A federal judge dismissed a pair of lawsuits that two California cities filed against major oil companies for their roles in climate change and its effects.

The ruling is a blow to San Francisco and Oakland and environmentalists who have long tried to hold fossil fuel companies liable for climate change.

Judge William Alsup stated in his late Monday ruling that his decision did not hinge on climate science and that there was no dispute about the harms of fossil fuels.

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But Alsup, nominated to the bench by former President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonTrump probes threaten to overshadow Democrats' agenda Kansas, South Carolina GOP scrap presidential nominating contests Democrats ignore Asian American and Pacific Islander voters at their peril MORE, ultimately felt that the core questions raised in the case were best left up to the federal government, Congress and international organizations.

“Questions of how to appropriately balance these worldwide negatives against the worldwide positives of the energy itself, and of how to allocate the pluses and minuses among the nations of the world, demand the expertise of our environmental agencies, our diplomats, our Executive, and at least the Senate,” Alsup wrote.

“Nuisance suits in various United States judicial districts regarding conduct worldwide are far less likely to solve the problem and, indeed, could interfere with reaching a worldwide consensus,” he continued.

“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.”

Alsup also felt that for a court to weigh in on substantive policy questions would be a violation of the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution, since those are rights reserved for other branches.

The lawsuits, filed last year, employed a novel legal strategy to try to accomplish climate goals, a strategy that a handful of other major liberal cities have started to try as well.. The defendants were BP, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell.

The National Association of Manufacturers, which has fought the strategy and sees the lawsuits as a threat to manufacturing, praised Alsup’s ruling.

“From the moment these baseless lawsuits were filed, we have argued that the courtroom was not the proper venue to address this global challenge,” NAM president Jay Timmons said in a statement.

“Judge Alsup agreed. Other municipalities around the country who have filed similar lawsuits should take note as those complaints are likely to end the same way.”

Exxon spokesman Scott Silvestri said the company has “said all along that addressing the risks of climate change is a serious global challenge that should be addressed by policymakers and not by the courts.”

Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, said the ruling is a disappointment. His group has been actively pushing for similar lawsuits around the country.

“The case before the judge was never about how to solve global climate change but simply whether oil and gas producers should help San Francisco and Oakland pay for the costs of adapting to it,” he said in a statement.

“By kicking the case to a do-nothing Congress and a climate denying White House, the court essentially ruled that taxpayers alone should pay the massive costs of adapting to climate change.”</s>Some cities think oil companies should foot the bill for their climate change impacts. At least one judge begs to differ.

District Court Judge William Alsup in San Francisco dismissed a major climate lawsuit Monday that the cities of San Francisco and Oakland filed against Big Oil bros like ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron last year. The cities believe companies like these should be paying to adapt to sea level rise because, well, they knew about climate change for a long damn time—even while they were claiming it wasn’t real—and their products are what’s driving it.

Alsup called this theory “breathtaking,” in his ruling.

While acknowledging the science of climate change, the judge doesn’t believe the court is the place to deal with the problem. In his view, the White House and Congress are. Plus, the warming of our globe stretches far beyond two cities in California or even the United States; it impacts the entire world.

“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” Judge Alsup wrote.

The judge is sure to point out Big Oil’s role in our global mess, but he’s also quick to note how we’ve benefited from fossil fuel extraction: “Without those fuels, virtually all of our monumental progress would have been impossible,” he went on.

He’s not wrong. Still, this sets a disappointing precedent for the other cities across the U.S. litigating to acquire dollars from the companies that profited the most from progress. Cities like New York and Boulder, Colorado, are hoping for different outcomes than their friends on the Westest Coast. (Even oil brethens are attacking each other.)

Preparing for climate change ain’t cheap, and someone needs to pay for it. These cities are making the case that it shouldn’t be solely the taxpayer. Oil defendants, on the other hand, just want these suits to go away. In New York City, a Chevron lawyer attempted to convince a judge to throw out the suit, too, earlier this month. And, unfortunately, such arguments hold a bit more weight after Monday’s decision.

This is not the end, though. Attorneys in San Francisco and Oakland are deciding on what to do next. Oakland attorney Barbara Parker told E&E News the plaintiffs are “carefully reviewing the order and considering all options, including an appeal.”

