us toward trouble. We may have a technological fix for greenhouse gas warming – just shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources – but there is no technical trick to get us out of the deep warming problem. That won’t stop some scientists from trying.

Perhaps, believing that humanity is incapable of reducing its energy usage, we’ll adopt a fantastic scheme to cool the planet, such as planetary-scale refrigeration or using artificially engineered tornadoes to transport heat from Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere where it can be radiated away to space. As far-fetched as such approaches sound, scientists have given some serious thought to these and other equally bizarre ideas, which seem wholly in the realm of science fiction. They’re schemes that will likely make the problem worse not better.

We will need to transform the human story. It must become a story of doing less, not more

I see several possibilities for how we might ultimately respond. As with greenhouse gas warming, there will probably be an initial period of disbelief, denial and inaction, as we continue with unconstrained technological advance and growing energy use. Our planet will continue warming. Sooner or later, however, such warming will lead to serious disruptions of the Earth environment and its ecosystems. We won’t be able to ignore this for long, and it may provide a natural counterbalance to our energy use, as our technical and social capacity to generate and use ever more energy will be eroded. We may eventually come to some uncomfortable balance in which we just scrabble out a life on a hot, compromised planet because we lack the moral and organisational ability to restrict our energy use enough to maintain a sound environment.

An alternative would require a radical break with our past: using less energy. Finding a way to use less energy would represent a truly fundamental rupture with all of human history, something entirely novel. A rupture of this magnitude won’t come easily. However, if we could learn to view restrictions on our energy use as a non-negotiable element of life on Earth, we may still be able to do many of the things that make us essentially human: learning, discovering, inventing, creating. In this scenario, any helpful new technology that comes into use and begins using lots of energy would require a balancing reduction in energy use elsewhere. In such a way, we might go on with the future being perpetually new, and possibly better.

None of this is easily achieved and will likely mirror our current struggles to come to agreements on greenhouse gas heating. There will be vicious squabbles, arguments and profound polarisation, quite possibly major wars. Humanity will never have faced a challenge of this magnitude, and we won’t face up to it quickly or easily, I expect. But we must. Planetary heating is in our future – the very near future and further out as well. Many people will find this conclusion surprisingly hard to swallow, perhaps because it implies fundamental restrictions on our future here on Earth: we can’t go on forever using more and more energy, and, at the same time, expecting the planet’s climate to remain stable.

The world will likely be transformed by 2050. And, sometime after that, we will need to transform the human story. The narrative arc of humanity must become a tale of continuing innovation and learning, but also one of careful management. It must become a story, in energy terms, of doing less, not more. There’s no technology for entirely escaping waste heat, only techniques.

This is important to remember as we face up to the extremely urgent challenge of heating linked to fossil-fuel use and greenhouse gases. Global warming is just the beginning of our problems. It’s a testing ground to see if we can manage an intelligent and coordinated response. If we can handle this challenge, we might be better prepared, more capable and resilient as a species to tackle an even harder one.

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Our Future Is Now - A Climate Change Essay by Francesca Minicozzi, '21

Francesca Minicozzi (class of 2021) is a Writing/Biology major who plans to study medicine after graduation. She wrote this essay on climate change for WR 355/Travel Writing, which she took while studying abroad in Newcastle in spring 2020. Although the coronavirus pandemic curtailed Francesca’s time abroad, her months in Newcastle prompted her to learn more about climate change. Terre Ryan Associate Professor, Writing Department

Our Future Is Now

By Francesca Minicozzi, '21 Writing and Biology Major

 “If you don’t mind me asking, how is the United States preparing for climate change?” my flat mate, Zac, asked me back in March, when we were both still in Newcastle. He and I were accustomed to asking each other about the differences between our home countries; he came from Cambridge, while I originated in Long Island, New York. This was one of our numerous conversations about issues that impact our generation, which we usually discussed while cooking dinner in our communal kitchen. In the moment of our conversation, I did not have as strong an answer for him as I would have liked. Instead, I informed him of the few changes I had witnessed within my home state of New York.

Zac’s response was consistent with his normal, diplomatic self. “I have been following the BBC news in terms of the climate crisis for the past few years. The U.K. has been working hard to transition to renewable energy sources. Similar to the United States, here in the United Kingdom we have converted over to solar panels too. My home does not have solar panels, but a lot of our neighbors have switched to solar energy in the past few years.”

“Our two countries are similar, yet so different,” I thought. Our conversation continued as we prepared our meals, with topics ranging from climate change to the upcoming presidential election to Britain’s exit from the European Union. However, I could not shake the fact that I knew so little about a topic so crucial to my generation.

After I abruptly returned home from the United Kingdom because of the global pandemic, my conversation with my flat mate lingered in my mind. Before the coronavirus surpassed climate change headlines, I had seen the number of internet postings regarding protests to protect the planet dramatically increase. Yet the idea of our planet becoming barren and unlivable in a not-so-distant future had previously upset me to the point where a part of me refused to deal with it. After I returned from studying abroad, I decided to educate myself on the climate crisis.

My quest for climate change knowledge required a thorough understanding of the difference between “climate change” and “global warming.” Climate change is defined as “a pattern of change affecting global or regional climate,” based on “average temperature and rainfall measurements” as well as the frequency of extreme weather events. 1   These varied temperature and weather events link back to both natural incidents and human activity. 2   Likewise, the term global warming was coined “to describe climate change caused by humans.” 3   Not only that, but global warming is most recently attributed to an increase in “global average temperature,” mainly due to greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans. 4

I next questioned why the term “climate change” seemed to take over the term “global warming” in the United States. According to Frank Luntz, a leading Republican consultant, the term “global warming” functions as a rather intimidating phrase. During George W. Bush’s first presidential term, Luntz argued in favor of using the less daunting phrase “climate change” in an attempt to overcome the environmental battle amongst Democrats and Republicans. 5   Since President Bush’s term, Luntz remains just one political consultant out of many politicians who has recognized the need to address climate change. In an article from 2019, Luntz proclaimed that political parties aside, the climate crisis affects everyone. Luntz argued that politicians should steer clear of trying to communicate “the complicated science of climate change,” and instead engage voters by explaining how climate change personally impacts citizens with natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and forest fires. 6   He even suggested that a shift away from words like “sustainability” would gear Americans towards what they really want: a “cleaner, safer, healthier” environment. 7

The idea of a cleaner and heathier environment remains easier said than done. The Paris Climate Agreement, introduced in 2015, began the United Nations’ “effort to combat global climate change.” 8   This agreement marked a global initiative to “limit global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels,” while simultaneously “pursuing means to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees.” 9    Every country on earth has joined together in this agreement for the common purpose of saving our planet. 10   So, what could go wrong here? As much as this sounds like a compelling step in the right direction for climate change, President Donald Trump thought otherwise. In June 2017, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement with his proclamation of climate change as a “’hoax’ perpetrated by China.” 11   President Trump continued to question the scientific facts behind climate change, remaining an advocate for the expansion of domestic fossil fuel production. 12   He reversed environmental policies implemented by former President Barack Obama to reduce fossil fuel use. 13

Trump’s actions against the Paris Agreement, however, fail to represent the beliefs of Americans as a whole. The majority of American citizens feel passionate about the fight against climate change. To demonstrate their support, some have gone as far as creating initiatives including America’s Pledge and We Are Still In. 14   Although the United States officially exited the Paris Agreement on November 4, 2020, this withdrawal may not survive permanently. 15   According to experts, our new president “could rejoin in as short as a month’s time.” 16   This offers a glimmer of hope.

The Paris Agreement declares that the United States will reduce greenhouse gas emission levels by 26 to 28 percent by the year 2025. 17   As a leader in greenhouse gas emissions, the United States needs to accept the climate crisis for the serious challenge that it presents and work together with other nations. The concept of working coherently with all nations remains rather tricky; however, I remain optimistic. I think we can learn from how other countries have adapted to the increased heating of our planet. During my recent study abroad experience in the United Kingdom, I was struck by Great Britain’s commitment to combating climate change.

Since the United Kingdom joined the Paris Agreement, the country targets a “net-zero” greenhouse gas emission for 2050. 18   This substantial alteration would mark an 80% reduction of greenhouse gases from 1990, if “clear, stable, and well-designed policies are implemented without interruption.” 19   In order to stay on top of reducing emissions, the United Kingdom tracks electricity and car emissions, “size of onshore and offshore wind farms,” amount of homes and “walls insulated, and boilers upgraded,” as well as the development of government policies, including grants for electric vehicles. 20   A strong grip on this data allows the United Kingdom to target necessary modifications that keep the country on track for 2050. In my brief semester in Newcastle, I took note of these significant changes. The city of Newcastle is small enough that many students and faculty are able to walk or bike to campus and nearby essential shops. However, when driving is unavoidable, the majority of the vehicles used are electric, and many British citizens place a strong emphasis on carpooling to further reduce emissions. The United Kingdom’s determination to severely reduce greenhouse emissions is ambitious and particularly admirable, especially as the United States struggles to shy away from its dependence on fossil fuels.

So how can we, as Americans, stand together to combat global climate change? Here are five adjustments Americans can make to their homes and daily routines that can dramatically make a difference:

• Stay cautious of food waste. Studies demonstrate that “Americans throw away up to 40 percent of the food they buy.” 21   By being more mindful of the foods we purchase, opting for leftovers, composting wastes, and donating surplus food to those in need, we can make an individual difference that impacts the greater good. 22   
• Insulate your home. Insulation functions as a “cost-effective and accessible” method to combat climate change. 23   Homes with modern insulation reduce energy required to heat them, leading to a reduction of emissions and an overall savings; in comparison, older homes can “lose up to 35 percent of heat through their walls.” 24   
• Switch to LED Lighting. LED stands for “light-emitting diodes,” which use “90 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and half as much as compact fluorescents.” 25   LED lights create light without producing heat, and therefore do not waste energy. Additionally, these lights have a longer duration than other bulbs, which means they offer a continuing savings. 26  
• Choose transportation wisely. Choose to walk or bike whenever the option presents itself. If walking or biking is not an option, use an electric or hybrid vehicle which emits less harmful gases. Furthermore, reduce the number of car trips taken, and carpool with others when applicable. 
• Finally, make your voice heard. The future of our planet remains in our hands, so we might as well use our voices to our advantage. Social media serves as a great platform for this. Moreover, using social media to share helpful hints to combat climate change within your community or to promote an upcoming protest proves beneficial in the long run. If we collectively put our voices to good use, together we can advocate for change.

As many of us are stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these suggestions are slightly easier to put into place. With numerous “stay-at-home” orders in effect, Americans have the opportunity to make significant achievements for climate change. Personally, I have taken more precautions towards the amount of food consumed within my household during this pandemic. I have been more aware of food waste, opting for leftovers when too much food remains. Additionally, I have realized how powerful my voice is as a young college student. Now is the opportunity for Americans to share how they feel about climate change. During this unprecedented time, our voice is needed now more than ever in order to make a difference.

However, on a much larger scale, the coronavirus outbreak has shed light on reducing global energy consumption. Reductions in travel, both on the roads and in the air, have triggered a drop in emission rates. In fact, the International Energy Agency predicts a 6 percent decrease in energy consumption around the globe for this year alone. 27   This drop is “equivalent to losing the entire energy demand of India.” 28   Complete lockdowns have lowered the global demand for electricity and slashed CO2 emissions. However, in New York City, the shutdown has only decreased carbon dioxide emissions by 10 percent. 29   This proves that a shift in personal behavior is simply not enough to “fix the carbon emission problem.” 30   Climate policies aimed to reduce fossil fuel production and promote clean technology will be crucial steppingstones to ameliorating climate change effects. Our current reduction of greenhouse gas emissions serves as “the sort of reduction we need every year until net-zero emissions are reached around 2050.” 31   From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, politicians came together for the common good of protecting humanity; this demonstrates that when necessary, global leaders are capable of putting humankind above the economy. 32

After researching statistics comparing the coronavirus to climate change, I thought back to the moment the virus reached pandemic status. I knew that a greater reason underlay all of this global turmoil. Our globe is in dire need of help, and the coronavirus reminds the world of what it means to work together. This pandemic marks a turning point in global efforts to slow down climate change. The methods we enact towards not only stopping the spread of the virus, but slowing down climate change, will ultimately depict how humanity will arise once this pandemic is suppressed. The future of our home planet lies in how we treat it right now. 

• “Climate Change: What Do All the Terms Mean?,” BBC News (BBC, May 1, 2019), https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48057733 )
• Ibid. 
• Kate Yoder, “Frank Luntz, the GOP's Message Master, Calls for Climate Action,” Grist (Grist, July 26, 2019), https://grist.org/article/the-gops-most-famous-messaging-strategist-calls-for-climate-action
• Melissa Denchak, “Paris Climate Agreement: Everything You Need to Know,” NRDC, April 29, 2020, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/paris-climate-agreement-everything-you-need-know)
• “Donald J. Trump's Foreign Policy Positions,” Council on Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations), accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/election2020/candidate-tracker/donald-j.-trump?gclid=CjwKCAjw4871BRAjEiwAbxXi21cneTRft_doA5if60euC6QCL7sr-Jwwv76IkgWaUTuyJNx9EzZzRBoCdjsQAvD_BwE#climate and energy )
• David Doniger, “Paris Climate Agreement Explained: Does Congress Need to Sign Off?,” NRDC, December 15, 2016, https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-doniger/paris-climate-agreement-explained-does-congress-need-sign )
• “How the UK Is Progressing,” Committee on Climate Change, March 9, 2020, https://www.theccc.org.uk/what-is-climate-change/reducing-carbon-emissions/how-the-uk-is-progressing/)
• Ibid.  
• “Top 10 Ways You Can Fight Climate Change,” Green America, accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.greenamerica.org/your-green-life/10-ways-you-can-fight-climate-change )
• Matt McGrath, “Climate Change and Coronavirus: Five Charts about the Biggest Carbon Crash,” BBC News (BBC, May 5, 2020), https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-52485712 )

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Essay on Climate Change: Check Samples in 100, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Sep 21, 2023

Writing an essay on climate change is crucial to raise awareness and advocate for action. The world is facing environmental challenges, so in a situation like this such essay topics can serve as s platform to discuss the causes, effects, and solutions to this pressing issue. They offer an opportunity to engage readers in understanding the urgency of mitigating climate change for the sake of our planet’s future.

Must Read: Essay On Environment  

Table of Contents

• 1 What Is Climate Change?
• 2 What are the Causes of Climate Change?
• 3 What are the effects of Climate Change?
• 4 How to fight climate change?
• 5 Essay On Climate Change in 100 Words
• 6 Climate Change Sample Essay 250 Words

What Is Climate Change?

Climate change is the significant variation of average weather conditions becoming, for example, warmer, wetter, or drier—over several decades or longer. It may be natural or anthropogenic. However, in recent times, it’s been in the top headlines due to escalations caused by human interference.

What are the Causes of Climate Change?

Obama at the First Session of COP21 rightly quoted “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it.”.Identifying the causes of climate change is the first step to take in our fight against climate change. Below stated are some of the causes of climate change:

• Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Mainly from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) for energy and transportation.
• Deforestation: The cutting down of trees reduces the planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide.
• Industrial Processes: Certain manufacturing activities release potent greenhouse gases.
• Agriculture: Livestock and rice cultivation emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

What are the effects of Climate Change?

Climate change poses a huge risk to almost all life forms on Earth. The effects of climate change are listed below:

• Global Warming: Increased temperatures due to trapped heat from greenhouse gases.
• Melting Ice and Rising Sea Levels: Ice caps and glaciers melt, causing oceans to rise.
• Extreme Weather Events: More frequent and severe hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires.
• Ocean Acidification: Oceans absorb excess CO2, leading to more acidic waters harming marine life.
• Disrupted Ecosystems: Shifting climate patterns disrupt habitats and threaten biodiversity.
• Food and Water Scarcity: Altered weather affects crop yields and strains water resources.
• Human Health Risks: Heat-related illnesses and the spread of diseases.
• Economic Impact: Damage to infrastructure and increased disaster-related costs.
• Migration and Conflict: Climate-induced displacement and resource competition.

How to fight climate change?

‘Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority,’ says Bill Gates. The below points highlight key actions to combat climate change effectively.

• Energy Efficiency: Improve energy efficiency in all sectors.
• Protect Forests: Stop deforestation and promote reforestation.
• Sustainable Agriculture: Adopt eco-friendly farming practices.
• Advocacy: Raise awareness and advocate for climate-friendly policies.
• Innovation: Invest in green technologies and research.
• Government Policies: Enforce climate-friendly regulations and targets.
• Corporate Responsibility: Encourage sustainable business practices.
• Individual Action: Reduce personal carbon footprint and inspire others.

Essay On Climate Change in 100 Words

Climate change refers to long-term alterations in Earth’s climate patterns, primarily driven by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, leading to global warming. The consequences of climate change are widespread and devastating. Rising temperatures cause polar ice caps to melt, contributing to sea level rise and threatening coastal communities. Extreme weather events, like hurricanes and wildfires, become more frequent and severe, endangering lives and livelihoods. Additionally, shifts in weather patterns can disrupt agriculture, leading to food shortages. To combat climate change, global cooperation, renewable energy adoption, and sustainable practices are crucial for a more sustainable future.

Must Read: Essay On Global Warming

Climate Change Sample Essay 250 Words

Climate change represents a pressing global challenge that demands immediate attention and concerted efforts. Human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, have significantly increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This results in a greenhouse effect, trapping heat and leading to a rise in global temperatures, commonly referred to as global warming.

The consequences of climate change are far-reaching and profound. Rising sea levels threaten coastal communities, displacing millions and endangering vital infrastructure. Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires, have become more frequent and severe, causing devastating economic and human losses. Disrupted ecosystems affect biodiversity and the availability of vital resources, from clean water to agricultural yields.

Moreover, climate change has serious implications for food and water security. Changing weather patterns disrupt traditional farming practices and strain freshwater resources, potentially leading to conflicts over access to essential commodities.

Addressing climate change necessitates a multifaceted approach. First, countries must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions through the transition to renewable energy sources, increased energy efficiency, and reforestation efforts. International cooperation is crucial to set emission reduction targets and hold nations accountable for meeting them.

