[bko]

> In the future I expect a party, perhaps an insurance firm, or reinsurance firm sue oil companies for their role in accelerating climate change to pay for the cost of natural disasters.

Why make something legal and build your entire society around it and then turn around and retroactively blame them for providing legal goods? Seems insane to me.

[js8]

It's not what happened, though. Fossil fuel companies had studies about the impact of AGW since 60s, and yet decided to fund climate change denial. That's criminal.

[brookst]

But here we are talking about this recent advance in showing cause/effect. Are you saying the fossil fuel companies had this knowledge 60 years ago and scientists are just learning it now?

[margalabargala]

Fossil fuel companies, and scientists, had the knowledge that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels would warm the earth 60 years ago.

Here we are now talking about a specific example of someone doing some math and writing an article about it. This is not a "recent advance", it's a retrospective based on warming that has already happened.

Someone 60 years ago could have (and did!) predict "warming will cause stronger hurricanes, and here's about how much stronger they might get". This article is "here are some hurricanes that happened recently, and here is specifically how much stronger they were than they would have been, due to the warming over the last 60 years"

[vegetablepotpie]

Cigarette companies knew that their products were dangerous for years. They didn’t know who specifically would develop lung cancer.

[bongodongobob]

No. Fossil fuel companies and scientist knew the effects. What is new is attributing how much of the storms power is due to climate change. It's a new metric essentially.

[majormajor]

To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.

[JadeNB]

> To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.

Doesn't the presence of legal penalties for an action make it even more desirable (for the perpetrator, from a purely practical point of view) to bury information about those actions and cover them up?

[richardw]

Because they’ve gone to great lengths to influence what is legal. Humanity should have more than a “we told you so”. It’ll also reduce more of this BS in future, when people act against all our interests with no repercussions, sailing super yachts on the ever-expanding waterline.