They’re also championing Alsup’s recognition of climate change. A slap of reality is always refreshing in the era of climate denial.</s>June 26 (Reuters) - A federal court in California dismissed climate change lawsuits by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland against five oil companies, saying the complaints required foreign and domestic policy decisions that were outside its purview.

San Francisco and Oakland sued Chevron Corp, Exxon Mobil Corp, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, and BP Plc last year seeking an abatement fund to help the cities address flooding they said was a result of climate change.

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said in the ruling that the dangers raised by the complainants were real and worldwide, and both parties accepted the science behind global warming.

"(However), the problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a District Judge or jury in a public nuisance case," Judge Alsup said. http://bit.ly/2Irnpo4

The suit was one of several filed by cities and local governments around the country that argued in part the production of fossil fuels had led to rising tides that damaged shorelines, roads and other properties requiring remediation.

Alsup, who held a primer on climate change during the case, wrote that although scientists agree burning fossil fuels is raising ocean levels, the suits "could interfere with reaching a worldwide consensus" on the social pros and cons of fuel use.

Chevron, which took the lead in fighting the case, called the decision "important and well-reasoned" and said although the ruling is not binding on other courts, judges in similar cases "should follow Judge Alsup's lead and dismiss their cases as well," according to spokesman Sean Comey.

Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group that supports the lawsuits, called the decision disappointing, but added: "This fight is just getting started and we expect to win."

A Shell spokeswoman said the company regards climate change to be a complex problem, which is not an issue for the courts but requires sound government policy.

The case is City of Oakland V. BP, Chevron and others, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 17-CV-06011.</s>(Reuters) - A California federal court dismissed climate change lawsuits against five oil companies by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, saying the complaints required foreign and domestic policy decisions that were outside the purview of courts, Chevron Corp <CVX.N> said on Monday.

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland, California sued Chevron, Exxon Mobil Corp <XOM.N>, ConocoPhillips <COP.N>, Royal Dutch Shell Plc <RDSa.L>, and BP Plc <BP.L> last year, seeking an abatement fund to help the cities address flooding they say is a result of climate change.

The dangers raised by the complainants are real and worldwide, and that both parties accepted the science behind global warming, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said in the ruling.

"(However), the problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a District Judge or jury in a public nuisance case," Judge Alsup said. http://bit.ly/2Irnpo4

A Shell spokeswoman said the company regards climate change to be a complex problem, which is not an issue for the courts but requires sound government policy.

BP did not have an immediate comment, while ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil were not available for comment outside regular business hours.</s>In a blow to activists seeking a way to hold big oil companies accountable for the damaging effects of global warming, a federal judge dismissed a pair of groundbreaking climate change lawsuits on Monday brought by two California cities against several major oil firms.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who had ordered a first-of-its-kind climate change “tutorial” earlier this year to help him understand issues raised by the suits, said in a lengthy ruling that he “fully accepts the vast scientific consensus” that fossil fuels have contributed to increasing temperatures and rising sea levels. But he said the problem was simply too massive — and too global in scope — for just one “district judge or jury” to solve.

Noting that the world has reaped many benefits from fossil fuels since the dawn of the industrial era, the San Francisco-based judge said “questions of how to appropriately balance ... worldwide negatives against the worldwide positives of the energy itself” must be handled by the U.S. government’s executive and legislative branches.

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland sued BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell last year. City officials argued that the five companies had created a “public nuisance,” and should be held accountable for the destructive — and costly — ramifications of global warming.

The suits accused the companies of having long known of the link between fossil fuels and planet-warming greenhouse gases, yet had not only done little to prevent their damaging effects but had even tried to hide these facts from the public.

The suits argued that the companies should help pay for sea walls and other infrastructure projects aimed at protecting communities against the effects of global warming. San Francisco has estimated that some $10 billion of public property and up to $39 billion of private land has been put at risk because of climate change-related rising seas, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

While Alsup acknowledged the existence of climate change and its associated risks, he said he was not persuaded by the cities’ legal argument.

“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” Alsup wrote in his ruling, adding that the “court will stay its hand in favor of solutions by the legislative and executive branches.”

Alsup, who invited experts from both sides of the case to be part of the climate change tutorial he presided over in March, also said he didn’t believe that oil companies were the only ones to blame for Earth’s environmental crisis.