In conclusion, climate change is a global crisis with profound and immediate consequences. Urgent action is needed to mitigate its impacts and secure a sustainable future for our planet. By reducing emissions and implementing adaptation strategies, we can protect vulnerable communities, preserve ecosystems, and ensure a livable planet for future generations. The time to act is now.

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in Earth’s climate patterns, primarily driven by human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation.

Five key causes of climate change include excessive greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, notably burning fossil fuels and deforestation. 

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Where does global warming occur in the atmosphere, why is global warming a social problem, where does global warming affect polar bears.

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Human activity affects global surface temperatures by changing Earth ’s radiative balance—the “give and take” between what comes in during the day and what Earth emits at night. Increases in greenhouse gases —i.e., trace gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that absorb heat energy emitted from Earth’s surface and reradiate it back—generated by industry and transportation cause the atmosphere to retain more heat, which increases temperatures and alters precipitation patterns.

Global warming, the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near Earth’s surface over the past one to two centuries, happens mostly in the troposphere , the lowest level of the atmosphere, which extends from Earth’s surface up to a height of 6–11 miles. This layer contains most of Earth’s clouds and is where living things and their habitats and weather primarily occur.

Continued global warming is expected to impact everything from energy use to water availability to crop productivity throughout the world. Poor countries and communities with limited abilities to adapt to these changes are expected to suffer disproportionately. Global warming is already being associated with increases in the incidence of severe and extreme weather, heavy flooding , and wildfires —phenomena that threaten homes, dams, transportation networks, and other facets of human infrastructure. Learn more about how the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, released in 2021, describes the social impacts of global warming.

Polar bears live in the Arctic , where they use the region’s ice floes as they hunt seals and other marine mammals . Temperature increases related to global warming have been the most pronounced at the poles, where they often make the difference between frozen and melted ice. Polar bears rely on small gaps in the ice to hunt their prey. As these gaps widen because of continued melting, prey capture has become more challenging for these animals.

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global warming , the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near the surface of Earth over the past one to two centuries. Climate scientists have since the mid-20th century gathered detailed observations of various weather phenomena (such as temperatures, precipitation , and storms) and of related influences on climate (such as ocean currents and the atmosphere’s chemical composition). These data indicate that Earth’s climate has changed over almost every conceivable timescale since the beginning of geologic time and that human activities since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have a growing influence over the pace and extent of present-day climate change .

Giving voice to a growing conviction of most of the scientific community , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), published in 2021, noted that the best estimate of the increase in global average surface temperature between 1850 and 2019 was 1.07 °C (1.9 °F). An IPCC special report produced in 2018 noted that human beings and their activities have been responsible for a worldwide average temperature increase between 0.8 and 1.2 °C (1.4 and 2.2 °F) since preindustrial times, and most of the warming over the second half of the 20th century could be attributed to human activities.

AR6 produced a series of global climate predictions based on modeling five greenhouse gas emission scenarios that accounted for future emissions, mitigation (severity reduction) measures, and uncertainties in the model projections. Some of the main uncertainties include the precise role of feedback processes and the impacts of industrial pollutants known as aerosols , which may offset some warming. The lowest-emissions scenario, which assumed steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2015, predicted that the global mean surface temperature would increase between 1.0 and 1.8 °C (1.8 and 3.2 °F) by 2100 relative to the 1850–1900 average. This range stood in stark contrast to the highest-emissions scenario, which predicted that the mean surface temperature would rise between 3.3 and 5.7 °C (5.9 and 10.2 °F) by 2100 based on the assumption that greenhouse gas emissions would continue to increase throughout the 21st century. The intermediate-emissions scenario, which assumed that emissions would stabilize by 2050 before declining gradually, projected an increase of between 2.1 and 3.5 °C (3.8 and 6.3 °F) by 2100.

Many climate scientists agree that significant societal, economic, and ecological damage would result if the global average temperature rose by more than 2 °C (3.6 °F) in such a short time. Such damage would include increased extinction of many plant and animal species, shifts in patterns of agriculture , and rising sea levels. By 2015 all but a few national governments had begun the process of instituting carbon reduction plans as part of the Paris Agreement , a treaty designed to help countries keep global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels in order to avoid the worst of the predicted effects. Whereas authors of the 2018 special report noted that should carbon emissions continue at their present rate, the increase in average near-surface air temperature would reach 1.5 °C sometime between 2030 and 2052, authors of the AR6 report suggested that this threshold would be reached by 2041 at the latest.

The AR6 report also noted that the global average sea level had risen by some 20 cm (7.9 inches) between 1901 and 2018 and that sea level rose faster in the second half of the 20th century than in the first half. It also predicted, again depending on a wide range of scenarios, that the global average sea level would rise by different amounts by 2100 relative to the 1995–2014 average. Under the report’s lowest-emission scenario, sea level would rise by 28–55 cm (11–21.7 inches), whereas, under the intermediate emissions scenario, sea level would rise by 44–76 cm (17.3–29.9 inches). The highest-emissions scenario suggested that sea level would rise by 63–101 cm (24.8–39.8 inches) by 2100.

The scenarios referred to above depend mainly on future concentrations of certain trace gases, called greenhouse gases , that have been injected into the lower atmosphere in increasing amounts through the burning of fossil fuels for industry, transportation , and residential uses. Modern global warming is the result of an increase in magnitude of the so-called greenhouse effect , a warming of Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere caused by the presence of water vapour , carbon dioxide , methane , nitrous oxides , and other greenhouse gases. In 2014 the IPCC first reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides in the atmosphere surpassed those found in ice cores dating back 800,000 years.

Of all these gases, carbon dioxide is the most important, both for its role in the greenhouse effect and for its role in the human economy. It has been estimated that, at the beginning of the industrial age in the mid-18th century, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were roughly 280 parts per million (ppm). By the end of 2022 they had risen to 419 ppm, and, if fossil fuels continue to be burned at current rates, they are projected to reach 550 ppm by the mid-21st century—essentially, a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in 300 years.

A vigorous debate is in progress over the extent and seriousness of rising surface temperatures, the effects of past and future warming on human life, and the need for action to reduce future warming and deal with its consequences. This article provides an overview of the scientific background related to the subject of global warming. It considers the causes of rising near-surface air temperatures, the influencing factors, the process of climate research and forecasting, and the possible ecological and social impacts of rising temperatures. For an overview of the public policy developments related to global warming occurring since the mid-20th century, see global warming policy . For a detailed description of Earth’s climate, its processes, and the responses of living things to its changing nature, see climate . For additional background on how Earth’s climate has changed throughout geologic time , see climatic variation and change . For a full description of Earth’s gaseous envelope, within which climate change and global warming occur, see atmosphere .

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References:

• Ackerman, K. V., & Sundquist, E. T. (2008). Comparison of two U.S. power-plant carbon dioxide emissions data sets. Environmental Science & Technology, 42(15), 5688-5693.
• Adams, P. N., & Inman, D. L. (2009). Climate change and potential hotspots of coastal erosion along the southern California coast—final report. Sacramento, California: Energy Commission.
• Adger, W. N., Paavola, J., Huq, S., & Mace, M. J. (Eds.). (2006). Fairness in adaptation to climate change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Macmillan, A. (2016, March 11). Global warming 101. NRDC. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/global-warming-101
• Author, B. (2018, January 19). Global warming essay: Causes, effects, solutions. PTE Academic Exam. https://pteacademicexam.com/global-warming-essay/

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Analysis: The most ‘cited’ climate change papers

Robert McSweeney

On Monday, we revealed the results of our survey of scientists in which we asked them to name the “most influential” climate change papers of all time.

The most popular nomination was a seminal paper by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T Wetherald published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences in 1967.

Now, we turn from the subjective to the objective and look at which are the most “cited” climate change papers. Here, Carbon Brief analyses which papers have had the biggest impact in the academic world, and who wrote them.

Thousands of peer-reviewed academic papers are published about climate change every year. These articles form the bedrock of climate science, underpinning the assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

With so many papers from so many journals, some inevitably sink without trace. But others become the centrepiece of their field or spark new areas of research.

Published papers

There are various databases to search through which list the thousands of academic papers published each year. Amidst options such as Google Scholar and Web of Science , we plumped for Scopus , the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.

In Scopus, we searched for any academic paper with the phrase ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ in its title, abstract or keywords. We also tried using just ‘climate’ for the searches, but that produced a very broad range of articles. As we wanted to look at both the top papers and all papers far beyond the top 100, we wouldn’t have manually been able to filter out all the non-climate papers for the analysis. So we went with ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, though this does mean that some climate change papers without those terms in the title, abstract or keywords would miss out.

But in response to queries from some climate scientists , we’ve also, for comparison, included the top 10 ‘climate’ papers at the end of the article.

We then limited the search to give us only pure research articles, filtering out other publications such as book chapters, conference papers, review articles and editorials.

The search yields a total of almost 120,000 papers, as of the beginning of June this year. You can see below how the number of published papers about climate change took off during the 2000s.

Total number of climate change papers published, by year. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

As the chart below shows, most of the papers relate to environmental science (25% of papers), earth and planetary science (22%) and agricultural and biological sciences (16%). But the search also unearths papers from social science (8%), medicine (3%) and even dentistry (0%, or 4 papers).

Subject of climate change papers, by topic area. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

Most prolific

Across all 120,000 papers, the most prolific author is Dr Philippe Ciais from the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat and de l’Environment in Paris. Ciais has 120 published articles on climate change, mostly about the global carbon cycle.

Coming in second is Prof Richard Tol , from the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex , with 113. And third place goes to Prof Josep Penuelas , director of the Global Ecology Unit at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona . You can see the rest of the top 10 in the graphic below.

Top 10 most prolific authors of climate change papers. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

But while the number of publications shows how prolific a researcher is, it doesn’t reveal how influential their work is. To do that we need to look at citations.

Citation, citation, citation

In an academic paper, scientists will refer to previous work by other scientists in their field.  This may be to set the scene of their research or acknowledge a method or finding that someone else produced. In doing this they refer to, or ‘cite’, other academic papers.

Databases such as Scopus keep track of how many times each paper has been cited by others. We extracted the 100 most cited climate change papers.

The top paper, with 3,305 citations, is Nature paper, ” A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems “, by Prof Camille Parmesan , at the University of Texas and Plymouth University , and Prof Gary Yohe , from Wesleyan University .

Published in 2003, the paper assessed the global impact of climate change on more than 1,700 biological species, from birds and butterflies to trees and alpine herbs. Parmesan and Yohe found that 279 species are already being affected by climate change, and 74-91% of these changes agree with what is expected from projections.

This paper also featured in our analysis as one of the papers that IPCC authors considered the most influential .

In runners-up spot is an Ecological Modelling paper from 2000, ” Predictive habitat distribution models in ecology “, with 2,746 citations. The paper was written by Prof Antoine Guisan , now of the Université de Lausanne , and Dr Niklaus Zimmerman of the Swiss Federal Research Institute .

And coming in third is ” Extinction risk from climate change “, again published in Nature, with 2,562 citations. This 2004 paper has 19 authors, but the lead was Dr Chris Thomas from the University of Leeds .

Our infographic below shows the top 10 most cited papers on climate change.

Top 10 most cited climate change papers. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

Apart from the Parmesan and Yohe article, just one of our top most influential papers according to IPCC authors makes the top 100 of most cited. This is the Journal of Climate paper “ Robust responses of the hydrological cycle to global warming “, by Prof Isaac Held and Prof Brian Soden , which comes in 34th.

So where are the climatic luminaries of Syukuro Manabe , Guy Callendar and Charles Keeling ? Well, primarily, Scopus doesn’t yet have complete citations for papers published before 1996, so older papers might be underrepresented in the top 100 most cited.

But another reason could be that papers tend to have more citations in recent years because there are more papers on climate change being published, so more opportunities to be cited. This is reflected in the top 100, where most are from 2000 onwards, and none before 1988.

Likewise, very recent papers don’t appear in the top 100 because they haven’t been around long enough to accrue citations. The most recent paper in the top 100 was published in 2011.

Most appearances

So we’ve looked at which authors produce the most papers, but which have appeared most often in the top 100 of cited papers? No researcher appeared more than twice as a lead author, but four appeared as at least a co-author in five papers.

Featuring in this group is, once again, Prof Ciais. But alongside him with five papers are Dr Josep Canadell , the executive director of the Global Carbon Project at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation ( CSIRO ) in Australia, Dr Richard Houghton , a senior scientist at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, and Prof Colin Prentice , professor of life sciences at Imperial College London .

Beyond the leading four, another two researchers are authors on four papers, and a further ten have authored three. This makes up a top 16 of authors behind the 100 most cited papers, which you can see in the graphic below.

Top 16 authors with the most papers in the top 100 most cited. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

Western focus

We also looked at which institutions were behind the top 100 papers. This time we just concentrated on the primary institution that each paper’s lead author was affiliated to.

Two come out top, with six papers each: the University of East Anglia , and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US. In total, there are 17 institutions with at least two papers in the top 100.

Looking at the countries where these institutions reside, there is a prominent leaning towards western countries in the northern hemisphere. The US and the UK dominate, with almost three-quarters of the top 100 papers.

Papers in the top 100, by institution. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

The rest are sprinkled through Europe, with a few further afield, including Australia, China and Costa Rica.

For comparison, we’ve also mapped which countries all 120,000 papers were authored from. Although note this isn’t a direct comparison, because this data include the locations of all the authors on each paper, not just the lead.

Map of countries with most papers, for the top 100 most cited (top), and for all climate change papers (bottom). Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief and © OpenStreetMap contributors © CartoDB.

You can see again that researchers in the US and UK are responsible for the bulk of climate change papers, but, interestingly, China comes in third with 7%. Looking into the data, over a fifth of these papers have an author from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In fact, according to Scopus, over 2,200 of all 120,000 papers have at least one author from the Chinese Academy, though just one makes into our top 100 most cited.

Top journals

Finally, we looked at where our top 100 most-cited papers were published. And there were no surprises here. Top of the tree are journal powerhouses  Nature  (27 papers) and  Science  (26), accounting for over half of the top 100, and Nature has six of the top 10. This doesn’t include sister journals, such as  Nature Climate Change  or  Science Advances .

Trailing behind at some distance are  Journal of Climate  (9),  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  (4) and  Review of Geophysics  (3). No other journal makes more than two appearances in the top 100.

Top 100 climate papers, by journal. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

But do Nature and Science only come out top because they publish the most articles on climate change? According to Scopus, it seems not.

Of all 120,000 papers, most were published by Geophysical Research Letters (3,057 papers), followed by Journal of Climate (2,600) and Climatic Change (2,200). Nature comes in 12th (839) and Science way down in 20th (625).

Here’s the entire Top 100 list if you want to have a look yourself.

Top ‘climate’ papers

As we mentioned earlier, searching for papers on “climate change” or “global warming” may mean overlooking some climate-related papers that don’t necessarily have these terms in their title, abstract or keywords. So, for comparison, below is the top 10 most cited “climate” papers.

Top 10 most cited climate papers. Differences in citation numbers between top 10 climate papers and top 10 climate change papers (see earlier graphic) are because the database was searched on different days. Data from Scopus. Credit: Rosamund Pearce, Carbon Brief

The most cited “climate” paper is ” The NCEP/NCAR 40-year reanalysis project “, with a total of 13,905 citations. The paper has 22 authors, but the lead was Prof Eugenia Kalnay , then at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction at NOAA in the US, but now of the University of Maryland .

Published in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1996, the paper describes the development of a 40-year global climate record, which has been used – and hence cited – in thousands of other climate studies.

Graphic preview: The top ten most cited climate papers.

Updated on 10 July 2015: We amended the top15 most cited authors infographic to add in a scientist we missed out.

• Analysis: The most 'cited' climate change papers

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Global warming.

The causes, effects, and complexities of global warming are important to understand so that we can fight for the health of our planet.

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Global warming is the long-term warming of the planet’s overall temperature. Though this warming trend has been going on for a long time, its pace has significantly increased in the last hundred years due to the burning of fossil fuels . As the human population has increased, so has the volume of fossil fuels burned. Fossil fuels include coal, oil, and natural gas, and burning them causes what is known as the “greenhouse effect” in Earth’s atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect is when the sun’s rays penetrate the atmosphere, but when that heat is reflected off the surface cannot escape back into space. Gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels prevent the heat from leaving the atmosphere. These greenhouse gasses are carbon dioxide , chlorofluorocarbons, water vapor , methane , and nitrous oxide . The excess heat in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to rise overtime, otherwise known as global warming.

Global warming has presented another issue called climate change. Sometimes these phrases are used interchangeably, however, they are different. Climate change refers to changes in weather patterns and growing seasons around the world. It also refers to sea level rise caused by the expansion of warmer seas and melting ice sheets and glaciers . Global warming causes climate change, which poses a serious threat to life on Earth in the forms of widespread flooding and extreme weather. Scientists continue to study global warming and its impact on Earth.

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The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof

Definitive answers to the big questions.

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By Julia Rosen

Ms. Rosen is a journalist with a Ph.D. in geology. Her research involved studying ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to understand past climate changes.

• Published April 19, 2021 Updated Nov. 6, 2021

The science of climate change is more solid and widely agreed upon than you might think. But the scope of the topic, as well as rampant disinformation, can make it hard to separate fact from fiction. Here, we’ve done our best to present you with not only the most accurate scientific information, but also an explanation of how we know it.

How do we know climate change is really happening?

• How much agreement is there among scientists about climate change?
• Do we really only have 150 years of climate data? How is that enough to tell us about centuries of change?
• How do we know climate change is caused by humans?
• Since greenhouse gases occur naturally, how do we know they’re causing Earth’s temperature to rise?
• Why should we be worried that the planet has warmed 2°F since the 1800s?
• Is climate change a part of the planet’s natural warming and cooling cycles?
• How do we know global warming is not because of the sun or volcanoes?
• How can winters and certain places be getting colder if the planet is warming?
• Wildfires and bad weather have always happened. How do we know there’s a connection to climate change?
• How bad are the effects of climate change going to be?
• What will it cost to do something about climate change, versus doing nothing?

