In criminal law, an “Alford plea” is entered when a defendant pleads “guilty” while still asserting innocence. What? Yes, really:

In this type of plea, the defendant does not admit guilt for the crime but acknowledges that the prosecution has enough evidence to likely secure a conviction. This allows the defendant to plead guilty while maintaining their innocence. The court accepts the plea, resulting in a guilty verdict, but the defendant does not have to admit to the actual commission of the crime. This plea can be beneficial for individuals who wish to avoid the risks associated with a trial, particularly if they face more severe charges.

This comes to mind in response to a recently updated overview of “extreme event attribution” – or as it’s colorfully nicknamed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “the climate versus weather blame game.” Reasonable people can readily agree that there’s value in, as NOAA explains,

• helping people in affected communities develop recovery and resilience plans that match their future risk
• offering climate experts a chance to test and improve how their models simulate different kinds of extreme weather events

At the same time, though, NOAA also admits the “more speculative possibility” that “over time, conducting such studies will identify a set of best practices in attribution research that lawyers and judges could apply in cases where the court needs to settle questions of liability for the costs or harm caused by an extreme event that may have been influenced by global warming and climate change.”

Liability? Well, yes, and hence my opening comment on the usefulness of the “Alford plea,” because global corporations are appropriately terrified of growing sentiment to send the profit sector a bill for climate-related damages and repairs. The World Economic Forum warns corporate boards of directors that

New regulatory frameworks are being enacted across the world, and climate cases are on the rise…more than 230 climate cases across 55 countries were filed in 2023 – from the United States to South Africa, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, Panama, Nigeria and beyond, according to the Climate Change Litigation Databases. Claims range from breach of regulation to breach of contract, from human rights violations to securities fraud. Defendants feature companies from a broad range of economic sectors – from energy and agriculture to forestry, industrial production, aviation, shipping, finance and housing.

When huge amounts of money are involved, proportionately huge efforts to deflect and obfuscate are going to be made. The “Paris Agreement” treaty of 2016 (which the United States initially signed, but from which it withdrew in 2020) tiptoed through the mine field, with language like “common but differentiated responsibilities” – a more dignified phrase, to be sure, than “blame game,” but Lavanya Rajamani (Professor of International Environmental Law at Oxford) has candidly commented on the resulting global debate:

Global climate change may…test the extent of humankind's collective conscience to take moral responsibility for a problem of its own making. If the ongoing international negotiations are any indication, the world community is yet to come of age… [C]limate negotiations have witnessed intense bickering between and within the industrial and developing world over who should take responsibility, in what measure, and under what conditions…result[ing] in a loss of momentum that could jeopardize the two critical determinants of an effective climate regime: universal participation and timeliness in achieving the necessary international co-operation.

I wonder, though, if Professor Rajamani is taking too much for granted with the phrase, “a problem of [our] own making”? It may be easier to get people to agree to help if they are not required to admit that they created the problem. There’s value in having a way for someone to say, “I’m not admitting that I did this, but let’s move forward on my helping to fix it anyway” – and whatever desire one might have for someone to say they’re sorry, I’d hate to let the demand for admission of guilt be a barrier to collaboration on getting the problem fixed.

Is there a maximally simple way to put a number on the problem of climate change that does not entail “attribution”?

Among the answers, and the discovery that actually kicked off this note, is the NASA “Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System”(CERES) project, which seeks to ask and answer a simple question that effectively encapsulates the climate change challenge:

What is the “Earth’s Radiation Budget” (ERB), and is that budget out of balance?

A grade-school student can understand this idea:

Weather and climate are fueled by the amount and distribution of incoming radiation from the sun. About one-third of the incoming solar radiation is reflected by clouds, aerosols, molecules and the surface, half is absorbed at the surface and the remainder is absorbed by the atmosphere. Earth cools by emitting thermal infrared radiation to space, which nearly balances the energy absorbed from the sun.

With no external forcing on the climate system (anthropogenic or natural), the long-term average of absorbed solar radiation (ASR) by the planet should be equal to the emitted thermal radiation (ETR) to space. Increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases (CO₂, CH₄, etc.) trap more of the emitted thermal radiation from the surface, thereby reducing ETR and leading to a net gain of energy.

This, however, may be the most important point that the CERES web site makes:

The planetary heat uptake accounts for the entire energy added to or removed from the climate system. It arguably provides a more fundamental measure of global warming than global mean surface temperature, which is influenced by other decadal processes internal to the climate at the air-sea interface.

This helps us suppress the noise of short-term fluctuations like “El Niño” and “La Niña” events – although these are certainly important, on both a global and a personal level. “As we step into 2026, travellers heading to top global destinations should brace for a year of climate upheaval,” warns Travel and Tour World, continuing: “With official warnings from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the globe is set to experience unprecedented challenges in weather patterns. From extreme heatwaves to record-breaking ocean temperatures and the return of El Niño, the travel landscape is about to shift dramatically.”

What’s noted by the WMO, in particular, is that

The ocean continues to warm and absorb carbon dioxide. It has been absorbing the equivalent of about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades. Annual sea ice extent in the Arctic was at or near a record low, Antarctic sea ice extent was the third lowest on record, and glacier melt continued unabated, according to the report.

This is why, as the CERES project notes, we need to look at the overall radiation imbalance rather than settling for measures of surface temperature.

If we can agree on simple measures of the overall problem, we’re less likely to get tangled in the weeds of who’s accountable for specific events and who’s going to pay for point-solution damages. Who pays is not the question, so deciding who’s to blame is not the answer. We need to be pulling emergency brakes, not arguing over who has the right of way.