“All of us have benefitted” from the “monumental progress” spurred by the industrial revolution, Alsup wrote. “Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress, would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded? Is it really fair, in light of those benefits, to say that the sale of fossil fuels was unreasonable?”

Michael Burger of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law told The New York Times it was “too early to tell” whether Alsup’s decision would have an impact on those efforts. Attorney and policy expert Andrew Grossman suggested on Twitter, however, that “given the respect for Alsup, expect his reasoning to carry weight in other cases.”

Alsup, who has presided over several high-profile cases, was nominated to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton and has served on it since 1999.</s>Claiming that laying blame for so-called climate change is a political issue and not a legal one, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a frivolous lawsuit brought forth by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco against Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell.

While accepting the science of climate alarmists, which insists that man is responsible for global warming, Alsup believed that the scope of the case was beyond his purview.

“This order accepts the science behind global warming,” Alsup wrote in his ruling. “So do both sides. The dangers raised in the complaints are very real. But these dangers are worldwide. Their causes are worldwide. The benefits of fossil fuels are worldwide. The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury.” Alsup contended that, given the global nature of so-called anthropogenic climate change, the issue was just too big for a district court to decide. The judge called the plaintiff’s theory — that the combustion of fossil fuels created a public nuisance — “breathtaking.”

“It would reach the sales of fossil fuels anywhere in the world, including all past and otherwise lawful sales, where the seller knew the combustion of fossil fuels contributed to the phenomenon of global warming,” the ruling read. “While these actions are brought against the first, second, fourth, sixth and ninth largest producers of fossil fuels, anyone who supplied fossil fuels with the knowledge of the problem would be liable.”

Both cities are looking to continue the fight against the oil companies. “We are carefully reviewing the order and considering all options, including an appeal,” said Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker. “We believe our lawsuit presents valid claims and these defendants must be held accountable for misleading the American people about the catastrophic risks to human beings and all forms of life on this planet caused by fossil-fuel driven global warming and sea-level rise.”

The suit was originally filed in state court, but was moved by the defendants into federal court. Alsup ruled that the case belonged in federal court because of the larger scope of the alleged problem. At that time, Alsup also ruled that the cities had standing to make such claims against the oil companies.

The Oakland and San Francisco lawsuit was simply the first in a long line of frivolous lawsuits brought forth against Big Oil by municipalities that claim to be injured by man-made global warming. In California, Imperial Beach, San Mateo, Marin County, Richmond, Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz County are suing more than a dozen oil companies along similar grounds. New York City; Boulder, Colorado; and two Colorado counties, San Miguel and Boulder, are also suing Big Oil companies.

While the decision is a win for the oil companies, the acceptance of the supposed science behind anthropogenic global warming by a federal district judge is irksome and possibly troublesome. Such acceptance in a court decision gives credence to the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming, which is far from proven at this point.

This was brought home in a statement by John Cote, communications director for San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera: “We’re pleased that the court recognized that the science of global warming is no longer in dispute. Our litigation forced a public court proceeding on climate science, and now these companies can no longer deny it is real and valid.”

And maybe that was the whole point of this frivolous suit, as well as all the others yet to come: to get judges and Big Oil companies on record admitting that the half-baked science is a fact. This could set up future suits arguing that the oil companies knew exactly what they were doing based on their acceptance of the climate alarmists’ theory.

It’s ironic that neither Oakland nor San Francisco has insisted that Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) shut down any of its fossil-fuel plants that produce electrical power for the area. At this point, only about 33 percent of California’s power comes from so-called renewable sources. Perhaps, if the good people of the Bay Area stop using all of the evil fossil fuels they claim to despise, they could make a small dent in this so-called global-warming crisis.</s>While delivering a partial victory for science by affirming the undeniable role that fossil fuels have played in the global climate crisis, a federal judge on Monday tossed out a pair of lawsuits filed by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, California that sought to make five oil and gas companies pay for their contributions to global warming-induced sea level rise, which has left oceanfront communities fighting increased flooding, coastal erosion, and property damage.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup—who was lauded earlier this year for hosting a historic "climate tutorial" in court for this case—wrote in his 16-page decision:

This order fully accepts the vast scientific consensus that the combustion of fossil fuels has materially increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which in turn has increased the median temperature of the planet and accelerated sea level rise. But questions of how to appropriately balance these worldwide negatives against the worldwide positives of the energy itself, and of how to allocate the pluses and minueses among the nations of the world, demand the expertise of our environmental agencies, our diplomats, our Executive, and at least the Senate. Nuisance suits in various United States judicial districts regarding conduct worldwide are far less likely to solve the problem and, indeed, could interfere with reaching a worldwide consensus.