Climate change is often cast as a prediction made by complicated computer models. But the scientific basis for climate change is much broader, and models are actually only one part of it (and, for what it’s worth, they’re surprisingly accurate ).

For more than a century , scientists have understood the basic physics behind why greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause warming. These gases make up just a small fraction of the atmosphere but exert outsized control on Earth’s climate by trapping some of the planet’s heat before it escapes into space. This greenhouse effect is important: It’s why a planet so far from the sun has liquid water and life!

However, during the Industrial Revolution, people started burning coal and other fossil fuels to power factories, smelters and steam engines, which added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Ever since, human activities have been heating the planet.

Where it was cooler or warmer in 2020 compared with the middle of the 20th century

Global average temperature compared with the middle of the 20th century

+0.75°C

–0.25°

30 billion metric tons

Carbon dioxide emitted worldwide 1850-2017

Rest of world

Other developed

European Union

Developed economies

Other countries

United States

E.U. and U.K.

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• Biology Article
• Essay on Global Warming

Essay On Global Warming

Essay on global warming is an important topic for students to understand. The essay brings to light the plight of the environment and the repercussion of anthropogenic activities. Continue reading to discover tips and tricks for writing an engaging and interesting essay on global warming.

Essay On Global Warming in 300 Words

Global warming is a phenomenon where the earth’s average temperature rises due to increased amounts of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone trap the incoming radiation from the sun. This effect creates a natural “blanket”, which prevents the heat from escaping back into the atmosphere. This effect is called the greenhouse effect.

Contrary to popular belief, greenhouse gases are not inherently bad. In fact, the greenhouse effect is quite important for life on earth. Without this effect, the sun’s radiation would be reflected back into the atmosphere, freezing the surface and making life impossible. However, when greenhouse gases in excess amounts get trapped, serious repercussions begin to appear. The polar ice caps begin to melt, leading to a rise in sea levels. Furthermore, the greenhouse effect is accelerated when polar ice caps and sea ice melts. This is due to the fact the ice reflects 50% to 70% of the sun’s rays back into space, but without ice, the solar radiation gets absorbed. Seawater reflects only 6% of the sun’s radiation back into space. What’s more frightening is the fact that the poles contain large amounts of carbon dioxide trapped within the ice. If this ice melts, it will significantly contribute to global warming. 

A related scenario when this phenomenon goes out of control is the runaway-greenhouse effect. This scenario is essentially similar to an apocalypse, but it is all too real. Though this has never happened in the earth’s entire history, it is speculated to have occurred on Venus. Millions of years ago, Venus was thought to have an atmosphere similar to that of the earth. But due to the runaway greenhouse effect, surface temperatures around the planet began rising. 

If this occurs on the earth, the runaway greenhouse effect will lead to many unpleasant scenarios – temperatures will rise hot enough for oceans to evaporate. Once the oceans evaporate, the rocks will start to sublimate under heat. In order to prevent such a scenario, proper measures have to be taken to stop climate change.

More to Read: Learn How Greenhouse Effect works

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• Begin the essay with an introductory paragraph detailing the history or origin of the given topic.
• Try to reduce the use of jargons. Use sparingly if the topic requires it.
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• Insert and highlight factual data, such as dates, names and places.
• Remember to break up the content into smaller paragraphs. 100-120 words per paragraph should suffice.
• Always conclude the essay with a closing paragraph.

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Article Contents

Introduction, i. climate change causes of action: a brief overview, ii. significant issues in climate change litigation, iii. the individual as plaintiff in climate change litigation.

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Climate Change and the Individual

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Margaret Rosso Grossman, Climate Change and the Individual, The American Journal of Comparative Law , Volume 66, Issue suppl_1, July 2018, Pages 345–378, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avy018

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“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.” 1 Atmospheric and ocean temperatures are rising, “[p]recipitation patterns are changing, sea level is rising, the oceans are becoming more acidic, and the frequency and intensity of some extreme weather events are increasing.” 2 The 2017 Climate Science Special Report describes the current state of scientific knowledge about U.S. and global climate change. The report concludes that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation.” 3

Global data show that 2016 was the warmest year on record and the third consecutive year for record global average surface temperatures. 4 In the continental United States, 2016 was the second warmest year on record, after 2012, with higher than average precipitation and fifteen climate-related disasters including drought, wildfire, floods, and severe storms, which caused losses of more than $1 billion. 5

The emission of greenhouses gases (GHGs), 6 which move about in the atmosphere, is a major cause of global climate change. GHGs absorb terrestrial radiation that leaves the Earth’s surface. Although GHGs “create the natural heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere” and are “necessary to life as we know it,” high concentrations of GHGs cause an increase in the Earth’s absorption of energy and the resulting increase in temperature referred to as global warming. 7

Recent research identifies deadly effects of climate change, “one of the biggest global threats to human health of the 21st century.” 8 If global GHG emissions are not reduced, heat waves will affect 74% of the world’s population by 2100. Even with drastic GHG reductions, almost half of humans will face deadly heat. 9 In Europe, increasing temperatures will result in weather disasters, especially heat waves and coastal flooding, and a sharp increase in climate-related deaths by 2100. 10 By 2050, climate change may affect nutrition in developing countries as rising temperatures reduce availability of plant proteins. 11

Although a number of U.S. statutes govern human activities related to climate change, no comprehensive climate change legislation exists. 12 Federal programs (including the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan 13 ), as well as regional, state, and local initiatives, promised to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. Recent developments, however, have diluted federal efforts. 14 For example, in March 2017, President Trump revoked significant Obama-administration climate change policies, including the Climate Action Plan and related strategies. 15 This revocation and others that followed are likely to result in increased emissions and a failure to meet climate targets (e.g., energy efficiency, methane emissions). 16

Significantly, in June 2017, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, 17 a decision that triggered international condemnation, as well as criticism from state and local governments and large corporations in the United States. In August 2017, the United States notified the United Nations of its intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as the United States is eligible, unless it “identifies suitable terms for reengagement.” 18 The U.S. withdrawal was characterized as a “severe backwards move and an abrogation of its responsibility as the world’s second largest emitter . . . when more, not less, commitment is needed from all governments to avert the worst impacts of climate change.” 19 Despite this withdrawal, however, the United States could meet its Paris goals through the efforts of cities, states, and businesses. 20

The global crisis of climate change has affected the practice of law. 21 Indeed, in recent years, climate change has engendered “a rapidly building wave of litigation” in the United States. 22 Although the judiciary is “a latecomer to the crisis that has worsened in the hands of the legislative and executive branches,” 23 litigation can play a role in forcing government regulatory action and perhaps in providing remedies for harm from GHG emissions. As commentators observed, “[t]he president might root out climate policy from executive branch decision-making, but he cannot unilaterally remove the issue from judicial consideration.” 24

This Report, guided by a questionnaire prepared for the Twentieth General Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law, addresses the topic of climate change lawsuits and the individual. The questionnaire focuses on lawsuits filed by individual plaintiffs against public and private actors to achieve mitigation of climate change or adaptation to its effects. It does not focus on legal persons, such as corporations and other legal entities. Of the hundreds of climate change cases filed in the United States, only a small number involve individual plaintiffs. Other cases involve environmental organizations that sue on behalf of their members, demanding mitigation or adaptation and sometimes damages for injury. To provide background, this Report first reviews possible causes of action to remedy climate change. It raises a number of difficult issues faced by plaintiffs in climate change litigation. The Report then reviews a number of cases brought by individual plaintiffs and environmental organizations against public and private actors.

Climate change litigation, defined broadly, is “any piece of federal, state, tribal, or local administrative or judicial litigation in which the party filings or tribunal decisions directly and expressly raise an issue of fact or law regarding the substance or policy of climate change causes and impacts.” 25 An empirical study identified 201 U.S. agency proceedings and court cases involving climate change up to 2010. 26 Two types of issues were predominant: government agency responsibility to restrict GHG emission by rule or permit and government compliance with statutory requirements for environmental impact assessment in decisions to approve GHG sources. 27 Most climate change litigation asked courts to decide “whether and how administrative agencies must take climate change into account in decisionmaking under existing statutes.” 28

The “wave of litigation” continued, and by April 2018, a database of U.S. climate change litigation listed 857 “cases,” broadly defined. 29 This database, linking to more than 3,094 documents, collects a wide variety of court cases, administrative actions, petitions for rulemaking, and other matters related to climate change. In some of the court cases in the database, climate change is not the main focus of the litigation. Claims represented in these cases arose under federal and state statutes, the Constitution, common law, public trust, securities and financial regulation, and trade agreements; a few cases involved climate change protesters and scientists. 30

A. Regulatory Litigation

A significant number of U.S. climate change cases are based on federal statutes and regulations, and many seek judicial review of administrative decisions. Both industry and environmentalists have sued. Industry cases often challenge government regulatory environmental standards. Suits by environmentalists often seek more stringent regulation for mitigation or adaptation. Under the Clean Air Act, for example, environmentalist suits include petitions to require agency rulemaking or other climate-related action and various challenges to administrative actions such as the granting of permits. Other cases challenge agency decisions under the National Environmental Policy Act 31 and other federal laws for failure to consider GHG emissions and the impact of climate change. Some of these climate change lawsuits have led to stricter regulation—for example, EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions after Massachusetts v. EPA . 32

State law claims, too, challenge administrative decisions, with environmental plaintiffs often seeking stronger regulation or challenging permits. Even more state law cases allege inadequate consideration of GHG emissions and climate change under state environmental impact laws. Cases that challenge inadequate adaptation measures sometimes rely on statutory and regulatory requirements or, in local cases, on local government ordinances.

B. Common Law

Although climate change litigation based on various federal and state statutes has predominated, a few plaintiffs have brought common law causes of action, albeit with little success. 33 Most are tort claims for damages, and scholars have expressed views on the most effective causes of action in climate change lawsuits. Nuisance and negligence offer some possibility for success, with trespass and civil conspiracy considered less helpful. Strict liability is another possible remedy, 34 and some cases rely on public trust.

Nuisance law, with its focus on unreasonable injury, may be effective for some climate change claims. 35 Public nuisance lawsuits are appropriate to abate “an unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public.” 36 American Electric Power, Co. v. Connecticut , 37 however, limited federal common law public nuisance claims in areas governed by statute, holding that “the Clean Air Act and the EPA actions it authorizes displace any federal common law right to seek abatement of carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel fired power plants.” 38 Common law nuisance claims based on state common law may continue to be viable. 39

Relatively few plaintiffs have sued in negligence, but some commentators see negligence as the most appropriate tort cause of action. 40 Typical requirements for a prima facie case in negligence—duty, breach of duty, proximate cause, and damages—raise significant challenges in cases against GHG emitters, especially in proving that emissions breached a duty to plaintiffs and that defendant’s emissions caused plaintiff’s injury. Negligence may be more successful in adaptation cases against local governments or property developers, but proving that the defendant’s alleged negligence, rather than an extreme precipitation event, was proximate cause of plaintiff’s harm may be difficult. 41

Despite the existence of some climate change tort cases, tort law may not be an effective means to mitigate or adapt to climate change. As one influential scholar insisted, “climate change ill fits the existing tort paradigm.” 42 Specifically, this scholar explained:

Diffuse and disparate in origin, lagged and latticed in effect, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions represent the paradigmatic anti-tort, a collective action problem so pervasive and so complicated as to render at once both all of us and none of us responsible. Thus, courts will have ample reason—not to mention doctrinal weaponry—to prevent climate change tort suits from reaching a jury. 43

Others agree that tort law is intended to solve private and local disputes, rather than big societal problems:

Climate change and other so-called “collective action” problems simply cannot be addressed through the common-law tort system. That system was developed to address essentially private disputes, involving lines of fault and causation running directly between discrete parties. It was never intended, and cannot reasonably be applied, to allow a judge or jury to assess and allocate liability for any and all societal concerns. 44

Legislatures, instead of courts, have “the authority and the capacity to consider and develop responses to [climate change], and only after a regulatory architecture has been established can judges and juries properly (and constitutionally) play a role.” 45

C. Public Trust

Beginning around 2011, plaintiffs have filed a number of cases relying, at least in part, on the public trust doctrine. 46 Some are part of a global campaign, the Atmospheric Trust Litigation, connected with a nonprofit, Our Children’s Trust. 47 Public trust, with roots in Roman and English law, requires governments to protect certain natural resources, “the gifts of nature’s bounty,” for present and future generations. 48 Although the precise source of public trust in U.S. law is hard to identify, the doctrine is an ancient attribute of federal and state sovereignty with constitutional force. 49

Plaintiffs (primarily young people) in recent public trust litigation insist that the government owes a fiduciary obligation to its citizen beneficiaries to protect public trust assets, including the atmosphere and water bodies affected by GHG emissions. State public trust law is evolving and may help to address climate change. A few courts have recognized the atmosphere as a public trust asset, and a few decisions have resulted in a court-ordered state GHG rulemaking. 50 Sixteen states have ecological public trusts; five have indicated that their doctrines are evolutionary, responding to changing environmental circumstances; and two have explicitly extended public trust to the atmosphere. 51 It is possible, therefore, that adaptation to climate change could “become an official state duty, geared to protecting as much of the public interest in and rights to natural resources and ecosystems as possible in light of climate change impacts.” 52

Some scholars urge the use of judicial restraint to limit climate change litigation, relying perhaps on standing and the political question doctrine. 53 Climate change, it is argued, is “a massive global and undifferentiated problem is one that must be addressed by the political branches of government—Congress and the EPA—and ultimately by international bodies.” 54 Nonetheless, litigants have turned to the courts for relief from harm caused by GHG emissions.

Courts, in general, accept the science of climate change 55 and conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others that anthropogenic emissions of GHGs are a major cause of climate change. 56 The majority opinion in Massachusetts v. EPA , decided in 2007, illustrates:

A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species—the most important species—of a “greenhouse gas.” 57

Despite judicial acceptance of the science, climate change litigation raises a number of issues. Some arise in nearly all climate change litigation; others apply to specific types of lawsuits, depending on the cause of action and the parties. The following discussion focuses on major issues common to cases brought to mitigate or abate the effects of climate change. It does not attempt to identify every possible defense or obstacle facing plaintiffs in climate change cases. 58

A. Standing

Under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, 59 which limits federal judicial authority to cases and controversies, plaintiffs who sue in federal court must have standing to sue; state courts also require standing. The doctrine of standing helps to ensure that the plaintiff has a personal stake in the controversy and that issues will be resolved in a “proper adversarial presentation.” 60

The U.S. Supreme Court articulated the elements of standing in an environmental law decision:

[T]o satisfy Article III’s standing requirements, a plaintiff must show (1) it has suffered an “injury in fact” that is (a) concrete and particularized and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical; (2) the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant; and (3) it is likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision. 61

The injury required for standing is injury to the plaintiff, rather than to the environment. 62 Only one plaintiff must have standing to invoke the jurisdiction of the court, 63 and the plaintiff bears the burden of establishing the elements of standing. 64

Nongovernmental and other organizations often bring climate change lawsuits on behalf of their members. These associations, the Supreme Court noted, have standing if “members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right, the interests at stake are germane to the organization’s purpose, and neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual members in the lawsuit.” 65

The plaintiff’s injury in fact must be particularized and imminent. The Supreme Court noted that “[b]y particularized, we mean that the injury must affect the plaintiff in a personal and individual way.” 66 Some scholars have noted that plaintiffs must allege harms that are more than “generalized grievances shared by all citizens.” 67 On a global scale, however, climate change “defies any notion of particularized injury.” 68 The fact that harms from climate change are widespread may lead courts to conclude that those harms are generalized grievances, but in a leading standing decision, Massachusetts v. EPA , the Supreme Court indicated that widely shared risks do not minimize the plaintiff’s interest in the outcome of litigation. 69

The plaintiff’s injury must be “fairly traceable” to defendant’s action. That is, the plaintiff must identify a causal connection between defendant’s behavior and injury caused by climate change. Given the nature of GHGs, plaintiffs are unlikely to identify a direct causal connection to a source of emissions. 70 As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit indicated, the analysis of traceability in climate change cases might use “the standard by which a public nuisance action imposes liability on contributors to an indivisible harm,” 71 a standard short of scientific certainty or proof of proximate cause, thus allowing “a substantial likelihood of causal contribution [to satisfy] the test of traceability” for standing. 72

Redressability can also pose difficulties for plaintiffs: “If redressability requires successful elimination of the entire climate change problem, then no plausible suit could ever clear the standing hurdle.” 73 Focus on redressing the harm suffered by the plaintiff makes satisfying this element more likely. As the Supreme Court noted in Massachusetts , climate change has enormous consequences; the plaintiff must allege that the requested remedy would slow or reduce global warming, but not that a favorable decision can relieve every injury. 74

Two types of climate change cases illustrate issues of standing. One involves a challenge to government failure to consider the impacts of climate change in making decisions under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 75 the Endangered Species Act (ESA), 76 or other statutes. The other involves claims that the Clean Air Act 77 or other statutes require the government to take more regulatory action to mitigate climate change. 78

Some federal statutes, most prominently the NEPA, 79 require the government to assess the environmental impacts of certain actions that affect the environment. Some courts denied standing to petitioners who challenged government failure to consider climate change in environmental assessments, in part because the effects of a proposed project were remote, rather than actual and imminent, and because their alleged harm (increased global temperature) was not particularized. 80 More recently, in WildEarth Guardians v. Jewell , 81 the D.C. Circuit granted standing to plaintiffs who established “that consideration of climate change would have impacted the decision that allegedly harms them, even if the harm is not itself related to climate change.” 82 Plaintiffs’ aesthetic and recreational interests supported standing, and their challenge to the failure to consider climate change could be litigated along with other issues in the case. 83 Indeed when plaintiffs allege that their procedural rights are violated (e.g., failure to consider climate change in a decision that results in harm to environmental interests), they may “tend to fare better when they can articulate an underlying injury for standing purposes that is not itself climate based .” 84

