Climate change attribution and legal contexts: evidence and the role of storylines

In a recent very influential court case, Juliana v. United States, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth used the “storyline” approach to extreme event attribution to argue that greenhouse warming had affected and will affect extreme events in their regions to such an extent that the plaintiffs already had been or will be harmed. The storyline approach to attribution is deterministic rather than probabilistic, taking certain factors as contingent and assessing the role of climate change conditional on those factors. The US Government’s opposing expert witness argued that Trenberth had failed to make his case because “all his conclusions of the injuries to Plaintiffs suffer from the same failure to connect his conditional approach to Plaintiffs’ local circumstances.” The issue is whether it is possible to make statements about individual events based on general knowledge. A similar question is sometimes debated within the climate science community. We argue here that proceeding from the general to the specific is a process of deduction and is an entirely legitimate form of scientific reasoning. We further argue that it is well aligned with the concept of legal evidence, much more so than the more usual inductive form of scientific reasoning, which proceeds from the specific to the general. This has implications for how attribution science can be used to support climate change litigation. “The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

Can we put Humpty Dumpty back together again? What does protein quantification mean in bottom-up proteomics?

Bottom-up proteomics provides peptide measurements and has been invaluable for moving proteomics into large-scale analyses. In bottom-up proteomics, protein parsimony and protein inference derived from these measured peptides are important for determining which protein coding genes are present. However, given the complexity of RNA splicing processes, and how proteins can be modified post-translationally, it is overly simplistic to assume that all peptides that map to a singular protein coding gene will demonstrate the same quantitative response. Accordingly, by assuming all peptides from a protein coding sequence are representative of the same protein we may be missing out on detecting important biological differences. To better account for the complexity of the proteome we need to think of new or better ways of handling peptide data.

Dumping Humpty Dumpty

Lebanon’s protests were sparked by economic misery, especially the decline of the long-standing currency peg. What is surprising about the currency collapse is not that it happened at all, but that the country’s unsustainable economic model avoided it for so long. A unique coalition had kept the system going: central bank and finance ministry created rents, banks appropriated rents, politicians were sharing rents, diaspora remittances kept rent-creation going, and foreign governments were tolerating or even underwriting the mechanism. This rentier coalition has now fallen apart. Protestors and critical economists, meanwhile, remain locked out of decision-making by an unaccountable political class. Options for the future include chaos and predation under militia rule, an International Monetary Fund agreement bringing privatisation and austerity, a growth-oriented interventionist state put together by technocrats of the left, and grassroots initiatives of mutual aid pioneered by protestors.

Humpty Dumpty Populism

This article analyzes Venezuelan Chavismo as an unstable formation gnawed by the unsolvable contradiction between, on the one hand, the politico-theological ambition to totalize sociality as a visible ‘people’ collected around the invisible ‘Spirit’ of Venezuela’s ‘Founding Father’ Simón Bolívar and, on the other, the non-totalizable theopolitical energies of a social field suffused with myriad globalized ‘spirits’ that admits no clear-cut demarcation between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ or ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’. Incapable of totalizing sociality as a discrete ‘society’, the political logic informing Chavismo, as with other recent populisms, shifts from hegemony to ‘dominance without hegemony’, a situation where, à la Humpty Dumpy, the ‘people’ is whatever is ‘lovingly’ decreed as such from above, always in tension with a host of deconstructive, often theopolitically imbued agencies and spirits.