Because the cities accused these five major fossil fuel companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—of creating a "public nuisance" that warranted compensation, this particular case wasn't about solving the global climate crisis, explained Richard Wiles of the Center for Climate Integrity, "but simply whether oil and gas producers should help San Francisco and Oakland pay for the costs of adapting to it."

"By kicking the case to a do-nothing Congress and a climate denying White House, the court essentially ruled that taxpayers alone should pay the massive costs of adapting to climate change," Wiles said.

"There are always adverse decisions along the road to victory. That was true in tobacco, lead, and asbestos, where the courts ultimately crafted a solution to a major crisis. This fight is just getting started and we expect to win."

—Richard Wiles, Center for Climate Integrity

"This is obviously not the ruling we wanted, but this doesn't mean the case is over," John Coté, a spokesman for the San Francisco city attorney, said. "We're reviewing the order and will decide on our next steps shortly."

Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker told E&E News the lawyers are "considering all options, including an appeal."

Although Alsup sided with the fossil fuel companies, Coté added: "We're pleased that the court recognized that the science of global warming is no longer in dispute. Our litigation forced a public court proceeding on climate science, and now these companies can no longer deny it is real and valid. Our belief remains that these companies are liable for the harm they've caused."

While dismissing the suits, Alsup wrote: "The issue is not over science. All parties agree that fossil fuels have led to global warming and ocean rise and will continue to do so, and that eventually the navigable waters of the United States will intrude upon Oakland and California. The issue is a legal one." Though the five companies named in the suit are among the world's largest producers, the judge pointed out that "anyone who supplied fossil fuels with knowledge of the problem would be liable."

"It is never good when a judge says the other side wins," Niskanen Center attorney David Bookbinder—a co-counsel for a similar case brought by communities in Colorado—told Axios. However, "this is round one of many, many rounds of decisions in these cases," he said. "By no means is it the end of the process."

"There are always adverse decisions along the road to victory. That was true in tobacco, lead, and asbestos, where the courts ultimately crafted a solution to a major crisis," concluded Wiles. "This fight is just getting started and we expect to win."</s>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A U.S. judge who held a hearing about climate change that received widespread attention ruled Monday that Congress and the president were best suited to address the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming, throwing out lawsuits that sought to hold big oil companies liable for the Earth’s changing environment.

Noting that the world has also benefited significantly from oil and other fossil fuel, Judge William Alsup said questions about how to balance the “worldwide positives of the energy” against its role in global warming “demand the expertise of our environmental agencies, our diplomats, our Executive, and at least the Senate.”

“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” he said.

Alsup’s ruling came in lawsuits brought by San Francisco and neighboring Oakland that accused Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP and Royal Dutch Shell of long knowing that fossil fuels posed serious risks to the environment, but still promoting them as environmentally responsible.

The lawsuits said the companies created a public nuisance and should pay for sea walls and other infrastructure to protect against the effects of climate change — construction that could cost billions of dollars.

The Oakland city attorney’s offices did not immediately have comment. John Cote, a spokesman for the San Francisco city attorney’s office, said the office was reviewing the ruling and would decide its next steps “shortly,” but the lawsuit had “forced a public court proceeding on climate science.”

“We’re pleased that the court recognized that the science of global warming is no longer in dispute,” he said.

New York City, several California counties and at least one other California city filed similar suits.

The companies said federal law controlled fossil fuel production, and Congress encouraged oil and gas development. The harm the cities claimed was “speculative” and part of a complex chain of events that included billions of oil and gas users and “environmental phenomena occurring worldwide over many decades,” they said in court documents.

National Association of Manufacturers President and CEO Jay Timmons applauded the ruling in a statement. “From the moment these baseless lawsuits were filed, we have argued that the courtroom was not the proper venue to address this global challenge,” said Timmons.

Alsup brought in the world’s leading experts on climate change at an unusual hearing in March that he said was intended to educate him about the science behind the Earth’s warming.