Standing is relevant when a plaintiff challenges the government’s failure to regulate GHG emissions under federal pollution control statutes. Standing was a threshold issue in Massachusetts v. EPA . 85 States, local governments, and private organizations alleged that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had “abdicated its responsibility under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to regulate the emissions of four greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide” from new motor vehicles. 86 Petitioners asked the Supreme Court to determine whether the EPA had statutory authority to regulate GHG emissions and whether the EPA’s reasons for failing to regulate were consistent with the CAA. In its standing determination, the Court recognized that GHG emissions caused widespread harm, but held that the state of Massachusetts satisfied the constitutional requirements for standing. Massachusetts, as landowner and parens patriae for its citizens, faced injury from the risk of rising sea levels that could swallow coastal land. In terms of causation, carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles contributed significantly to GHG concentrations. The regulation of those carbon dioxide emissions would help to redress the injury suffered by Massachusetts and its citizens. 87

The Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts was solicitous of states as plaintiffs, but some argue that the decision “weakened the traditional requirements for Article III standing,” 88 especially causation and redressability. As one scholar suggested, private plaintiffs could cite the Court’s reasoning to support standing in similar cases involving injury from rising sea levels due to climate change, but subsequent cases have been “confusing” on standing. 89 Nonetheless, standing decisions are difficult (and “often logically suspect”) in cases where the claim is that “a government action or inaction permits or leaves unregulated some activity” that contributes to climate change and its harm. 90

B. The Political Question Doctrine

The political question doctrine is, in a sense, a separation of powers issue, which applies in a federal law context. That is, it holds that certain types of issues are “committed to an elected branch of government and thus should not be heard in federal court.” 91 The political question doctrine might be considered an aspect of prudential standing, beyond the requirements for Article III standing, that can “ensure respect for the separation of powers.” 92

In Baker v. Carr , a leading political question decision, the Supreme Court articulated six attributes of a nonjusticiable political question and indicated that only if one of those attributes is “inextricable” from the dispute should the court dismiss the case as a political question. 93 The Court indicated that cases that involve political actions or issues are not normally nonjusticiable political questions. Indeed, few Supreme Court cases have been found to present political questions. 94

In the climate change context, the political question doctrine was analyzed in trial and appellate decisions in Connecticut v. American Electric Power , a case involving federal common law nuisance claims seeking abatement of carbon dioxide emissions from electric power corporations. The federal district court in New York noted that climate change was “patently political” and “transcendently legislative.” It focused especially on a Baker v. Carr attribute, “the impossibility of deciding without an initial policy determination of a kind clearly for nonjudicial discretion,” and determined that it needed a legislative policy determination before it could decide the global warming complaints. The district court therefore dismissed the case as raising nonjusticiable political questions. 95 On appeal, the Second Circuit applied the Baker v. Carr factors, analyzing each factor in detail, and concluding that none of the factors applied. The dispute was not inherently political, and the court could hear a public nuisance suit. Therefore, the Second Circuit reversed. 96 The Supreme Court granted certiorari, but did not reach the political question issue. Instead, the Court held that the Clean Air Act, which authorizes the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, displaced plaintiffs’ federal common law nuisance claims. 97

In a more recent case alleging violation of constitutional and public trust rights, a federal district court analyzed plaintiffs’ claims in light of the six criteria in Baker v. Carr . The court concluded that the case did not raise a nonjusticiable political question, but involved a determination of whether plaintiffs’ constitutional rights had been violated. The court acknowledged, however, that if plaintiffs prevail, a remedy would have to be crafted carefully to avoid separation of powers issues. 98

Some scholars urge the use of judicial restraint, using standing and the political question doctrine, to dismiss tort litigation in the context of climate change. 99 But the political question doctrine does not apply often, and others believe that it was not intended to apply to nonconstitutional issues or, if it applies, should not preclude review of common law claims. That is, “courts should not hide from these issues behind the veil of the political question doctrine.” 100

C. Displacement

The doctrine of displacement, a separation of powers issue between the judicial and legislative branches, 101 has prevented the resolution of some prominent climate change cases based on federal common law. A leading displacement decision is American Electric Power, Co. v. Connecticut ( AEP ), 102 a federal common law public nuisance claim for injunctive relief, alleging that GHG emissions from power companies contributed to global warming. Federal common law applies only when Congress had not regulated, and Massachusetts v. EPA 103 had held that the CAA authorized federal regulation of GHG emissions. The EPA had issued its “endangerment” finding 104 and had begun the regulatory process. Therefore, the Court held “that the Clean Air Act and the EPA actions it authorizes displace any federal common law right to seek abatement of carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel fired power plants.” 105 The test for displacement of federal common law is “whether the statute ‘speak[s] directly to [the] question’ at issue.” 106 Congressional delegation of authority to the EPA to regulate (or not to regulate) emissions displaced federal common law, even before the EPA promulgated regulations. The court stated clearly, however, that “EPA’s judgment . . . would not escape judicial review” through administrative law challenges in the federal courts. 107

Although plaintiffs in AEP v. Connecticut sought injunctive relief, later cases indicated that displacement does not depend on the type of remedy. For example, Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil 108 was a federal public nuisance claim against energy producers for money damages brought by an Alaskan village threatened by erosion from storm waves and surges attributed to global warming. Although federal common law nuisance could apply to transboundary pollution, the Ninth Circuit stated that common law “is subject to the paramount authority of Congress,” 109 and that displacement of the common law right of action displaces all its remedies. Therefore, the court held, “ AEP extinguished Kivalina’s federal common law public nuisance damage action,” just as it had extinguished the abatement actions at issue in AEP . 110 The court’s conclusion was not affected by the fact that Kivalina sought damages for harms that occurred before the EPA established GHG standards. Congressional empowerment of the EPA triggered displacement, which applies even if the executive branch has not yet acted under its congressional authority.

AEP v. Connecticut focused on federal common law, but did not reach the plaintiff’s state law claims. The Court noted, however, that “the availability . . . of a state lawsuit depends, inter alia , on the preemptive effect of the federal” CAA. 111 Preemption requires a “clear and manifest [congressional] purpose” 112 and is generally disfavored. Nonetheless, the complications of climate change cases mean that the EPA can more efficiently regulate GHG emissions. 113

Recent cases allege harm to public trust assets, including the atmosphere and territorial seas. Public trust claims were not at issue in AEP v. Connecticut , and so far, the displacement doctrine has not been applied to public trust claims. Characterized as substantive due process claims, these public trust rights, which predate and are secured by the Constitution, are unique because the government obligation to protect the trust property “cannot be legislated away.” 114

D. Causation and Problems of Proof

As a threshold determination, standing requires a causal connection between the defendant’s conduct and the plaintiff’s injury, which must be “fairly traceable” to defendant’s action. 115 On the merits, however, proof of causation may be a significant barrier to recovery, particularly in tort cases claiming damages for injuries caused by climate change. Plaintiffs must generally prove the connection between the defendant’s GHG emissions and plaintiff’s harm, as well as the extent of defendant’s contribution to that harm.

The nature of climate change raises significant evidentiary problems. GHGs come from many sources; some have persisted in the atmosphere, and others are present-day emissions. Some emissions come directly from industry; others, less direct, come when many individuals burn fossil fuels. In fact, “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes the key causal mechanism of climate change as ‘well-mixed greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere. Such mixing obscures particular contributions and makes attribution of harm difficult. Yet the law generally assigns liability only when particular contributions can be related to particular effects.” 116

Therefore, plaintiffs in climate change cases will face “enormous difficulties” in proving causation, especially “that emissions from a particular site, or group of sites, actually made their way into the atmosphere, and once there contributed to climate change, which then caused a specific event . . . and that provable damages ensued.” 117 A 2017 international study asserted that “no court has yet found that particular GHG emissions relate causally to particular adverse climate change impacts for the purpose of establishing liability.” 118 Moreover, plaintiffs face the additional burden of proving that defendant’s GHG emissions were a substantial factor in their particularized damages. 119 Apportionment of damages among numerous sources of GHGs will raise particular challenges. 120

Some tort causes of action (negligence, negligent nuisance) require proof that the defendant’s actions were unreasonable. Defendants who operated under a valid government permit or whose GHG emissions were not regulated may have acted reasonably. Moreover, in negligence cases, plaintiffs may not meet the requirement of proximate cause if, for example, flood damage was caused by extreme rainfall, rather than breach of duty by the defendant. 121 Intentional torts (intentional nuisance, trespass) require proof that the defendant knew of the resulting harm or was “substantially certain” that harm would result from the defendant’s actions. 122

When plaintiffs claim damages from climate change, difficulties in proving causation and other issues and in collecting a substantial portion of damages mean that the “financial viability of these cases from a plaintiff’s perspective in many instances is highly questionable.” 123

Problems of proof faced by climate change plaintiffs are often due to “gaps or uncertainties in relevant climate science,” in part because scientific studies have focused on large-scale effects, rather than more local impacts. 124 Advances in scientific research may make proof of causation easier, allowing plaintiffs to identify defendants and to apportion their responsibility more accurately. 125 An article published in 2014, for example, noted that climate change is the result of historic emissions and traced emissions to major carbon producers. The study, based on records from 1854 to 2010, found that 63% of cumulative global emissions of industrial CO 2 and methane originated from ninety international “carbon major” entities (companies, state-owned enterprises, and nations). 126 For some cases, studies like this could make apportionment of damages easier.

In the United States, individuals have the right to comment on regulatory proposals and participate in administrative agency proceedings. Moreover, many statutes have citizen-suit provisions that allow individuals and others affected by statutory or regulatory violations to sue for violations, sometimes after giving notice to the agency. Plaintiffs must generally meet the threshold requirements discussed above. Few individuals, however, have the resources for costly, protracted litigation against governments or private actors. 127 Instead, plaintiffs in climate change litigation tend to be environmental organizations and associations. The following discussion therefore includes some cases brought by environmental organizations.

A. Human Rights and Public Trust

Although climate change threatens people globally and in the United States, few climate change cases in the United States have focused on human rights. In 2005, the Inuit community in Alaska petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, claiming that U.S. failure to control GHGs had violated Inuit human rights. The Commission did not decide the case, but the Inuit petition helped to highlight “the human rights implications of climate change.” 128

In recent years, public trust litigation, often in state courts, has raised human rights claims, with mixed success. 129 These cases, many brought by young people under the auspices of Our Children’s Trust, allege that public trust requires government action on climate change. Using petitions for rulemaking, often seeking carbon recovery plans, as well as lawsuits, they form “a full-scale, coordinated campaign with multiple suits pending and others teed up in different forums, all connected by a common template of science and law.” 130 Most petitions and lawsuits have been unsuccessful, but a few have led to regulatory action. 131 Successful atmospheric trust litigation requires the court to recognize its judicial role in enforcing public trust obligations, identifying government obligations to protect the atmosphere as a public trust asset, and crafting remedies that will “ensure that the political branches fulfill their trust obligation.” 132

A federal case filed in Oregon illustrates the efforts of individual plaintiffs to gain acceptance of the public trust doctrine in the context of climate change. Plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States 133 are twenty-one young people, one adult (guardian for future generations), and Earth Guardians, a youth association with a chapter in Oregon. They sued the United States, the President, and executive agencies, alleging that defendants knew for decades that burning fossil fuels destabilized the climate system, but nonetheless enabled exploitation and use of fossil fuels, allowing CO 2 concentrations in the atmosphere to escalate.

Because the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly protect the environment, plaintiffs in Juliana alleged that defendants’ actions “violate their substantive due process rights to life, liberty, and property, and that defendants have violated their obligation to hold certain natural resources in trust for the people and for future generations.” 134 They sought a declaration that their rights had been violated and an order enjoining continued violation and requiring preparation of a plan to reduce emissions of CO 2 . Defendants and intervenors moved to dismiss, asserting, among other claims, that the case raised political questions, plaintiffs lacked standing, the federal government is not subject to public trust claims. The judge’s thoughtful opinion affirmed and supplemented the magistrate judge’s denial of the motion to dismiss.

The judge identified the questions at issue: “[W]hether defendants are responsible for some of the harm caused by climate change, whether plaintiffs may challenge defendants’ climate change policy in court, and whether this Court can direct defendants to change their policy without running afoul of the separation of powers doctrine.” 135

On the political question issue, the court analyzed the case in light of the Supreme Court criteria 136 and concluded that the case did not raise a nonjusticiable political question, but instead involved a determination of “whether defendants have violated plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.” 137 Moreover, plaintiffs met constitutional requirements for standing. They alleged particularized and imminent injuries, which are ongoing and likely to recur. 138 Plaintiffs’ injuries are fairly traceable to defendant’s actions and are redressable because the relief requested (a remedial plan to phase out emissions and reduce CO 2 ) will help to slow climate change. 139

The court then evaluated plaintiffs’ due process and public trust claims. Applying a strict scrutiny standard, because of possible infringement of a fundamental right, the court noted that “the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.” 140 The court held that “where a complaint alleges governmental action is affirmatively and substantially damaging the climate system in a way that will cause human deaths, shorten human lifespans, result in widespread damage to property, threaten human food sources, and dramatically alter the planet’s ecosystem, it states a claim for a due process violation.” 141 The court evaluated the plaintiffs’ claim of harm to public trust assets and held that the doctrine applies to the federal government. Unlike common law nuisance claims, AEP v. Connecticut did not displace public trust, and those claims, characterized as substantive due process claims, can be heard in federal court. 142

Perhaps recognizing the novelty of her decision, the judge commented that “[f]ederal courts too often have been cautious and overly deferential in the arena of environmental law, and the world has suffered for it.” 143 Defendants moved for an interlocutory appeal, but in June 2017, the district court denied defendants’ motion. 144 The United States filed a writ of mandamus in the Ninth Circuit, arguing in part, that

[t]he District Court’s rulings in this case show a clear and continuing intent to usurp the power of Congress to determine national policy regarding energy development, use of public lands and environmental protection by constructing out of whole cloth a novel constitutional right to a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.” 145

The Ninth Circuit stayed the district court proceedings until further order and heard oral arguments on December 11, 2017. 146

Juliana is the first federal court decision holding that “there might be a constitutional right to a sound environment,” but it seems unlikely, according to a climate law scholar, that the plaintiffs will ultimately prevail. 147 Indeed, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a suit against federal defendants because public trust was a matter of state law. 148 Similarly, cases in state courts may be unsuccessful. For example, a New Mexico state court rejected application of the public trust with a separation of powers rationale. 149 An individual plaintiff and a conservation organization alleged that the public trust obligated the government to regulate GHG emissions. The New Mexico Court of Appeals held that the state constitution includes a public trust duty to protect natural resources, including the atmosphere, but that public trust arguments “must be raised within the existing constitutional and statutory framework,” rather than by a common law action. 150 The Air Quality Control Act addresses regulation of GHGs and allows plaintiffs the right to participate in the administrative process, so courts cannot independently regulate GHG emissions. Therefore, the court affirmed the trial court’s summary judgment for the state.

B. Mitigation Cases v. Public Actors

Many federal and state cases seek mitigation of climate change. Some (for example, Massachusetts ) demand regulatory action; others demand consideration of GHG emissions and climate change in governmental decision making. 151 Industry cases against public actors often challenge regulatory measures to mitigate climate change. 152

Two state-court cases brought by youth plaintiffs as part of atmospheric trust litigation illustrate individual-plaintiff lawsuits against public actors for mitigation. In both, plaintiffs sought review of environmental agency denials of petitions for rulemaking. In one, the court required GHG regulations; in the other, the trial court required regulations and recognized plaintiff’s public trust and constitutional rights, but its order was reversed on appeal.

In Kain v. Department of Environmental Protection , individual state residents and two associations sought a declaratory judgment or writ of mandamus to require the Department to regulate GHG emissions as required by Massachusetts law. 153 After petitioning the Department, which cited regulatory initiatives and asserted that it had complied with the law, state residents sued. The trial court dismissed plaintiff’s claims, and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts granted review and concluded that the Department had not complied with statutory requirements. Therefore, the court required the Department

to promulgate regulations that address multiple sources or categories of sources of greenhouse gas emissions, impose a limit on emissions that may be released, limit the aggregate emissions released from each group of regulated resources or categories of sources, set emission limits for each year, and set limits that decline on an annual basis. 154

Foster v. Washington Department of Ecology 155 was a public-trust challenge to the Washington Department of Ecology’s denial of a 2014 petition for a rule to propose science-based GHG emission limits to the legislature. In June 2015, the court ordered the Department of Ecology (DOE) to reconsider its denial of plaintiffs’ petition, especially in light of the DOE’s own report, which the court characterized as an “urgent call to action” on climate change, that emphasized the importance of prompt action on climate change, but failed to recommend stricter emission limits. 156 In November 2015, the court affirmed the DOE’s second denial of the plaintiffs’ petition because rulemaking had begun, but emphasized the state and DOE duty to protect public trust and other rights under the Washington state constitution. 157 In May 2016, however, after the DOE’s rulemaking lagged, the judge ordered the DOE to finalize its rule and make recommendations for GHG emission reductions to the legislature. 158 The Department of Ecology appealed this order. 159

By the end of 2016, the DOE had issued its GHG rule and recommended GHG emission limitations to the legislature. Nonetheless, in a December 2016 opinion, the trial court judge, sua sponte , granted petitioners leave to amend their complaint to add a complaint for declaratory judgment that that DOE is violating their inalienable constitutional and public-trust rights to a healthy environment. The court retained jurisdiction of the case to give the plaintiffs their day in court. 160 In another order, the court took “judicial notice of the fact that federal mechanisms designed to protect the environment are now under siege, more than ever leaving to the States the obligation to protect their citizens under the Public Trust Doctrine.” 161 In September 2017, the Washington Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s May 2016 order as an abuse of discretion. 162

The trial court’s approach in Foster is significant because of its recognition of the crisis of climate change, its declaration of public-trust protection of the atmosphere, and its emphasis on the importance of science for rulemaking. 163 In Foster , the judge “declared an atmospheric public trust responsibility of constitutional magnitude in a context framed by urgency, severe danger to humanity, and agency recalcitrance.” 164

C. Climate Change in Environmental Impact Assessment

1. federal law.

