Climate Crisis Working Group 

If a reckless driver slams into your car, you know exactly whom to blame. But when, say, a historic flood puts your state capital underwater—as one did for Vermonters in July 2023—whom do you hold responsible? In a famous 2003 paper published in the journal Nature, climate scientist Myles Allen posed the question in a slightly different way: “Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?” Two decades later, two Dartmouth climate researchers say the answer is “Yes” and offer a how-to guide. In their recent paper, also in Nature, geography professor Justin Mankin and Christopher Callahan, Adv’23, demonstrated that trillions of dollars in economic losses from extreme heat can be directly attributed to emissions from specific fossil fuel companies. Mankin leads Dartmouth’s Climate Modeling and Impacts Group (CMIG), which specializes in analyzing the risks, variability, and effects of climate change on the systems that people rely upon. His work with Callahan, who completed his Ph.D. working with CMIG, is a major step toward what some experts have called the holy grail of climate litigation: a scientifically robust method for linking specific emissions from individual polluters (whether corporations or entire countries) with specific damages. “Who’s to say these particular emissions caused this flood that reached my doorjamb?” says Mankin. “That was always the question to resolve scientifically and was a bulwark legally: Could we provide specific causation?”