The nearly five-hour hearing covered topics including the history of climate change research, carbon dioxide’s role as a greenhouse gas, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and extreme weather.

In Monday’s ruling, the judge said he accepted the “vast scientific consensus” that the combustion of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming and rising sea levels. But he questioned whether it would be fair to “ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded.”</s>This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 2015, a University of California, Davis researcher named Sarah Moffit appeared in a four-and-a-half-minute video detailing her work studying ancient ocean ecosystems.

Looking young and serious, with a long ash-blonde mane falling around a scarf that wouldn’t be out of place on a Nancy Meyers protagonist, she explained the methods she used to make a new and significant discovery. First, she had sliced up cores of sediment from the ocean floor “like a cake.” Then she’d used a microscope to examine high-resolution photos of the microorganisms scattered throughout those samples.

Moffit’s analysis indicated that when an ocean ecosystem had suffered an ecological shock—such as relatively sudden shifts in oxygen levels or temperature—it had taken 10 times longer to recover than was previously believed, millennia as opposed to centuries. In other words: Climate change’s impact on marine life could be much more drastic than we thought.

“It’s a place of personal heartbreak to know that, in the future, if we go down a path of unchecked climate warming, these places that are so beautiful, these organisms that are so fascinating and bizarre and alien—that those organisms and those ecosystems will not be there for my grandkids,” she concluded, clearly crestfallen.

Three years later, in a coffee shop nestled in a damp alley just off the University of Washington campus, she tells me that video was one of her first forays into a debate that is currently raging in climate-scientist circles. At the time, she recalls hearing a rumble of disapproval from some of her UC Davis colleagues along the lines of, “That’s not how a scientist should talk.” Scientists shouldn’t bring emotion or family or humanity into their work, they argued. It’s unprofessional! It’s irrelevant! And, of course, it’s feminine.

Today, Sarah Moffitt is Sarah Myhre, having reclaimed her maiden name after shedding a marriage, a foot of hair, and much of the timidity of her younger self. Now 35, she is known for much more than her work as a research associate at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography. To her allies, the single mother is a passionate advocate for climate action and social justice whose voice reaches far beyond the staid confines of academia. To her detractors, she is a “climate alarmist.”

But the debate over the role scientists should play in public discourse goes far beyond Myhre. It strikes at the heart of what it means to be a scientist in the age of Trump. As the world watches the U.S. government withdraw from the Paris Agreement and extend lifelines to the coal industry, many in academia are asking: Should climate scientists be publicly advocating for climate action?

While traditionalists caution loudly against damaging one’s credibility by opining about what is, at heart, scientific phenomena, a new breed of scientist believes that it has a social and moral obligation to save the planet. These upstarts feel that it would be a violation of the social contract to not translate the severity of the climate crisis in terms the public can relate to and be moved by. They’re the descendants of scientists like James Hansen, who 30 years ago this week sounded the alarm on climate change to Congress—and eventually resigned his position studying warming at NASA to become an activist. And the traits that would typically stymie Myhre and her peers in the staid scientific arena, still dominated by male scholars in their ivory towers, may turn out to be their most formidable strengths in a highly politicized era.

“I think you can be both rigorous and objective and be human at the same time,” Myhre tells me. “And I have come to a place where I’m no longer willing to divorce my humanity from the science that I have participated in and am stewarding.”

One of the first meaningful occasions of a scientist stepping into — or rather, being pushed into — a public forum to advocate for climate action took place on the floor of the Senate in 2003. There, climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann discussed his now-famous hockey-stick graph, which shows that recent changes in the Earth’s average temperature have no precedent in the prior millennium.

“When we first published our hockey-stick work in the late 1990s, I was of the belief that the role of a scientist was, simply put, to do science,” Mann wrote in his 2015 memoir, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

He thought scientists needed to remain “dispassionate” in discussing their analysis of the climate, wringing empathy and emotion from their communication. But after his Senate appearance, he was the subject of a hacking attack by oil interests where his correspondence with other climate scientists was intentionally misrepresented. Once he realized the stakes involved, he says his feelings evolved. “Everything I have experienced since then has gradually convinced me that my former viewpoint was misguided,” he wrote in a 2014 New York Times op-ed.