A significant number of U.S. cases (more than 300) focus on government responsibility to consider the impact of GHG emissions and climate change in decision making. Federal cases rely on the NEPA, the ESA, 165 and other statutes; state cases rely on state impact assessment laws. In an analysis of litigation through 2010, researchers found “a fairly well defined case law under NEPA . . . establishing that GHG emissions and climate change impacts are fair game for impact assessment procedures, but that the normal rules apply for determining the level of analysis agencies must provide.” 166 Most NEPA claims had been unsuccessful, but some more recent cases have found treatment of climate change in environmental impact statements (EIS) inadequate. 167 The Council on Environmental Quality provided guidance for federal agency consideration of GHG emissions and climate change effects under the NEPA. 168 A 2017 executive order required that guidance to be withdrawn, but the withdrawal in April 2017 did not change any “legally binding requirement,” 169 so the NEPA will continue to require consideration of climate change in environmental assessments and EIS.

Plaintiffs—often environmental advocacy groups acting on behalf of their members—in many of these NEPA cases have sued to force analysis of climate change by federal agencies or to challenge the sufficiency of analysis in an EIS. A few decisions have required consideration of climate change in impact assessment. 170 Many others have evaluated agencies’ climate change analysis under a deferential standard of review and found the agency’s analysis adequate. 171

For example, a recent NEPA case brought by environmental advocacy organizations on behalf of their individual members is WildEarth Guardians v. U.S. Forest Service . 172 Petitioners in consolidated cases challenged Forest Service approvals of coal leases, alleging violations of the NEPA and other statutes. Petitioners claimed that the coal leases on federal land in Wyoming had major impacts on CO 2 emissions, affected global climate change, and threatened members’ enjoyment of the leased land areas. Members’ documentation of the effects of leases on their use and enjoyment of the areas satisfied standing requirements. 173 Nonetheless, the court affirmed the agency decisions. In the EIS prepared for the coal leases, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management “did not ignore the effects of coal combustion, GHGs and climate change” and considered risk of harm. 174 Applying a deferential standard of review, the court held that the NEPA analysis was not arbitrary and capricious. This decision, however, has been criticized as portraying “an interpretation of NEPA shorn of its capacity to compel agencies to consider how their decisions impact the energy infrastructure that is at the heart of climate change.” 175

Some plaintiffs seeking mitigation of climate change fail to satisfy threshold requirements. In Amigos Bravos v. U.S. BLM , 176 for example, citizen environmental groups alleged, among other claims, that BLM approval of gas leases on almost 69,000 acres in New Mexico violated several federal statutes by failing to address climate change, global warming, and GHG emissions. Although environmental groups have standing to sue if their members would have standing, these plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that their members suffered injury in fact because they presented no factual support or scientific evidence for their allegations that climate change would impact members’ lives significantly or that climate change would cause imminent harm to the environment in New Mexico, nor did they show that their members used the land subject to BLM leases. Further, plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the BLM’s approval of the leases made a “meaningful contribution” to climate change; therefore the court also concluded that plaintiffs failed to show that their alleged harms were “fairly traceable” to the BLM’s actions. The federal district court therefore dismissed the suit for lack of standing. 177

2. State Impact Assessment

Of the many state law impact assessment cases (142, in the Sabin Center Database, with a number filed recently), few have named individual plaintiffs. More typical are cases with associations as plaintiffs. State claims, especially under the California Environmental Quality Act, 178 have been more successful than cases under the NEPA. 179 In Center for Biological Diversity v. City of Desert Hot Springs , 180 for example, a California trial court held that the environmental impact report (EIR) required under California law was inadequate, in part because it failed to determine the effects of a large development project on GHGs or global warming.

Some individual plaintiffs challenged consideration of climate change in assessments of local projects, with mixed success. For example, individual plaintiffs challenged their county’s failure to prepare an EIR (instead of a less detailed statement) for a subdivision intended for agro-industrial development. 181 Among plaintiffs’ allegations was the failure to consider the environmental effects of odors and other emissions from livestock facilities, effects on air quality, and increased GHG emissions. After the trial court denied plaintiff’s claims, the appellate court held that county approval of the subdivision was a project under the CEQA and required preparation of an EIR because of impact on traffic at an intersection adjacent to the site, but not because the county’s climate change analysis was deficient.

In another case, an individual and two associations challenged the EIR on San Francisco’s 2005 Bicycle Plan, prepared under the California Environmental Quality Act. 182 The trial court ruled that the EIR complied with the Act, but the individual plaintiff appealed the order, alleging that the 2000-page EIR was deficient. The appellate court rejected arguments (among others) that the EIR, which considered GHG emissions, did not adequately consider climate change and other environmental effects of the Bicycle Plan. The court did, however, require revision of the EIR, which failed to comply with a technical requirement of the Act by omitting specific findings of infeasibility, when the City did not adopt measures that might mitigate significant effects on the environment.

D. Adaptation Cases v. Public Actors

Climate change policy and litigation in the United States emphasized mitigation, with less focus on adaptation. More recently, however, adaptation has received more attention, both in policy and litigation. State and local law have been particularly important, especially in the context of climate effects on coastal and other communities. 183 A few cases demand injunctions to require adaptation measures; others seek compensation for property damage. 184

Cases filed after Hurricane Katrina, though not strictly adaptation cases, sought damages for failure of the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) to adapt to the effects of climate change. The Army Corps’ action in widening the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet shipping channel and moving it closer to levees increased storm surge. That is, the government canal increased the risk of flooding, and the Corps did not act to avoid flooding. 185 Plaintiff’s choice of cause of action, however, was critical. Claims alleging negligence were unsuccessful, but some claims alleging temporary takings resulted in Court of Claims decisions for plaintiffs.

In re Katrina Canal Breaches Consolidated Litigation addressed tort claims from plaintiffs (some of the more than 400 individuals) who alleged that the Army Corps’ negligent design and failure to maintain the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet contributed to damage from Hurricane Katrina. The district court concluded that the ACE’s failure to maintain and operate the Gulf Outlet properly led to severe flooding. 186 The court held, in part, that the discretionary function exception to the federal Tort Claims Act did not apply. 187

The Fifth Circuit affirmed most of the district court’s legal conclusions, 188 but then granted the government’s petition for rehearing and withdrew its opinion. On rehearing, the same panel held the government was immune from liability under the discretionary function exception to the Tort Claims Act. 189 Its decision for the government affected the bellwether plaintiffs whose cases had been litigated, as well as other claimants who alleged negligence.

In other litigation after Hurricane Katrina, the St. Bernard Parish government and individual property owners filed a Fifth Amendment Takings Clause claim against the United States. 190 Plaintiffs claimed that the Army Corps’ operation of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet had increased storm surge and flooding after Hurricane Katrina and subsequent hurricanes, resulting in temporary taking of their property.

The 2015 Court of Claims liability decision relied on factual determinations in Katrina Canal Breaches, which found that the Army Corps’ negligence in maintaining and operating the Gulf Outlet was a substantial cause of the flooding. 191 The court in St. Bernard Parish held that plaintiffs had protected property interests with reasonable investment-backed expectations, and that the severe and foreseeable flooding constituted a temporary taking. 192

In 2016, after failure of the parties to settle or mediate, the Court of Claims calculated just compensation for the plaintiffs’ damages. 193 Because property was not lost or destroyed, plaintiffs received no compensation for the value of their fee-simple interest. Instead, they received compensation for the value of replacement improvements on the property and for loss of rent as a result of flooding. The judge entered a final partial judgment with just compensation for eleven “trial properties,” certified a class of property owners, and appointed class counsel. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will review the Court of Claims’ decisions. 194

As these federal court decisions suggest, “[c]urrent tort doctrine shields the government in most cases from negligence suits related to climate change adaptation,” but government defendants may be more vulnerable to takings claims, which do not require unreasonable government action. 195 Takings claims could address the failure to take adaptive measures, taking ineffective measures, or actions that increase property losses. But these actions do not fit “the traditional paradigm of the Takings Clause, wherein the government is held liable for directly causing a loss of property that otherwise would not have happened”; for Takings Clause liability, government actions should be “both the but-for and the proximate cause of property loss.” 196 In some instances, however, government failure to prevent property losses—that is, “passive takings”—could lead to liability, and the St Bernard Parish case might support that approach. 197

2. State Law

Individual and other plaintiffs can bring adaptation cases against states and local governmental units; negligence, takings, and fraud are possible causes of action. Some experts argue that tort law is appropriate for “adaptation liability,” particularly if plaintiffs can prove that defendants’ actions were unreasonable “in light of the well-established science of climate change” and the expectation that governments will provide adaptive infrastructure. 198

Sovereign immunity poses obstacles for state law cases, particularly for fraud and some negligence claims, but is less likely to bar takings claims. 199 Although government tort claims acts waive sovereign immunity in some situations (dangerous conditions or failure to maintain public property), sovereign immunity may protect state and local governments from tort liability for actions involving discretionary functions, nonstructural measures, failure to adopt regulations, or failure to provide benefits that states have no duty to provide. 200 Despite some immunity for state and local governments, “when governments act as landowners they are subject to liability for impacts from their construction and operation of structural measures.” 201

Few adaptation cases involve individual plaintiffs. In a recent New York case, plaintiff homeowners sustained water damage to their property after severe storms in 2011 overwhelmed the sewer system. They sued the City of New York and its Department of Environmental Protection in negligence for failure to maintain sewer lines to prevent flooding. The City claimed that it had no knowledge of maintenance issues or defective conditions. Under New York law, a municipality is immune from negligence for discretionary activities (designing a sewer or drainage system). For ministerial actions (negligent maintenance), liability exists only if the municipality violates a special duty to the plaintiff, beyond the duty to the public. The city owed no special duty to plaintiffs, nor did plaintiffs prove negligence; the “sole proximate cause” of flooding was precipitation. Therefore, the court granted summary judgment to the city and dismissed the case. 202 Similarly, in Illinois, plaintiffs sued to recover for flooding of their homes after heavy rainfall. In consolidated cases, the court dismissed claims against Cook County and other government defendants under the public duty rule, which applies to provision of government services owed to the public at large, rather than to individual plaintiffs. 203

Individuals are defendants, rather than plaintiffs, in eminent domain, which allows governments to acquire property for projects to adapt to the effects of climate change. In a New Jersey case, the local government took permanent easements over beachfront property to construct a 20-foot dune. The easement covered a quarter of the owners’ property; the dune obstructed their beach view, but offered significant protection to the owners and others in the community. In a dispute over just compensation, a jury awarded the owners $375,000, and an appellate court affirmed. The New Jersey Supreme Court, reversing, held that just compensation for a partial taking

must be based on a consideration of all relevant, reasonably calculable, and non-conjectural factors that either decrease or increase the value of the remaining property. In a partial-takings case, homeowners are entitled to the fair market value of their loss, not to a windfall, not to a pay out that disregards the home’s enhanced value resulting from a public project. 204

Ultimately, the owners settled for $1. Fair-market-value analysis may decrease the cost of adaptation measures, if just compensation for eminent domain considers benefits, as well as losses, from the project to property owners. 205

E. Climate Change Cases v. Private Actors

Relatively few individual climate change plaintiffs have sued private actors. Owners of private facilities are not protected by sovereign immunity, but the Clean Air Act displaces some federal common law claims. 206 State tort law claims may remain viable, and some argue that tort claims are particularly appropriate, in part because “the primary goals of tort law [are] . . . its ability to resolve disputes between individuals while galvanizing changed behavior amongst communities.” 207 Nonetheless, tort cases against private actors have not been particularly successful. 208 Impediments to recovery for property damage include proving a breach of duty by past emitters and a causal connection between emissions and harms, as well as the complexity of tort cases. 209 Claims against property developers, or perhaps engineers and architects, who should recognize climate change vulnerability of land that they sell or develop, may be less difficult, but others issues—for example, foreseeability of harm from climate change—may pose obstacles to recovery. 210

Comer v. Murphy Oil USA was a putative class action lawsuit against a number of energy corporations brought by a dozen individuals who owned coastal property destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Plaintiffs sued for damages under Mississippi common law claims of public and private nuisance, trespass, and negligence, as well as other claims. 211 The Fifth Circuit held that the landowners had standing for the tort actions, but not the other claims, and that the tort claims were not barred as a nonjusticiable political question. The opinion was vacated when the court granted rehearing en banc, 212 but judicial recusals led to a lack of quorum for the rehearing, and the court did not reinstate the vacated opinion. 213

More recently, a pending citizen suit brought by Conservation Law Foundation on behalf of its individual members seeks declarative and injunctive relief and civil penalties. Plaintiffs allege that ExxonMobil’s storage terminal (with toxic and hazardous chemicals) poses a risk to public health and the environment, in part because ExxonMobil failed to adapt to effects of climate change, so a storm surge, sea level rise, or extreme rain could flood the facility. 214 In September 2017, the federal district court denied defendant’s motion to dismiss claims for short-term damages, but held that plaintiffs lacked standing for claims for damages not likely to occur until 2050 or 2100.

Private actors may also be defendants in suits by governmental units. In July 2017, three local governments in California sued thirty-seven private oil, gas, and coal companies alleged to be responsible for 20% of pollution from CO 2 and methane from 1965 to 2015. 215 Causes of action in the complaints include public nuisance, private nuisance, negligence, trespass, and strict liability for failure to warn and design defect. Quoting industry documents showing that since the 1960s defendants knew, but concealed their knowledge, that GHG pollution from fossil fuels affected climate and sea levels, plaintiffs alleged that defendants’ conduct led to continued sea-level rise that injured plaintiffs and their citizens. Plaintiffs’ claims for relief include compensatory and punitive damages, abatement of nuisances, disgorgement of profits, and other costs. 216

Individual plaintiffs have claimed climate change fraud, alleging that energy companies have misled investors and the public about the risks of climate change from their activities. A recent case filed in Texas on behalf of investors alleged that ExxonMobil had committed securities fraud by failure to disclose climate-related risks. 217

Fraud may become more significant in climate change cases. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) advised companies “to consider climate change and its consequences,” including physical impacts and extreme weather conditions, in disclosure documents. 218 Moreover, the SEC and others are investigating misleading statements from energy companies, 219 and an environmental organization petitioned for ExxonMobil’s suspension as a government contractor because of its deceptive behavior and “campaign of misinformation” on climate change. 220 Recent research concluded that energy companies knew of the risks of climate change, had the opportunity to reduce those risks, but instead acted to misinform the public. 221

As the discussion above indicates, climate change litigation raises complex issues, especially for private plaintiffs. Regulatory challenges as well some common law and constitutional claims are possible causes of action, but few plaintiffs have been successful. Moreover, threshold issues, including standing, the political question doctrine, and displacement, sometimes pose obstacles. Proof of causation also raises special difficulties for individual and other plaintiffs. Although U.S. “courts to date have been unwilling to impose civil liability on private entities,” science may help “address some of the causation and apportionment hurdles that have made these cases challenging.” 222 Even so, individual plaintiffs may conclude that lawsuits to mitigate or adapt to climate change are not financially viable. Environmental and other nongovernmental organizations, rather than individual plaintiffs, are more likely to have the resources to pursue climate change litigation.

This Report is based on work supported by the USDA, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch Project No. ILLU-470-348.

U.S. Global Change Research Program, Highlights of Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment 2 (Jerry M. Melillo et al. eds., 2014), https://www.globalchange.gov/sites/globalchange/files/NCA3_Highlights_LowRes-small-FINAL_posting.pdf .

Id . (“Many lines of independent evidence demonstrate that the rapid warming of the past half-century is due primarily to human activities.”).

1 U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment 12 (D.J. Wuebbles et al. eds., 2017), https://science2017.globalchange.gov/downloads/CSSR2017_FullReport.pdf .

NASA Press Release No. 17-006, NASA, NOAA Data Show 2016 Warmest Year on Record Globally (Jan. 18, 2017), https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show-2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally .

Am. Meteorological Soc’y, State of the Climate in 2016 , 98 Bull. Am. Meteorological Soc’y Si, S175, S178 (Supp. 2017). See U.S. Gov’t Accountability Office, GAO-17–720, Climate Change: Information on Potential Economic Effects Could Help Guide Federal Efforts to Reduce Fiscal Exposure (2017) (recommending government use of information on economic effects to identify risks and responses to climate change).

Significant GHGs include water vapor (H 2 O), carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ), nitrous oxide (N 2 O), ozone (O 3 ), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulphur hexafluoride (SF 6 ), as well as other substances. Although some GHGs occur naturally, human activities produce or sequester additional quantities of these gases and affect atmospheric concentrations. U.S. Envtl. Prot. Agency , EPA 430-P-17-001, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks 1990–2015 , at 1-3 to 1-8 (2017), https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-02/documents/2017_complete_report.pdf .

Id . at 1-3.

Giovanni Forzieri et al., Increasing Risk over Time of Weather-Related Hazards to the European Population: A Data-Driven Prognostic Study , 1 Lancet Planetary Health e200, e200 (2017).

Camilo Mora et al., Global Risk of Deadly Heat , 7 Nature Climate Change 501 (2017) (studying “documented lethal heat events”).

Forzieri et al., supra note 8, at e200; Susanna Ala-Kurikka, EU Scientists Warn of Huge Rise in Climate-Related Deaths , ENDSEurope , Aug. 7, 2017. Moreover, research projects a range of temperature increases by 2100 from 2 to 4.9 o C, with extremely little chance of meeting Paris Agreement goals. Adrian E. Raftery et al., Less than 2 o C Warming by 2100 Unlikely , 7 Nature Climate Change (2017), https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3352.pdf .

Danielle E. Medek, Joel Schwartz & Samuel S. Myers, Estimated Effects of Future Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations on Protein Intake and the Risk of Protein Deficiency by Country and Region , 125 Envtl. Health Perspectives 087002-1 (2017), doi:10.1289/EHP41.

For U.S. laws, see Michal Nachmany et al. , The GLOBE Climate Legislation Study 606–17 (4th ed. 2014), http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Globe2014.pdf ; Climate Change Laws of the World , Grantham Inst. , http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/climate-change-laws-of-the-world/ (last visited Apr. 11, 2018).

Exec. Office of the President, The President’s Climate Action Plan (2013), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/image/president27sclimateactionplan.pdf (focusing on reduced carbon emissions, preparation for effects of climate change, and leadership of international efforts).

