The Faux Science of Outlawing Fossil Fuels

Instead of casting light on the climate issue, the authors attempt to provide a blueprint for a “‘coming wave of climate legal action’ for which courts are woefully unprepared.”

By Dr. Bruce Everett and Gordon Tomb

The recent Nature article, “Carbon Majors and the Scientific Case for Climate Liability,” tries to further the alarmists’ dream of pinning alleged harms of “extreme” weather on the world’s largest producers of fossil fuels.

Christopher W. Callahan and Justin S. Mankin, both at Dartmouth College when their article was prepared, accept – without substantiation – climate activists’ position that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide cause catastrophic warming and perpetuate the demonization of oil and gas companies as global villains. Instead of casting light on the climate issue, the authors attempt to provide a blueprint for a “‘coming wave of climate legal action’ for which courts are woefully unprepared.”

“More than 100 climate-related lawsuits have been filed annually since 2017,” report the authors. “And as extreme events intensify and losses accumulate … more people are turning to the legal system for relief.”

The authors, however, fail to provide a sound foundation for such lawsuits. Their claim that Chevron Corp. is liable for nearly $2 trillion in “climate damages” has no basis in science, fact or common sense. Moreover, in making the case, they violate important tenets of scientific inquiry.

The Nature article uses the words “science” and “scientific” 44 times, but the writers disregard the scientific method, a centuries-old system of inquiry that relies on testing by empirical observation. Repeated are fallacies of popular climate research such as trusting computer models that have failed validation by real-world data.

The research is bestowed with the supposed credibility of “peer review” – a term that once described a dispassionate assessment by third parties but long ago was corrupted into a seal of approval for ideological purity. At best, the authors attempt to cover their conclusions with a patina of authority by using faddish jargon and opinions that are more political than scientific.

The authors claim to establish the liability of oil and gas companies for climate damage through a four-step process:

First, relying on discredited analytical models, they find that Chevron’s emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible for 0.025 degrees Celsius of warming since 1920, or less than 0.01% of the Earth’s average temperature. Attributing this level of precision to crude computer analysis makes no sense.

Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has declared such analysis the basis of “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative.” Suffice it to say that the many parameters influencing climate are too poorly understood to construct a useful predictive model. Among those factors are changes in Earth’s orbit, fluctuations in solar energy, volcanic emissions, changes in ocean currents and cloud formation.

Second, the authors purport to show that heat waves induced by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide are becoming more severe and frequent without showing a connection between hot weather and CO₂ and without having a baseline to establish a trend of greater severity and frequency.

How could they? Earth has been in a beneficial warm period for nearly 12,000 years, but satellite data to track heat waves cover only the last half century and scattered thermometer readings a mere 150 years. The trend for U.S. heat waves has been flat since at least 1890 except for the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s.

The third and fourth steps assume connections – with little or no empirical backup – between changes in global surface temperatures and extreme heat at a regional level and between unusually hot days and per capita income.

The least rigorous of the researchers’ analyses is that of weather’s influence on income. For centuries, economists have tried to understand why per capita income varies from country to country, region to region, year to year and month to month.

Individual income is influenced by culture, geography, demographics, normal weather variations, government policy, war, civil strife, crime, natural disasters of all types, trade, influences from friendly or hostile neighbors, world commodity prices, exchange rates, interest rates and consumer sentiment – to name just some variables. To assert that the effect of several hot days on income can be screened from all manner of influences – natural or otherwise – is well beyond any reasonable interpretation of data.

In summary, the authors use unvalidated computer models, opinions and assumptions and specious economic correlations to calculate down to two decimal places a climate liability for Chevron of $1.98 trillion – more than eight times the company’s market capitalization.

The authors ignore the direct benefits of increasing CO₂ – mainly an overall greening of Earth and record crop production from the gas’s fertilization effect. Although they note that fossil fuels have “produced immense prosperity,” even that is an understatement. After all, coal, oil and natural gas are largely responsible for sustaining 8 billion people – tenfold the population prior to the Industrial Revolution.

Such facts, hopefully, would be considered should the faux science of Messrs. Callahan and Mankin ever be introduced to a judge and jury.

The authors are with the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia – Bruce Everett as a member of the board of directors and Gordon Tomb as a senior advisor. Dr. Everett has published a paper on the research of Callahan and Mankin.

This commentary was also published by The Daily Signal on June 2, 2025.