Professor Lin Talks to Science Magazine About Bid to Calculate Climate Damage Cost

Professor Albert Lin spoke to Science magazine for an April story on a new paper that finds a way to quantify how much emissions from a particular polluter contributed to a given heat wave.

As Science reports, the paper’s authors say they can attribute hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from an extreme heat event to emissions from a single fossil fuel company.

Whether the model could be used in legal cases against polluters is uncertain, Lin told Science.

“I think it is an open question whether the courts would find that the end-to-end attribution analysis as described (in the paper) is sufficient,” he said.

Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law Albert Lin specializes in environmental and natural resources law and also teaches Evidence at UC Davis School of Law.