See Michael Mehling, A New Direction for US Climate Policy , 11 Carbon & Climate L. Rev. 3 (2017); Avi Zevin, United States , 11 Carbon & Climate L. Rev . 162 (2017).

Exec. Order No. 13,783, Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth, 82 Fed. Reg. 16,093 (Mar. 31, 2017).

Projected Effect of Trump Administration Policy Changes on US Emissions , Climate Action Tracker , http://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa.html (last updated Nov. 6, 2017). Regulatory changes to weaken climate policies will require notice and comment rulemaking.

U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Draft Dec. 1/CP.17, Adoption of the Paris Agreement, U.N. Doc. FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1 (Dec. 12, 2015) (entered into force Nov. 4, 2016); U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Dec. 1/CP.21, Adoption of the Paris Agreement, U.N. Doc. FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1 (Jan. 29, 2016). The Paris Agreement includes nationally determined contributions, that is, voluntary pledges to mitigate GHG emissions. It does not establish enforceable GHG limits or causes of action.

Letter from Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador, to António Guterres, U.N. Secretary General (Aug. 4, 2017), https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CN/2017/CN.464.2017-Eng.pdf . The United States is eligible to withdraw on November 4, 2019, three years after the Agreement entered into force. The United States will continue to provide GHG emissions data to the U.N., as required by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, U.N. Doc. A/AC.237/18 (Part II)/Add.1 (May 15, 1992).

Projected Effect of Trump Administration Policy Changes on US Emissions , supra note 16 (rating U.S. climate change efforts as critically insufficient). U.S. ratification in September 2016 promised a reduction of net GHG emissions by 2025 to 26–28% below 2005 levels, a commitment “at the least ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution.” Id.

U.S. May Meet Emission Goals—Top U.N. Official , EENews Greenwire (July 3, 2017), https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/07/03/stories/1060056898 .

See Leah A. Dundon, Climate Science for Lawyers , 31 Nat. Res. & Env’t 20, 23 (Spring 2017).

David Markell & J.B. Ruhl, An Empirical Assessment of Climate Change in the Courts: A New Jurisprudence or Business as Usual? , 64 Fla. L. Rev. 15, 21 (2012).

Mary Christina Wood & Charles W. Woodward IV, Atmospheric Trust Litigation and the Constitutional Right to a Healthy Climate System: Judicial Recognition at Last , 6 Wash. J. Envtl. L. & Pol’y 634, 643 (2016).

Jim Rubin & Derek Furstenwerth, Trump Seeks to Uproot the Obama Climate Change Agenda, but Can He Succeed? , 48 Trends , no. 6, July/Aug. 2017, at 2, 4.

Markell & Ruhl, supra note 22, at 27.

Id . at 15.

Id . at 25.

U.S. Climate Change Litigation , Sabin Ctr. for Climate Change Law , http://climatecasechart.com/us-climate-change-litigation/ (updated monthly; numbers from Apr. 11, 2018) [hereinafter Sabin Center Database ]. This general summary of climate change cases is guided by the Sabin Center Database.

Id . Cases are listed by category, with some reported in more than one category.

National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321–4370f.

549 U.S. 497 (2007), discussed infra Part II.A.

See generally Emily Hammond & David L. Markell, Civil Remedies , in Global Climate Change and U.S. Law 239 (Michael B. Gerrard & Jody Freeman eds., 2014) (summarizing possible causes of action and obstacles to success).

See David Weisbach, Negligence, Strict Liability, and Responsibility for Climate Change , 97 Iowa L. Rev . 521, 521–27 (2012). Weisbach considered strict liability in the context of past GHG emissions; complex issues include determining sources of emissions in the face of inconsistent data and assigning responsibility for harmful effects.

See Hammond & Markell, supra note 33 (focusing on nuisance and public trust).

Restatement (Second) of Torts § 821B ( Am. Law Inst. 1979). A private nuisance is “a nontrespassory invasion of another’s interest in the private use and enjoyment of land.” Id . § 821D.

564 U.S. 410 (2011).

Id . at 424.

See Maxine Burkett, Litigating Climate Change Adaptation: Theory, Practice, and Corrective (Climate) Justice , 42 Envtl. L. Rep. 11,144, 11,144 (2012) (noting courts’ “skepticism and fatigue with complex climate litigation”).

Id. at 11,149.

Id . at 11,150. See, e.g. , Wohl v. City of New York, 45 Misc. 3d 1217(A), 2014 WL 6092059 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Oct. 22, 2014) (finding proximate cause was extreme precipitation, not the city’s negligence in maintaining sewer lines).

Douglas A. Kysar, What Climate Change Can Do About Tort Law , 42 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,739, 10,740 (2012) (suggesting that climate change could trigger an alteration of tort law).

Id . at 10,739.

David T. Buente Jr., Quin M. Sorenson & Clayton G. Northouse, A Response to What Climate Change Can Do About Tort Law , 42 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,749, 10,751 (2012).

Id. But see Andrew Gage & Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, Taking Climate Justice into Our Own Hands: A Model Climate Compensation Act (2015), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2906252 (proposing a Model Climate Compensation Act, based on common law principles and intended to facilitate climate change lawsuits in state courts).

These cases are collected at Sabin Center Database , supra note 29. Lawsuits or petitions for rulemaking have been filed in all fifty states.

See Our Children’s Trust , https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/ (last visited Feb. 19, 2018). Our Children’s Trust and related organizations have filed lawsuits and petitions for administrative rulemaking.

Joseph L. Sax, The Public Trust Doctrine in Natural Resource Law: Effective Judicial Intervention , 68 Mich. L. Rev. 471, 484 (1970). A leading case is Illinois Cent. R.R., Co. v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892).

Wood & Woodward, supra note 23, at 650–53.

E.g. , Foster v. Wash. Dep’t of Ecology, No. 14-2-25295-1 SEA (Wash. Super. Ct. June 23, 2015), discussed in Wood & Woodward, supra note 23.

Robin Kundis Craig, Climate Change, State Public Trust Doctrines, and PPL Montana 8–10 (Univ. of Utah Coll. of Law, Research Paper No. 57, 2014), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2380754 .

E.g. , Donald G. Gifford, Climate Change and the Public Law Model of Torts: Reinvigorating Judicial Restraint Doctrines , 62 S.C. L. Rev . 201, 240–57 (2010) (focusing on tort lawsuits).

Id . at 255.

Michael Gerrard, Court Rulings Accept Climate Science , 250 N.Y.L.J., Sept. 12, 2013.

Maria L. Banda & Scott Fulton, Litigating Climate Change in National Courts: Recent Trends and Developments in Global Climate Law , 47 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,121, 10,130 (2017).

Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497, 504–05 (2007).

For a lengthy list of tactical questions and issues in climate change litigation, even when standing, political question, and displacement do not bar a lawsuit, see Michael B. Gerrard, What Litigation of a Climate Nuisance Suit Might Look Like , 121 Yale L.J. Online 135 (2011).

U.S. Const. art. III, § 2.

Massachusetts , 549 U.S. at 517.

Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs.(TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 180–81 (2000) (citing Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560–61 (1992)).

Id. at 181.

Massachusetts , 549 U.S. at 518.

Lujan , 504 U.S. at 561. As one scholar noted, these elements are ill-defined, leaving room for judges to decide, for example, what is an injury, whether that injury is “fairly traceable” to the defendant’s behavior, and whether the remedy plaintiff seeks is constitutionally adequate. Daniel A. Farber, Standing on Hot Air: American Electric Power and the Bankruptcy of Standing Doctrine , 121 Yale L.J. Online 121, 122 (2011) (referring to the “unpredictability and ideological nature of standing”).

Friends of the Earth , 528 U.S. at 181.

Lujan , 504 U.S. at 560 n.1.

See Gifford, supra note 53, at 243, 244 (citing Thomas W. Merrill, Global Warming as a Public Nuisance , 30 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 293 (2005)).

Barry Kellman, Standing to Challenge Climate Change Decisions , 46 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,116, 10,117 (2016).

Massachusetts , 549 U.S. at 522, cited by Benjamin Ewing & Douglas A. Kysar, Prods and Pleas: Limited Government in an Era of Unlimited Harm , 121 Yale L.J . 352, 389 (2011).

Ewing & Kysar, supra note 69, at 392.

Connecticut v. Am. Elec. Power, Co., 582 F. 3d 309, 346 (2d Cir. 2009), rev’d on other grounds , 564 U.S. 410 (2011).

Ewing & Kysar, supra note 69, at 393.

Id . at 394.

Massachusetts , 549 U.S. at 525.

42 U.S.C. §§ 4321–4370f.

Id . §§ 1531–1544.

Id . §§ 7401–7671q.

Kellman, supra note 68, at 10,118 (identifying and analyzing two types of cases).

42 U.S.C. § 4332(C) (requiring an environmental impact statement for “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment”).

E.g. , Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. Dep’t of Interior, 563 F.3d 466, 478 (D.C. Cir. 2009) (challenging the agency’s failure to consider climate change in oil and gas leasing decision), cited by Kellman, supra note 68, at 10,118.

738 F.3d 298 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (challenging the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)’s failure to consider climate change in a decision to lease federal land for coal mining).

Kellman, supra note 68, at 10,118.

Id . at 10,118–19 (citing additional decisions).

Bruce Myers, John Broderick & Shannon Smyth, Charting an Uncertain Legal Climate: Article III Standing in Lawsuits to Combat Climate Change, 45 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,509, 10,509 (2015) (providing a chart of cases with results of challenges to standing and indicating that a majority of plaintiffs are NGOs).

549 U.S. 497 (2007).

Id. at 505.

Id . at 522–26.

Jonathan H. Adler, Warming up to Climate Change Litigation , 93 Va. L. Rev. in Brief 63, 66 (2007).

Kellman, supra note 68, at 10,120.

Id . at 10,118. See also Myers, Broderick & Smyth, supra note 84, at 10,509.

James R. May, AEP v. Connecticut and the Future of the Political Question Doctrine , 121 Yale L.J. Online 127, 127 (2011). For a detailed analysis of the political question doctrine in the context of climate change, see Ewing & Kysar, supra note 69, at 380–86.

Kevin A. Gaynor, Benjamin S. Lippard & Margaret E. Peloso, Challenges Plaintiffs Face in Litigating Federal Common-Law Climate Change Claims , 40 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,845, 10,847 (2010).

[A] textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department; or a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it; or the impossibility of deciding without an initial policy determination of a kind clearly for nonjudicial discretion; or the impossibility of a court’s undertaking independent resolution without expressing lack of the respect due coordinate branches of government; or an unusual need for unquestioning adherence to a political decision already made; or the potentiality of embarrassment from multifarious pronouncements by various departments on one question.

Connecticut v. Am. Elec. Power, Co., 582 F. 3d 309, 321 (2d Cir. 2009). See also Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp. 663 F. Supp. 2d 863 (N.D. Cal. 2009); 696 F.3d 849 (9th Cir. 2012) (affirming on displacement grounds), cert. denied , 133 S. Ct. 2390 (2013).

406 F. Supp. 2d 265, 271 n.6, 272 (S.D.N.Y. 2005).

Connecticut , 582 F.3d at 321–32. The court indicated that because Congress can displace common law standards, there is “no need for the protections of the political question doctrine.” Id . at 332. The court held that plaintiffs had standing. See also Comer v. Murphy Oil USA , discussed infra text accompanying notes 211–13.

Am. Elec. Power, Co. v. Connecticut, 564 U.S. 410, 424 (2011). See infra Part II.C for a discussion of displacement.

Juliana v. United States, 217 F. Supp. 3d 1224, 1235–42 (D. Or. 2016).

E.g. , Gifford, supra note 53, at 240–57.

E.g. , May, supra note 91, at 132–33 (quotation at 133). See also Ewing & Kysar, supra note 69, at 387.

See generally John Wood, Easier Said than Done: Displacing Public Nuisance When States Sue for Climate Change Damages , 41 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,316 (2011); Hari M. Osofsky, AEP v. Connecticut’ s Implications for the Future of Climate Change Litigation , 121 Yale L.J. Online 101 (2011).

AEP , 564 U.S. The Court was evenly decided on the issue of standing, so affirmed the Second Circuit’s exercise of jurisdiction. Id . at 420. Plaintiffs sought an injunction requiring defendants to cap and then reduce CO 2 emissions.

Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, 74 Fed. Reg. 66,496 (Envtl. Prot. Agency Dec. 15, 2009).

AEP , 564 U.S. at 424.

Id . (citations omitted).

Id . at 426.

696 F. 3d 849 (9th Cir. 2012), cert. denied , 133 S. Ct. 2390 (2013).

Id . at 857.

Id . (citing Middlesex Cty. Sewerage Auth. v. Nat’l Sea Clammers Ass’n, 453 U.S. 1 (1981)).

AEP , 564 U.S. at 429 (noting that the parties had not briefed the issues of state common law or preemption).

Id . at 423 (quoting Milwaukee v. Illinois, 451 U.S. 304, 317 (1981)).

AEP , 564 U.S. at 428. See generally Jonathan H. Adler, A Tale of Two Climate Cases , 121 Yale L.J. Online 109, 112 (2011).

Juliana v. United States, 217 F. Supp. 3d 1224, 1260 (2016). See id . at 1255–61 for a more detailed discussion.

See supra text accompanying notes 61–72. Massachusetts v. EPA did not require a “rigorous step-by-step proof of causal chains” to grant standing. Jacqueline Peel, Issues in Climate Change Litigation , 5 Carbon & Climate L. Rev . 15, 19 (2011).

Michael Burger & Justin Grundlach, U.N. Env’t Programme, The Status of Climate Change Litigation: A Global Review 20 (2017).

Ronald G. Peresich, Climate Change Litigation , 45 The Brief 28, 32, (Summer 2016 (analyzing the Comer cases).

Burger & Grundlach , supra note 116, at 20.

Peresich, supra note 117, at 33; Gaynor, Lippard & Peloso, supra note 92, at 10,853–54.

Gaynor, Lippard & Peloso, supra note 92, at 10,854–56.

Wohl v. City of New York, 45 Misc. 3d 1217(A), 2014 WL 6092059 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Oct. 22, 2014).

Restatement (Second) of Torts § 825 ( Am. Law Inst. 1979).

Gaynor, Lippard & Peloso, supra note 92, at 10,857.

Peel, supra note 115, at 19.

Banda & Fulton, supra note 56, at 10,130.

Richard Heede, Tracing Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emissions to Fossil Fuel and Cement Producers, 1854–2010 , 122 Climatic Change 229, 229 (2015). Half of all emissions between 1751 and 2010 occurred since 1986. Id . at 234. One purpose of the study was “to lay the possible groundwork for apportioning responsibility for climate change to the entities that provided the hydrocarbon products to the global economy.” Id . at 230. Some courts have used market share to apportion responsibility for harm, for example, from the synthetic estrogen DES (diethylstilbestrol). Ewing & Kysar, supra note 69, at 350.

Class action lawsuits do not seem prominent in climate change litigation. A search of the climate change litigation database identified only eight class action cases. Sabin Center Database , supra note 29.

Michael Burger & Jessica Wentz, U.N. Env’t Programme, Climate Change and Human Rights 12 (2015). In human rights cases, as in other climate change cases, evidentiary challenges have prevented success: difficulties of proving causal links between emitters, climate change, and plaintiff’s harm, and absence of GHG standards. Id . at 35.

But see id . at 23 n.151, suggesting that public trust cases do not raise human rights claims, but that “there is a clear relationship between governments’ public trust obligations—which require the maintenance and preservation of common environmental resources for the benefit of current and future generations—and governments’ human rights obligations.”

Wood & Woodward, supra note 23, at 648.

Some are discussed in the context of state lawsuits for mitigation.

Wood & Woodward, supra note 23, at 656–69 (quotation at 668). Young plaintiffs continue to bring these cases. See, e.g. , Sinnok v. Alaska, No. 3AN-17-CI (Alaska Super. Ct. filed Oct. 27, 2017).

Juliana v. United States, 217 F. Supp. 3d 1224 (D. Or. 2016). The adult, James Hansen, is a climate scientist whose recent research, published with fourteen co-authors, quantified the burden of climate change on future generations. James Hansen et al., Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO 2 Emissions , 8 Earth Sys. Dynamics 577 (2017).

Juliana , 217 F. Supp. 3d at 1233.

Id . at 1234.

Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), discussed supra text accompanying note 93.

Juliana , 217 F. Supp. 3d at 1241; political question analysis at 1235–42 (noting that a remedy, if plaintiffs prevail, would have to be crafted carefully to avoid separation of powers issues).

Id . at 1242–44. Injuries included algae blooms in drinking water, wildfires and floods, high temperatures affecting a family orchard, and a disastrous flood that destroyed a home.

Id . at 1246–47 (stating that the causal link is adequate for pleading, but at trial, causation may be difficult to prove).

Id . at 1250.

Id . at 1255–61. The court distinguishes PPL Montana, L.L.C. v. Montana, 565 U.S. 576, 603 (2012): “public trust doctrine remains a matter of state law”; “the contours of that public trust do not depend upon the Constitution.” Juliana , 217 F. Supp. 3d at 1272–76.

Throughout their objections, defendants and intervenors attempt to subject a lawsuit alleging constitutional injuries to case law governing statutory and common-law environmental claims. They are correct that plaintiffs likely could not obtain the relief they seek through citizen suits brought under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, or other environmental laws. But that argument misses the point. This action is of a different order than the typical environmental case. It alleges that defendants’ actions and inactions—whether or not they violate any specific statutory duty—have so profoundly damaged our home planet that they threaten plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional rights to life and liberty.

Order, Juliana v. United States, No. 6:15-CV-01517, 2017 WL 2483705, at *2 (D. Or. June 8, 2017) (agreeing with the magistrate’s May 2017 decision). The magistrate judge granted trade group intervenors’ motions to withdraw.

Petition for Writ of Mandamus, United States v. U.S. Dist. Court for the Dist. of Or., No. 17-71692, 2017 WL 2537433, at *40 (9th Cir. June 9, 2017).