Today, amid fake news and misinformation—and climate deniers eager to conflate uncertainty with doubt—Mann’s initial just-the-facts approach would not simply fail to win over hearts and minds, it’d be drowned out by bombast. But, according to Michael Nelson, chair of sustainable resources at Oregon State University, scientists are conditioned to be careful and to note that their conclusions could always require more research to back them up.

“We scientists start our sentences with, ‘It depends’—because it does!” he says. “The world isn’t homogenous. It depends whether a tree grows in a mountain or a valley, for example—things respond differently. That’s drilled into our heads.”

In 2009, Nelson authored a definitive review of the arguments environmental scientists have used to advocate for climate action. In it he concluded, perhaps surprisingly, that his colleagues should become more active in policy matters.

He then expanded on that recommendation in a 2010 op-ed he coauthored in the journal Minding Nature: “Broad participation by scientists in advocacy will very likely make for a messy, complicated world,” he and a colleague wrote. “That complexity is justified if the goal is the betterment of society. It is time to stop discussing whether scientists should be advocates and move on to the difficult business of learning how to do so wisely.”

A few years back, as Myhre was pursuing her Ph.D. in paleoceanography at UC Davis, she realized that she ran into trouble when she tried to talk about science with the general public. Like most other scientists, she frankly wasn’t very good at it, having been drilled on precision, data, and careful interpretation. Public communication, however, required charisma, power, and clear translation.

Throughout her career, the global lack of action to slow climate change had become an increasingly alarming issue, so Myhre decided to sharpen her communication skills. She began to pounce on every course, conference, and any other opportunity to practice speaking publicly about science.

“Our respective discipline areas are so narrow and specific that when we talk as scientists, there’s only a small group of people that can really understand that language,” Myhre says. “That’s not enough. We can’t do this basic science and then just communicate with our little tiny microcosm and expect that we’ve completed our job.”

Many scientists argue that their colleagues must elide scientific uncertainties to portray climate change as an urgent threat and demand action. And yet even those critics usually agree that more must be done to fight climate change. At the same time, injecting those caveats into explanations can make for a message that’s less digestible to the general public. It’s a pickle!

“I’m not advocating for bad science at all,” Myhre says. “I’m not advocating for fudging information ever ever ever.”

Over the past year and a half, Seattle has played host to a public debate over the scientist-as-advocate question. The participants: Sarah Myhre and a local celebrity who happens to be her colleague at the University of Washington.

For the past decade, Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University’s College of the Environment, has arguably been Seattle’s most beloved meteorologist. Mass’ forecasts are so widely trusted that a common response to, “What’s the weather this weekend?” is “Well, Cliff Mass said it would rain!” In 2008, he started the Cliff Mass Weather Blog to share his love of weather with the average Seattleite. His inspiration was the teachings of his mentor Carl Sagan: “He really impressed upon me the importance of scientists speaking directly to people, not going through the media,” he says.

On a gray April day at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s outpost in Seattle, a man—who, according to the event moderator, “doesn’t need much of an introduction”—approached a podium in front of a packed auditorium. Slight and soft-spoken, Cliff Mass has an unexpected charisma and command of a crowd. He grinned, and prefaced his talk with: “This will be a little controversial.” He then explained that there was little evidence that the series of devastating wildfires that dotted the western US last year were influenced by climate change. That conclusion is in line with his rhetoric of recent years, which has tended to reject links between a growing list of natural disasters and global warming.

Mass believes it’s irresponsible to make a connection between climate change and extreme weather events without acknowledging the scientific uncertainties in that relationship. As a result, he is loathe to do so. (Extreme weather attribution is a fairly new science with substantial uncertainty, although the accuracy of those connections is rapidly improving.)

In February 2017, Sarah Myhre traveled to Washington’s capital, Olympia, to give testimony to the state House of Representatives Environment Committee. There, Representative Shelly Short, a Republican from northeastern Washington, asked her to comment on her colleague Mass’ unwillingness to link recent wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes to climate change. Myhre responded that she and many of her colleagues saw Mass’ recent views “as coming from a denialist or contrarian place.”

For Myhre’s part, she contends that communicating about climate simply through the lens of weather ignores a broader view. “This is not about warming or precipitation; it’s about ocean circulation, sea ice, distribution of glacial ice across terrestrial mountain ranges,” Myhre says. “When we talk about climate change, we’re talking about changing the biological, geological, and evolutionary trajectory of this finite planet forever.”

