It is thanks to his lawyer Roda Verheyen that Saul Luciano Lliuya is going to court in Germany and that his lawsuit was accepted at all. Up to now such lawsuits were always dismissed, because it is difficult to prove a company’s concrete guilt.

One of the authors of the study which takes the graph as a basis is Raymond Bradley from the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts. He will be giving the opening presentation at the Hans Sigrist Symposium. Title: «Climate Variations and Forcing since Early Medieval Time, and our Return to the Dark Ages». Bradley is among the well-known American climate researchers who were subjected to great political pressure in recent decades and was even threatened with death.

Cognition and classification of climate change

Up until about 15 years ago it could not be exactly said to what extent man is responsible for climate change, since the climate also changes because of natural driving forces. Among other things, this includes solar activity and volcanic eruptions. One of the pioneers with regard to attributing and evaluating the various climatic factors is Gabriele Hegerl from the University of Edinburgh. She will be speaking in Bern about the quantification of human influence on the climate system. Erich Fischer from ETH Zurich is also another speaker who carries out research in this field. «Three-fourths of observed global warming since 1950 is manmade», he says. Fischer is co-author of a study which shows that even today three-fourths of all heat extremes and nearly one-fifth of all precipitation extremes are attributable to global warming – and a predominant part is thereby attributable to humans.

New legal territory: climate lawsuit

The IPCC reports not only serve as a scientific basis for climate policy, as of late they are also cited for argumentation in climate lawsuits in court. For example, during a 2015 lawsuit brought before civil court in The Hague, the Dutch state was obligated to more severely reduce the emission of greenhouse gases as politically resolved. The Urgenda Foundation about 900 individual plaintiffs had pursued the lawsuit. In Belgium and Norway there are similar plans, and stronger climate change mitigation shall also be argued before court in Switzerland. A group of women at the age of AHV (old age & survivors’ insurance) retirement, who argue that they are quite strongly affected by the heatwaves to be anticipated as a consequence of climate change, intend to file a lawsuit. The association known as «Verein Klimaseniorinnen» is entering new legal territory in Switzerland.