Order, Juliana v. United States, No. 17-71692 (9th Cir. July 25, 2017); Amanda Reilly, 9th Circuit Panel Skeptical of Dismissing Kids’ Suit , E&E News PM , Dec. 11, 2017. On March 7, 2018, the Ninth Circuit denied the petition for a writ of mandamus and refused to dismiss the climate change lawsuit. United States v. United States Dist. Court for the Dist. of Or., No. 17-71692 (9th Cir. Mar. 7, 2018). The trial is scheduled for late October 2018.

Ciara O’Rourke, The 11-Year-Old Suing Trump Over Climate Change , The Atlantic (Feb. 9, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/trump-climate-lawsuit/516054/ (citing Michael Gerrard, who believes that a decision for plaintiffs would not survive Supreme Court review). See generally Michael C. Blumm & Mary Christina Wood, “No Ordinary Lawsuit”: Climate Change, Due Process, and the Public Trust Doctrine , 67 Am. U. L. Rev . 1 (2017).

Alec L. v. Jackson, 863 F. Supp. 2d 11 (D.D.C. 2012) (dismissing suit against federal defendants because public trust was a matter of state law), aff’d sub nom ., Alec L. v. McCarthy, 561 Fed. App’x 7 (Mem.) (D.C. Cir. 2014), cert. denied , 135 S. Ct. 774 (2014).

Sanders-Reed v. Martinez, 350 P.3d 1221 (N.M. Ct. App. 2015).

Id . at 1225.

Federal common law tort suits filed before 2011 focused on mitigation. Burkett, supra note 39, at 11,145 (referring to “mitigation-oriented carbon torts”).

These industry lawsuits, many challenging CAA regulations, are collected in the Sabin Center Database. E.g. , Util. Air Regulatory Grp. v. EPA, 134 S. Ct. 2427 (2014) (challenge to regulation of stationary sources under the CAA).

Kain v. Dep't of Envtl. Prot., 49 N.E.3d 1124 (Mass. 2016).

Id . at 1142. The opinion does not consider public trust.

Foster v. Washington Dep’t of Ecology, No. 14-2-25295-1 (Wash. Super. Ct. Sept. 15, 2014). The judge issued orders on June 23, 2015; Nov. 19, 2015 (reported at 2015 WL 7721362); May 16, 2016; Dec. 19, 2016; and April 18, 2017. Orders are collected in Sabin Center Database , supra note 29. For a detailed discussion of Foster , see Wood & Woodward, supra note 23, at 669–72.

Order, Foster , No. 14-2-25295-1 (June 23, 2015).

Order, Foster , 2015 WL 7721362 (Nov. 19, 2015).

Order, Foster , No. 14-2-25295-1 (May 16, 2016), following an April 29, 2016 ruling from the bench (recognizing “extraordinary circumstances”).

Foster , No. 14-2-25295-1 (Wash. Ct. App. filed June 15, 2016).

Foster , No. 14-2-25295-1 (Dec. 19, 2016) (order denying motion for order of contempt and granting sua sponte leave to file amended pleading).

Foster (Apr. 18, 2017) (order granting petitioner’s motion for leave to file supplemental brief), cited in Blumm & Wood, supra note 147, at 66 n.360.

Foster , No. 75374-6-1, 2017 WL 3868481 (Wash. Ct. App. Sept. 5, 2017). The trial court had not met the requirements for granting relief under the provision of Washington law on which it relied.

On Foster ’s significance, see Wood & Woodward, supra note 23, at 673–83.

Id . at 673. See also Martinez v. Colo. Oil & Gas Conservation Comm’n , a rulemaking petition by young plaintiffs who relied in part on public trust and constitutional rights. The Court of Appeals relied on a Colorado statute, and so did not reach the public trust issue. No. 16CA0564, 2017 WL 1089556 (Colo. App. Mar. 23, 2017) (not released for publication as of Oct. 18, 2017), petition for cert. granted , No. 17 SC 297 (Colo. Jan. 29, 2018).

The ESA requires consideration of climate change, primarily in agency consultations. See David Owen, Endangered Species Act , in Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, supra note 33, at 183, 196. See 16 U.S.C. §§ 1536(a)(2), 1536(a)(2), (b)(3); citizen-suit provision, § 1540(g). E.g. , Nat. Res. Def. Council v. Kempthorne, 506 F. Supp. 2d 322 (E.D. Cal. 2007) (consultation about threatened fish and its habitat must consider climate change), cited in Markell & Ruhl, supra note 22, at 63–64.

Markell & Ruhl, supra note 22, at 85. The NEPA is procedural and provides public notice of environmental impacts. Unlike many other federal environmental statutes, the NEPA does not have a citizen-suit provision, but litigants can sue under the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 702, which allows persons adversely affected to seek review of agency action.

Up until 2010, no court had found an agency analysis of climate change in an EIS to be inadequate. Markell & Ruhl, supra note 22, at 61–62. For a recent analysis, see Michael Burger & Jessica Wentz, Downstream and Upstream Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Proper Scope of NEPA Review , 41 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 109 (2017).

Final Guidance for Federal Departments and Agencies on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Effects of Climate Change in NEPA Reviews, announced at 81 Fed. Reg. 51,866 (Aug. 5, 2016).

Exec. Order No. 13,783, supra note 15, at 16,094; Council on Environmental Quality, Withdrawal of Final Guidance for Federal Departments and Agencies on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Effects of Climate Change in National Environmental Policy Act Reviews, 82 Fed. Reg. 16,576 (Apr. 5, 2017).

E.g. , Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. Nat’l Highway Traffic Safety Admin., 538 F.3d 1172 (9th Cir. 2008) (requiring agency to consider cumulative impact GHG implications); Mid States Coal. for Progress v. Surface Transp. Bd., 345 F.3d 521 (8th Cir. 2003) (requiring agency to consider air-quality effects and GHG emissions in rail project that would transport coal). See Paul Weiland, Robert Horton & Erik Beck, Environmental Impact Review , in Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, supra note 33, at 153, 160–64 (analyzing case law).

Weiland, Horton & Beck, supra note 170, at 161. See, e.g. , WildEarth Guardians v. Jewell, 738 F.3d 298 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (upholding a BLM decision to lease tracts for coal mining; EIS discussed climate change, but not its global impacts, and followed Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) guidance, so the court upheld it). But see High Country Conservation Advocates v. U.S. Forest Serv., 52 F. Supp. 3d 1174 (D. Colo. 2014) (EIS rejected for failure to consider impacts of emissions or costs of climate change). For more detail, see Barry Kellman, NEPA Review of Climate Change , 46 Envtl. L. Rep. 10,378, 10,382–83 (2016).

120 F. Supp. 3d 1237 (D. Wyo. 2015). Petitioners challenged the actions under the Administrative Procedure Act. The NEPA and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act lack citizen-suit provisions.

Id . at 1257.

Id . at 1273.

Kellman, supra note 171, at 10,384. See also Jessica Wentz, Planning for the Effects of Climate Change on Natural Resources , 47 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,220, 10,223 & n.28 (2017) (stating that courts defer to agency decisions about the scope of climate change review).

Amigos Bravos v. U.S. Bureau of Land Mgmt., 816 F. Supp. 2d 1118 (D.N.M. 2011).

Id . at 1138–39.

CA Pub. Res. §§ 21,000–21,189.3.

Markell & Ruhl, supra note 22, at 63 (cases to 2010).

No. RIC464585, 2008 WL 3996186 (Cal. Super. Ct. Aug. 6, 2008).

Rominger v. County of Colusa, 229 Cal. App. 4th 690 (2014).

Anderson v. City & County of San Francisco, No. A129910, 2013 WL 144915 (Cal. Ct. App. Jan. 14, 2013). See also Jones v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 183 Cal. App. 4th 818 (2010) (finding no requirement to allow public comment in final EIR amended to consider GHG emissions).

Jacqueline Peel & Hari M. Osofsky, Sue to Adapt? , 99 Minn. L. Rev. 2177, 2178–79, 2192 (2015). Little adaptation litigation occurred before 2012, although ESA and tort cases had implications for adaptation. Id . at 2192 (citing Markell & Ruhl, supra note 22, at 30–32).

Burger & Grundlach , supra note 116, at 22.

David Dana, Incentivizing Municipalities to Adapt to Climate Change: Takings Liability and FEMA Reform as Possible Solutions , 43 Envtl. Affairs 281, 290 (2016).

In re Katrina Canal Breaches Consol. Litig., 647 F. Supp. 2d 644, 679–98 (E.D. La. 2009). A number of opinions decided claims of various plaintiffs.

28 U.S.C. § 2674. The discretionary function exception, 28 U.S.C. § 2680(a), excepts any claim “based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the Government, whether or not the discretion involved be abused.”

In re Katrina Canal Breaches Litig., 673 F.3d 381, 399 (5th Cir. 2012) (withdrawn).

In re Katrina Canal Breaches Litig., 696 F. 3d 436, 454 (5th Cir. 2012), cert. denied sub nom ., Lattimore v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2855 (2013). The Fifth Circuit also held that the government was immune from liability under the Flood Control Act of 1928, 33 U.S.C. § 702c.

St. Bernard Parish Gov’t v. United States, 121 Fed. Cl. 687 (2015), originally filed as Tommaseo v. United States. The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has jurisdiction under the Tucker Act, 29 U.S.C. § 1491, for damage claims against the United States that are not tort claims; the Tucker Act does not create substantive rights.

By July 2009, the ACE had closed the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet because of the likelihood of continued flooding. St Bernard Parish , 121 Fed. Cl. at 691. The Fifth Circuit, 696 F.2d 436, 441–43, upheld the District Court’s findings of fact in Katrina Canal Breaches , which assigned causation to the Army Corps of Engineers.

121 Fed. Cl. at 746.

Id . at 707. Recent Supreme Court decisions indicate that governments can be liable for flooding as a temporary taking. E.g. , Arkansas Game & Fish Comm’n v. United States, 568 U.S. 23 (2012).

St. Bernard Parish Gov’t v. United States, No. 16–2301 (Fed Cir. Mar. 24, 2017).

Dana, supra note 185, at 287–88, n.29 (quote on 288).

Id . at 286.

Christopher Serkin, Passive Takings: The State’s Affirmative Duty to Protect Property , 113 Mich. L. Rev. 345, 389–401 (2014); Dana, supra note 185, at 289–90.

Burkett, supra note 39, at 11,145, 11,147. Proof of causation may be difficult.

Jennifer Klein, Sabin Ctr. for Climate Change Law, Potential Liability of Governments for Failure to Prepare for Climate Change (2015), http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/files/2016/06/Klein-2015-08-Liability-US-Gov-Failure-to-Prep-Climate-Change.pdf . On fraud, knowing misrepresentation of information about climate change, see id . at 15–23; on takings, see id . at 23–27. U.S. Const. amend. XI bars cases against states, but not local governments, in federal courts. Klein , supra , at 4.

Burkett, supra note 39, at 11,153–54.

Id . at 11,154. See also Maxine Burkett, Duty and Breach in an Era of Uncertainty: Local Government Liability for Failure to Adapt to Climate Change , 20 Geo. Mason L. Rev . 775 (2013).

Tzakis v. Berger Excavating Contractors, Inc., 2009 CH 6159 (Ill. Cir. Ct. 2009). In May 2014, Illinois Farmers Insurance, Co. brought nine class-action lawsuits against municipalities and counties in the Chicago area, after 600 insured homes suffered flood damage in heavy April 2013 storms. The suits alleged that defendants were aware of the effects of climate change, but did not prepare for the heavy rains and floods caused by higher global temperatures. The company withdrew the suits in June 2014. See, e.g. , Illinois Farmers Ins., Co. v. Metro. Water Reclamation Dist. of Greater Chi., No. 2014CH06608 (Ill. Cir. Ct. filed Apr. 16, 2014) (dismissed June 4, 2014).

Borough of Harvey Cedars v. Karan, 70 A.3d 524, 527 (N.J. 2013).

See Peel & Osofsky, supra note 183, at 2203–05, 2247. See also Stephen R. Miller, The Local Official and Climate Change , 46 Envtl. L. Rep. News & Analysis 10,883, 10,883 (2016). “[E]ven the most aggressive efforts to address climate change have largely ignored land use,” usually the responsibility of local officials. Issues for cities include lack of technical capability, lack of political will, ineffective land use planning and regulatory institutions. Id . at 10,884.

See, e.g., American Electric Power and Kivalina , discussed supra Part II.C.

Burkett, supra note 39, at 11,147.

See, e.g. , Pietrangelo v. S&E Customize It Auto Corp., No. SCR 100/13, 39 Misc. 3d 1239(A) (N.Y. Civ. Ct. May 22, 2013). Court dismissed suit against auto bailee for damage after Hurricane Sandy; bailee had no obligation to have insurance, and an “act of God” defense barred the negligence claim.

Burkett, supra note 39, at 11,150.

Id . at 11,155–56.

585 F.3d 855, 859–60 (5th Cir. 2009), vacated , 598 F.3d 208 (2010). Other claims were unjust enrichment, fraudulent misrepresentation, and civil conspiracy.

598 F.3d 208 (5th Cir. 2010).

607 F.3d 1049, 1055 (5th Cir. 2010).

Conservation Law Found. v. ExxonMobil Corp., No. 1:16-cv-11950, at 49–51 (¶¶ 183–86) (D. Mass. filed Sept. 29, 2016).

County of San Mateo v. Chevron Corp., No. 17CIV03222 (Cal. Super. Ct. July 17, 2017); County of Marin v. Chevron Crop., No. CIV1702586 (Cal. Super. Ct. July 7, 2017); City of Imperial Beach v. Chevron Corp., No. C17-01227 (Cal. Super. Ct. July 17, 2017). In August 2017, defendants removed the cases to federal court, and plaintiffs moved to remand. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted plaintiffs’ motion to remand. Removal was not warranted, among other reasons, under federal common law or the doctrine of complete preemption. An appeal is pending. Order Denying Remand, County of San Mateo v. Chevron Corp., No. 17-cv-04929-VC (N.D. Cal. Mar. 16, 2018). In re Peabody Energy Corp. , No. 16-42529-399 (Bankr. E.D. Mo. Dec. 8, 2017), dismissed the cases against Peabody.

Environmental organizations have suggested that liability may follow from energy companies’ “funding climate denial and disseminating false or misleading information on climate risks.” Kevin LaCroix, Is Climate Change a D&O Insurance Issue? , The D&O Diary (June 2, 2014), https://www.dandodiary.com/2014/06/articles/director-and-officer-liability/is-climate-change-a-do-liability-and-insurance-issue/ .

Ramirez v. ExxonMobil Corp., No. 3:16-cv-03111 (N.D. Tex. filed Nov. 7, 2016). Defendant moved to dismiss in September 2017.

SEC, Commission Guidance Regarding Disclosure Related to Climate Change, 75 Fed. Reg. 6290, 6297 (Feb. 8, 2010). See also SEC, Concept Release, Business and Financial Disclosure Required by Regulation S–K, 81 Fed. Reg. 23,916 (Apr. 22, 2016). See Dundon, supra note 21, at 23. On disclosure requirements, see Matthew Morreale, Corporate Disclosure Considerations Related to Climate Change , in Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, supra note 33, at 205.

Banda & Fulton, supra note 56, at 10,134.

Petition for Suspension or Debarment, Waterkeeper All., Inc. (Dec. 14, 2016), http://blogs2.law.columbia.edu/climate-change-litigation/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/case-documents/2016/20161214_docket-na_petition.pdf .

Ctr. for Int’l Envtl. Law, Smoke & Fumes: The Legal and Evidentiary Basis for Holding Big Oil Accountable for the Climate Crisis (2017), http://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Smoke-Fumes-FINAL.pdf . See also David Anderson, Matt Kasper & David Pomerantz, Energy & Pol’y Inst., Utilities Knew: Documenting Electric Utilities’ Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception on Climate Change from 1968–2017 (2017), https://www.eenews.net/assets/2017/07/25/document_gw_08.pdf .

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Global Warming Essay and the Main Types of Pollution for Writing Essays

Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, dying cloud forests, and extinction of wildlife - all these phenomena are clear signs of the global warming process that has already been launched. But, what do we know about it?

What we call global warming is actually a very broad term. In a nutshell, it means fluctuations in the climate of our planet as a whole or in its individual regions over time, caused by a variety of different factors. Apart from changes in temperatures, global warming also results in a whole range of changes in long-term weather patterns and even causes extreme weather events, which bring irreparable damage to our entire ecosystem.

For centuries, human activities have been taking us closer and closer to the point of no return, and, now, global warming is already a major problem. Today, when changes are already occurring, the entire humanity is wondering how to stop global warming. While the answer is not clear yet, this issue became a common topic for debates and even academic papers.

Pretty much every student faces the need to write my essay about global warming at least once in a lifetime. If you are studying in one of the best colleges for astrophysics working on one now, you’ve come to the right place! Our article will tell you what types of pollution there are, share handy examples, and help you choose the best topic for your essay on global warming that will be interesting for you. Let’s dive in!

Causes of Global Warming

Most of the causes are there because of people and their activities. But, it’s also worth noting that there are some natural causes of global warming. Typically, writing an environmental pollution essay, you’ll have to cover both human-caused and natural reasons. To help you get started, let’s look at the biggest ones.

• Burning fossil fuels - probably the biggest cause that leads to faster global warming is a mass burning of various fossil fuels that results in large emissions of CO2 into our atmosphere. The activities that bring the most emissions include transportation, electricity production, and industrial activity.
• Clearing of forests and woods - the next big cause is deforestation, whether natural or human-made. As you may already know, trees play a huge role in restoring the atmosphere and, respectively, regulating the climate as they absorb CO2 emitted into the air and release oxygen back to replace it.
• Farming - this may surprise you, but the biggest natural cause of global warming is animals that also release greenhouse gases. Thus, a significant percentage of emissions is caused by agriculture and farming.
• Resource extraction - another reason for climate change is the extraction of natural materials that can’t be restored naturally for human use.
• Pollution - finally, one last cause that speeds up the process of global warming is pollution. This spans air and water pollution, as well as the big share of plastic waste - all the pollution types we are going to discuss further.

Effect of Global Warming

Apart from analyzing some core causes, writing essays about global warming will also require you to delve into the effects it can have. Needless to say that the emaciation of natural resources, pollution, deforestation, and changes in the atmosphere can’t go unnoticed. But, what exactly will happen after global warming?