Mass insists that portraying climate change so breathlessly politicizes it—and that’s a detriment to bipartisan action on climate change. “Basically, what I’ve done is criticize some of the exaggeration and hype,” Mass says, defending his position. “And there’s some folks who believe that if you speak out against some of the over-exuberance and exaggeration, you’re a denier.”

This past October, Myhre once again took on Mass in an article in The Stranger, Seattle’s popular alt-weekly newspaper, criticizing what she sees as the consequences of his views: Namely, that he misses the human element, specifically the vulnerable communities who suffer the most from extreme weather events—and by extension, climate change.

“This is why communication about climate change is not about science inasmuch as it is about public service and public safety,” she wrote. “It’s about the lives of people and the places we call home. It’s about mitigating the risks of this planetary-scale self-inflicted wound.”

That op-ed kicked off months of back-and-forth between Myhre and Mass. There were accusations of incompetence and misogyny, on either side, in different Seattle publications. Myhre’s op-ed criticizing the appointment of Scott Pruitt in the Seattle Times elicited a comment from Mass (in the actual comments section) that she’s “idealistic” and “not really a climate scientist.”

Again Myhre penned a piece for The Stranger where she wrote that Mass perpetuates an institutional culture that “demeans women scientists.” Mass responded by effectively calling her a liar.

Myhre’s driving philosophy is that she cannot, as a woman, divorce herself from her humanity in the eyes of the scientific establishment, so why would she divorce it from the way she communicates with the public? She believes that she will always be seen as too sensitive or too angry or too sexy or too much of a bitch. These are simply the lenses through which society tends to view women. She is never seen as just a scientist—always a woman scientist.

That worldview emerges in a lot of her writing—which has appeared in The Stranger, Newsweek, and on her Medium blog. It covers a wide range of deeply personal topics: from the unprecedented heartbreak of divorce to the unexpected liberation of plastic surgery to the unspoken prevalence of sexual assault in scientific fieldwork. All of it is unapologetic in expressing the type of fuck-you feminism that has come into vogue post-Trump’s election.

It’s an approach that has not sat well with other academics. Take Judith Curry, who until recently was a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Curry very publicly left her position last year amid what she called “climate alarmism” that she said had taken over academia. In the wake of testimony Curry had given to the U.S. House’s Committee on Science, Space, and Technology last year—in which she questioned the effectiveness of environmental regulations and fossil fuel cuts—Myhre and others had labeled her a “climate contrarian.”

Curry lambasted the behavior of young, female scientists in a lengthy blog post last December that reads like a mix of Emily Post and the anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly. In it, she labeled Myhre and her ilk as “radical lipstick feminists.”

“Is this category of female scientists particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment?” she writes. “Probably not. However, owing to their strident and often irrational behavior, they are very vulnerable to not being taken seriously by males in the scientific community and viewed as undesirable for faculty or other leadership positions.”

According to Myhre, women from Curry’s era believe that science rewards women for their humility and docility. “That’s a lie,” Myhre declares. “You’re not rewarded through docility, you’re subjugated.”

Her words resonated as I watched a roomful of mostly older, white men interrogate her in April while she presented results from her research on ocean oxygenation in the North Pacific.

The scene was a lunchtime seminar on the University of Washington campus, where Myhre’s colleagues were swaddled in earth-tone fleece half-zips. Myhre, in a sleek, black skirt suit, had boosted her already considerable height with a pair of heels.

Myhre has published 13 academic papers on ocean oxygenation and led a team of paleoceanographic researchers who put together an unprecedented database of Pacific ocean sediment cores. Nevertheless, as her audience repeatedly interrupted her, she apologized more than once for “not being great at explaining this.”

“Despite its tremendous size, the deep North Pacific has received relatively little attention from paleoceanographers,” she said, beginning her talk. What followed was a scientifically rigorous discussion of oxygen shifts in the ocean that was basically impossible for me to follow. This is not, I kept thinking as I watched Myhre’s lecture and concurrent inquisition, a particularly engaging way to convey the crisis of a changing ocean to someone like me.

Of course, this presentation was not meant for someone like me—it was for her peers and colleagues. And this kind of interrogation is customary—no, necessary—to good, rigorous science. But this wasn’t supposed to be a Ph.D. defense; to my understanding, it was a friendly seminar.