The primary negative effect of global warming is the drastic change in our planet’s climate. This includes rising temperatures, unpredictable weather patterns, and an increase in extreme weather events. But, this is not all that is there. Due to a changing climate and more extreme weather conditions, some side effects of global warming can include:

• Rising sea levels;
• Land degradation;
• Loss of biodiversity;
• Loss of wildlife.

These are the primary effects on our environment that can be caused by global warming.

Apart from that, there are also some possible social effects that we will feel on ourselves. The lack of natural resources and land degradation will likely lead to a significant shortage of water and food and, as a result, will trigger global hunger. Some other negative impacts on our lives can include the loss of livelihood and shorter lifespans, poverty, malnutrition, increased risks of diseases, and mass displacement of people.

Global Warming Solutions

Another important point to cover in essays on climate change and global warming is the possibility of solving the problem. So, let’s take a moment to talk about some of the solutions.

First and foremost, in an attempt to stop global warming, people are already trying to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Some of the most common solutions include a switch to alternative energy resources, transportation methods, and alternative industrial and other activities.

Apart from that, people are becoming more conscious about their everyday consumption behavior. For example, some opt for reusable bottles, shoppers, cups, and other items to reduce the use of plastic.

Finally, we can already observe a global trend for eco-friendliness in various spheres of our lives. People strive to make their homes, offices, and lives in general “greener” to help save the planet.

At this point, the solutions we discussed earlier are all that we can do for now. However, there is still a need for more innovative and effective solutions. So let this serve you as motivation. After all, who knows, maybe while writing your essay about global warming, you will suddenly discover more innovative solutions that will help us save the planet.

Now that you know everything about the definition, causes and effects, and possible solutions for global warming, let’s move on and consider different types of pollution that can cause it and that students can use as the base for essays global warming.

Glitter Pollution Essay Sample

Water pollution essay.

The first type of pollution and, concurrently, a great topic for an essay on global warming is water pollution. It shouldn’t be a secret for you that the world ocean covers 90% of the entire surface of our planet. It also shouldn’t be a secret that every living organism needs clean water to support vital functions. Given that, we can confidently say that mass pollution of water is a huge problem that we must drive attention to. So, there is no wonder why students are often assigned to write essay for me about water pollution.

If you are wondering what you can write about in your essay on water pollution, the ideas are countless. The pollution of the world ocean has been a pressing issue for decades, so there is plenty of information and examples to cover in an essay.

One great example for your essay is a worldwide famous oil company. Not so long ago, it became known that one of the oil-production leaders has been polluting rivers in Nigeria for many decades. The pollution had affected the lives, environment, and health of many locals, which made this case so high-profile. So, be sure to use it as an example in your paper.

Another good point to cover in an essay is the process of cleaning the world’s oceans from plastic waste. You can use this idea if you are planning to write a how to prevent water pollution essay.

Air Pollution Essay

We have already said a lot about gas emissions and how it affects the quality of air. So, here you have another type of pollution.

Just like water pollution, the rapid pollution of the air is also a big problem. Apart from natural causes of gas emissions, there are also many human-made reasons that make the problem worse. Namely, if you will be writing a causes of air pollution essay, you can write about the rising number of gasoline cars that boost emissions.

Also, you can tell your readers about different manufacturing and industrial activities that also harm our environment by producing too much CO2. 

Another great idea is to write an essay for me answering the question, “how does air pollution affect our health?” Some of the negative effects include the risk of diseases and shorter lifespans. Not to mention a poor quality of life that results from air pollution.

Finally, you can write a solution of air pollution essay. With air pollution being a big issue in the modern world, we can already see humanity trying to resolve it. Some of the best-known solutions that are already there are alternative energy resources such as solar panels and alternative means of transport such as electric cars. But, you can definitely discover more solutions if you research the problem well. There are tons of helpful materials on the web, including air pollution articles for students that can be used for your essay.

Plastic Pollution Essay

Another common type of academic assignment is an essay on plastic pollution. So, this is the last type of pollution we are going to discuss here.

The issue is real. For decades, people have been trapped in the endless circle of large-scale plastic production and no-lesser plastic consumption. Each of us uses lots of plastic in our household. Not to mention that this material is generally used in all areas of our lives.

If you are planning to write my essay for me on this type of pollution, we would recommend you to write plastic pollution in the ocean essay. As for 2021, there are already over 5 trillion micro and macro pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans. The total weight of this plastic can reach 269,000 tonnes. About 8 million pieces are being thrown into the oceans every single day. And, the amount of plastic in the form of garbage is also huge. 

To beat plastic pollution, it is vital that we learn how to recycle and reuse it instead of throwing all the waste away. So, here you have another possible topic for your essay. You can write about the global campaigns on cleaning the oceans and our planet from plastic.

Finally, one more topic you can cover is the Plastic Pollution Coalition. In case you haven’t heard of it, it is an existing social organization and advocacy group that found its mission in reducing plastic pollution.

After reading this article, you should agree that global warming is one of the biggest issues we’re facing in the 21st century. After decades of pollution, thoughtless consumption of resources, and blatant disdain for our environment, humanity finally begins to recognize the issues. And that is why essays on global warming and climate change are so important to write.

Global warming essays can help us drive more attention to the problems that we are already facing and the negative effects we can have. Also, writing such papers is a great way to inform students and other people about the solutions we can adopt to make a positive change.

If you are still hesitating whether it is worth writing a pollution essay or not, leave all the doubts behind. First of all, by writing such essays, you are doing a good deed. And, secondly, writing such papers isn’t as hard as it can seem. Though we still have many unresolved problems in this area, there is lots of information on this topic. If you research it well, you can find plenty of books, articles, scientific papers, and other materials on global warming. It is also possible to find a documentary on global warming, as well as many feature films. So rest assured that you won’t face a shortage of information. So, don’t hesitate and start writing your essay on global warming, and don’t neglect the tips and examples we shared here!

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Essay: To fix climate anxiety (and also climate change), we first have to fix individualism

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How do you cope? I feel the sorrow, the quiet plea for guidance every time someone asks me this question. As an environmental reporter dedicated to helping people make sense of climate change, I know I should have answers. But the truth is, it took me until now to face my own grief.

My heart keeps breaking whenever I meet yet another child struggling with asthma amid orange, smoke-filled skies. I, too, am reeling from the whiplash of extreme drought and extreme rain , and I’m still haunted by the thought of a mother having to call each of her daughters to say goodbye as the homes around her cave to fire.

Each year, as I reflect on my own reporting on the floods that keep getting worse and the toxic pollution building up in all forms of life , I find myself questioning whether I could ever justify bringing my own children into this world. I agonize over the amount of plastic we can’t avoid using and mourn the monarch butterflies that have vanished. With each new heat record shattered, and each new report declaring a code red for humanity , I can’t help but feel like we’re just counting down the days to our own extinction.

In the face of sea level rise, can we reimagine California’s vanishing coastline?

“Climate anxiety” is the term we now use to describe these feelings, but I must confess, I was perplexed when I first heard these words a few years ago. Anger, frustration, helplessness, exhaustion — these are the emotions I come across more often when getting to know the communities bracing for, or recovering from, the devastation of what they’ve long considered home.

Then a college student asked me about climate anxiety. It came up again on social media, and again in personal essays and polls. This paralyzing dread was suddenly the talk of the town — but it has also, very noticeably, remained absent in some circles.

All this has led me to wonder: What, exactly, is climate anxiety? And how should we cope? At first blush, this anxiety seems rooted in a fear that we’ll never go back to normal, that the future we were once promised is now gone. But who this “normal” is even for (and what we’re actually afraid of losing) speaks to a much more complicated question:

Is this anxiety pointing to a deeper responsibility that we all must face — and ultimately, is this anxiety something we can transcend?

For Jade Sasser, whose research on climate emotions has been grounded by her own experiences as a Black woman, these questions sharpened into focus during a research-methods seminar that she was teaching early last year at UC Riverside.

The class — all female, many from low-income immigrant communities — had been a fairly quiet group all quarter, so Sasser was surprised when the room completely erupted after she broached what she thought would be an academic, somewhat dispassionate discussion about climate change and the future.

Every student was suddenly talking, even yelling, over one another. Thought after thought tumbled out as they shared that not only does the future feel bleak when it comes to the job market, the housing crisis and whether their generation will ever be able to “settle down with kids” — but all this is many times worse when you’re not white, not documented and not born into a college-educated family.

How can they feel hopeful about the future, they asked, when, on top of everything already stacked against them, they also have to worry about wildfires, extreme heat and air pollution getting out of control?

‘It’s almost shameful to want to have children’

‘Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question’ asks: With American society feeling more socially and politically polarized than ever, is it right to bring another person into the world?

“It was literally a collective meltdown unlike anything I had ever experienced,” said Sasser, whose podcast and book, “ Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question, ” were largely inspired by her students that day. “I understood in that moment that you cannot assume someone does not also experience anxiety simply because their way of talking about it may not be the same as yours.”

It doesn’t help, she added, that many people don’t realize what they’re feeling is climate anxiety because the way we talk about it tends to center the experiences of white and more privileged people — people who have been insulated from oppression and have rarely (until now) had to worry about the safety of their own future.

“For a lot of people, climate anxiety looks a certain way: It looks very scared, it looks very sad, and it looks like a person who is ready, willing and able to talk about it,” Sasser said. “But for those who are experiencing many compounding forms of vulnerability at the same time, you can’t just pick out one part of it and say, ‘Oh, this is what’s causing me to feel this way.’”

A brave first step is to acknowledge privilege — and to support, and perhaps even learn, from those who have had to be resilient long before climate change became so overwhelming.

“For me, this work is a matter of survival,” said Kevin J. Patel, who grew up in South L.A. and has been fighting for climate justice since he was 11. He was contemplative, nodding, when I shared what I learned from Sasser, and he gently added that one privilege many communities don’t have is the ability to turn it off. Not everyone can go on a vacation or take a day to recharge, he said. Even having the time to talk about your sadness can be a luxury.

Feeling climate anxiety? These books offer glimmers of hope — and much-needed wisdom

Patel learned at a young age that not all communities get the same level of care. Growing up with hazy air, in a neighborhood hemmed in by the 10 and 110 freeways, Patel almost collapsed one day in front of his sixth-grade class when his heart suddenly started pounding at more than 300 beats per minute.

His parents, farmers from Gujarat, India, rushed Patel to the emergency room and held his hand while everyone around him thought he was dying. After months of hospital visits and procedures, doctors determined that he had developed a severe heart condition in large part due to the smog.

‘For me, this work is a matter of survival.’

— Kevin J. Patel

As he learned to live with an irregular heartbeat, he found joy in his family’s tiny garden and marveled at all the ladybugs that gathered on the tulsi, a special type of basil. He taught his classmates that food came from the ground, not the grocery store, and together, they went on to form an environmental club.

Today, Patel speaks with the hardened wisdom of someone who has experienced much more than the typical 23-year-old. He’s constantly doing something — whether it’s supporting a neighbor, getting water bottle refill stations installed at his school, or turning the idea of a Los Angeles County Youth Climate Commission into reality. For years, he has guided other marginalized youth through OneUpAction , a grassroots environmental group that he built from the ground up.

Even if he doesn’t call it anxiety, he admits he sometimes has trouble focusing, and there’s a tenseness in his body that can be hard to shake off. But he’s usually able to turn it around by talking to his friends or elders, or by reciting his favorite proverb:

They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.

“It’s not about what I need, it’s about what my community needs,” he said. “There is joy in caring for one another. There is joy in coming together to fight for a future that we believe in.”

When talking about climate anxiety, it’s important to differentiate whether you’re assessing these emotions as a mental health condition, or as a cultural phenomenon.

Let’s start with mental health: Polls show climate anxiety is on the rise and that people all around the world are losing sleep over climate change. Organizations like the Climate-Aware Therapist Directory and the American Psychiatric Assn. have put together an increasing number of guides and resources to help more people understand how climate change has affected our emotional well-being.

Poll shows Californians’ climate anxiety is on the rise

Just knowing that climate change is getting worse can trigger serious psychological responses. And the shock and trauma are all the more great if you’ve already had to live through the kinds of disasters that keep the rest of us up at night.

It’s also important to note that social media has magnified our sense of doom. What you see on social media tends to be a particularly intense and cherry-picked version of reality, but studies show that’s exactly how the vast majority of young people are getting their information about climate change: online rather than in school.

But you can’t treat climate anxiety like other forms of anxiety, and here’s where the cultural politics come in: The only way to make climate anxiety go away is to make climate change go away, and given the fraught and deeply systemic underpinnings of climate change, we must also consider this context when it comes to our climate emotions. How we feel is just as much a product of the narratives that have shaped the way we perceive and respond to the world.

“Climate anxiety can’t be limited to just a clinical setting — we have to take it out of the therapy room and look at it through a lens of privilege, and power, and the economic, historical and social structures that are at the root of the problem,” said Sarah Jaquette Ray, whose book “ A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety ” is a call to arms to think more expansively about our despair. “Treating a person’s climate anxiety without challenging these systems only addresses the symptoms, not the causes... and if white or more privileged emotions get the most airtime, and if we don’t see how climate is intersecting with all these other problems, that can result in a greater silencing of the people most impacted.”

Ray, an environmental humanist who chairs the environmental studies program at Cal Poly Humboldt, also emphasized that our distress can actually be a catalyst for much-needed change. These emotions are meant to shake us out of complacency, to sound the alarm to the very real crisis before us. But if we don’t openly talk about climate anxiety as something that is not only normal but also expected, we run the risk of further individualizing the problem. We already have a tendency to shut down and feel alone in our sorrows, which traps us into thinking only about ourselves.

“One huge reason why climate anxiety feels so awful is this feeling of not being able to do anything about it,” Ray said. “But if you actually saw yourself as part of a collective, as interconnected with all these other movements doing meaningful things, you wouldn’t be feeling this despair and loneliness.”

The trick to fixing climate anxiety is to fix individualism, she said. Start small, tap into what you’re already good at, join something bigger than yourself.

And by fixing individualism, as many young activists like Patel have already figured out, we just might have a better shot at fixing climate change.

Let us consider, for a moment, how the words that we use can also limit the way we think about our vulnerability and despair.

Something as simple as the “climate” in “climate anxiety” and how we define “environment” can unintentionally reinforce who we center in the conversation.

“In Nigeria, what we call our environment — it’s not just trees and mountains — it’s also about our food, our jobs, the biodiversity that gives us the life support that we need to thrive every day. That’s what we call our environment; it’s about our people,” said Jennifer Uchendu, who founded SustyVibes , a youth-led sustainability group based in her home country, as well as the Eco-Anxiety in Africa Project , which seeks to validate the emotions and experiences of communities often overlooked in climate conversations. “So if people are being oppressed by the system, it is still linked to our idea of the environment.”

Many of Uchendu’s elders have expressed a lifetime of feeling frustrated and powerless, for example, but she said they didn’t immediately connect these feelings to climate change because “climate anxiety” sounded to them like a new and elite phenomenon.

Editorial: California can make climate polluters pay for the mess they have made of Earth

We hear so often today that climate change is the existential crisis of our time, but that dismisses the trauma and violence to all the people who have been fighting to survive for centuries. Colonization, greed and exploitation are inseparable from climate change, Uchendu said, but we miss these connections when we consider our emotions only through a Western lens.

For Jessa Calderon, a Chumash and Tongva songwriter, these disconnects are ever-present in the concrete-hardened rivers snaking through Los Angeles, and the sour taste of industrialization often singeing the air. In her darkest moments, her heart hurts wondering if her son, Honor, will grow up to know clean water.

Her voice cracked as she recalled a brown bear that had been struck dead on the freeway near the Cajon Pass. As she watched strangers gawk at the limp body and share videos online, she wished she had been able to put the bear to rest and sing him into the spirit world.

“If we don’t see them as our people, then we have no hope for ourselves as a people, because we’re showing that we care about nothing more than ourselves,” she said. “And if we care about nothing more than ourselves, then we’re going to continue to devastate each other and the land.”

It is not too late to turn your climate anxiety into climate empathy. Acknowledging the emotional toll on people beyond yourself can be an opportunity to listen and support one another. Embracing our feelings — and then finding others who also want to turn their fear into action — can be the missing spark to much-needed social and environmental healing.

There is also wisdom to be learned in the songs and traditions of past movements, when people banded together — for civil rights, for women’s suffrage — and found ways to keep hope alive against all odds. And the more we look to the young people still caring for their elders in Nigeria, and to our Indigenous neighbors who continue to sing and love and tend to every living being, the better we might also comprehend the resilience required of all of us in the warming years ahead.

Opinion: Here are the places that could become too hot for humans due to climate change

So how should we cope? For Patel, living with his irregular but unwavering heartbeat, he finds strength in the words of adrienne maree brown, who famously wrote in “ Emergent Strategy ” that in the same way our lives are shaped today by our ancestors, we ourselves are future ancestors. Calderon, who similarly taught her son to leave this Earth better with every passing generation, confided to me that on the days when the sorrow feels too great, she sneaks off to plant native manzanita seeds in neighborhoods stripped of plants and trees.

As I’m reminded of all the love we can still sow for the future, I think of Phoenix Armenta, a longtime climate justice organizer in Oakland who has inspired numerous people, including myself, to take heart in all the times we actually got it right. (Remember acid rain? It was a huge problem, but collective action inspired multiple countries to join forces in the 1980s, and we did what needed to be done.)

“Imagine what kind of world you actually want to live in and start working to make that happen,” said Armenta, who recently made the switch to government planning to help more communities find their voice and determine their own visions for the future.

To grieve the world as we know it is to miss out on opportunities to transform our world for the better. To believe we have nothing left to hope for is a self-fulfilling void. We must find the courage to care, to change, to reimagine the systems that got us into such a devastating crisis in the first place — and we must allow ourselves to dream.

“But it can’t just be my dream, or your dream. It has to be our collective dream,” Armenta said. “I’ve known for a very long time that I can’t save the world, but we can save the world together.”

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Rosanna Xia is an environment reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her award-winning book, “ California Against the Sea ,” has been praised as a poetic and mind-expanding exploration of what we stand to lose in the face of rising water.

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