At the dozenth interruption—about why she chose to make measurements in particular units, why she studied a particular time interval, whether she was familiar with other research—Myhre rested against the podium to answer yet another question in an even, thoughtful tone—but I thought I caught a sharp, momentary flex of her clenched jaw.

These days, Myhre has become a prominent figure in both women’s rights and climate advocacy circles. She liberally uses Twitter and Medium as platforms for her well-honed voice. She is a board member of both 500 Women Scientists, a very young organization that supports and promotes women in science, and Seattle’s Center for Women and Democracy. And just last month, in addition to her research position at the University of Washington, she founded The Rowan Institute, a communications consultancy for climate leaders.

A younger generation of scientists seems to find her approach quite appealing. In 2015, Priya Shukla, a soon-to-be Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, was an undergraduate student in the same lab where Myhre conducted her doctoral research. She considers Myhre’s career a model for her own. She, too, is active in 500 Women Scientists. She, too, hopes to be as publicly and politically vocal as Myhre is about climate action and equity in science. She, too, has noticed how the overwhelmingly white and male power structure in the scientific community has kept certain crucial perspectives out of the conversation.

“We, the scientific community, have tried to view science as apolitical,” Shukla says. “Under the current administration, it’s becoming clear to young scientists and early-career scientists that science has never been apolitical. The fates of science and national and local and regional politics are all intertwined.”

This much is clear, as a fresh set of stale faces in the White House works to strip away a record amount of environmental regulations, resoundingly supports polluting businesses, and censors climate change references from government communications. These are not normal times—and the “normal” role of a scientist, it seems, may no longer be appropriate.

That was the theme of a TEDx talk that Myhre gave in early May in a sweltering auditorium at the University of Washington. The cavernous theater was packed, mostly with young students. Myhre was in heels again, her impressive stature noticeable even from the back row. Rather than running through the technicalities of her research, she spoke about her experience as a woman—a human—scientist.

Scientists are themselves galaxies of racial, social, economic, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, Myhre told the audience. “And we are never separate from that humanity, we are always coupled to it,” she explains. “And we need to speak to this basic truth in public. Because if we don’t have the courage to stand up for our own humanity, how will we ever have the courage to stand up for the humanity of the people that science is meant to serve?”

Myhre closed her speech with a call to action. Do not check your humanity at the door, she pleaded. It’s an echo of the late climate scientist-advocate Stephen Schneider, who, according to his friend Michael Mann, once said, “Just because we are scientists does not mean that we should check our citizenship at the door of a public meeting.” (Schneider, coincidentally enough, was an influential mentor of Cliff Mass.)

The audience applauded, resoundingly, because that is the kind of sentiment that mobilizes people.

Because climate change, especially as Myhre sees it, is not a scientific problem but a human one. If it is solved, it will be with the help and innovation of scientists, of course. But first and foremost it will be solved by humans.</s>A California court ruled in favor of the nation’s top oil companies on Monday, dismissing a lawsuit that held them responsible for the effects of global climate change.

Last year, the cities of San Francisco and Oakland sued Chevron Corporation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, and BP Plc for an abatement fund that would help to aid cities affected by flooding allegedly caused by climate change. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted Chevron’s motion to dismiss the suit, however, stating that “the scope of plaintiffs’ theory is breathtaking. It would reach the sale of fossil fuels anywhere in the world, including all past and otherwise lawful sales,” according to a statement released by Chevron.

Chevron noted that similar claims of the production and sale of oil and gas being a public nuisance that produces harmful greenhouse gas emissions had been rejected in courts across the country.

The company also stated that it had filed motions to dismiss such cases in other U.S. cities and counties, including in New York City and King County, Washington, although it does support “meaningful efforts to address climate change and accepts internationally recognized climate science.”

“Reliable, affordable energy is not a public nuisance but a public necessity,” said R. Hewitt Pate, Chevron’s vice president and general counsel. “Tackling the difficult international policy issues of climate change requires honest and constructive discussion. Using lawsuits to vilify the men and women who provide the energy we all need is neither honest nor constructive.”
A U.S. judge dismisses legal action brought by two Californian cities against oil companies, regarding their contributions towards climate change.