Shell Oil Sued Over “Causing Typhoon” in Philippines in Major Test Case
A massive ‘lawfare’ claim backed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth has been filed in the UK’s Royal Courts of Justice claiming that Shell Oil played a part in a devastating typhoon in the Philippines in 2021. At the centre of the case is a Green Blob-funded weather ‘attribution’ study that claims Typhoon Rai, also known as Odette, was made significantly worse due to human caused climate change. The study has been recently published and is heavily linked to academic institutions funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham.
The action has been filed by a number of survivors of the Philippines storm that caused considerable damage in parts of the Philippines in late 2021. It claims financial compensation as well as “injunctive relief to curb Shell’s destructive activities”.
Typhoons are not unknown in this part of the world, but recent evidence suggests there has been little change in the overall trend over the last 100 years. Numbers and intensity of storms rise and fall over shorter periods but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has seen little evidence that humans have recently caused the trend to get worse. In fact, a recent paper published in Nature found “robust declining trends in the annual number of tropical cyclones at global and regional scales during the 20th century”. The paper was titled: ‘Declining tropical cyclone frequency under global warming.’
The key attribution paper in the Shell case uses a standard technique measuring the outputs of two computer model simulations. This imagines an atmosphere where humans have emitted carbon dioxide by burning hydrocarbons and one where there is no such contribution. To say the process is controversial would be an understatement. It cannot count as scientific work under the Popperian principle since the results are unable to be tested and are unfalsifiable. The field of weather attribution is dedicated to grabbing media headlines and providing ammunition for lawfare cases.
If the Shell case ever gets to court, it will be interesting to see how weather attribution claims stand up to forensic cross examination. Shell could call on the services of the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr., who has noted that he can think of no other area of research “where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by research in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits”. Pielke suggests that the rise of individual event attribution studies coincides with frustration that the IPCC cannot say that the frequency and intensity of most types of extreme weather have increased in an era where humans are using oil and gas. In his view, they offer “comfort and support” to those focused on climate advocacy.
The Typhoon Rai attribution paper is written by four academics from the University of Sheffield and Imperial College London. Both universities have financial links with Jeremy Grantham. The fourth author Nathan Sparks works at the Grantham Institute at Imperial. The Philippines’ Category 5 Cyclone Rai caused widespread damage across the southern-central part of the country, with compounding effects of extreme rainfall, high winds and storm surges. It is claimed that a “multi-method, multi-model probabilistic event attribution” found that wind speeds of landfalling storms like Rai had become 70% more likely due to humans emitting ‘greenhouse’ gases. Looking of course at you in particular Shell Oil. Lawsuits and lawyers thrive on precise numbers so “multi-method probabilistic” modelling along with “compound event attribution theory” produces the conclusion that human-caused climate change “has likely more than doubled the likelihood of a compound event like Typhoon Rai”.
As noted, it will be interesting to see how all this modelling stands up to examination in a civil law court. The less charitable might note that this probabilistic guff would not last five minutes in a criminal court where hard and conclusive evidence, such as DNA, fingerprints, confessions and observations, is generally considered a basic requirement to secure a conviction.
The Rai civil lawsuit has been filed under Philippines tort law in the London Courts due to the domicile of Shell in the UK. The case is backed by three large activist groups who are thought to be covering the legal and organisational costs. Greenpeace is providing advocacy, research and mobilisation support, while Legal Rights and Natural Resources Centre, the local member of Friends of the Earth International, is said to be handling local legal coordination matters. Also involved is a local grouping under the banner of Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. Shell is accused of being responsible for producing 2% of global fossil fuel emissions that have directly contributed to human-caused atmospheric warming. For good measure, Shell is said to have known about the alleged risks for decades, a common claim made by activists that will no doubt be tested in any future court hearing. The mainstream rules around ‘settled’ climate science, where discussion is effectively banned in the interests of promoting the Net Zero fantasy, are unlikely to apply in the London High Court.
The Shell litigation is an important test case. Activists have spent years seeking financial support and recognition for their pseudoscientific claims that they can measure a chaotic and non-linear atmosphere. Such is the level of refinement and expertise that they claim, many people believe they are able to pin the blame for individual weather events on humans. Most mainstream media hype their alchemistic pronouncements without question, but it will be interesting to see how the attribution claims stand up to the attention of m’Learned Friends in a combative court forum.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
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Should hopefully be easy enough for Shell to beat this by showing the financial links mentioned above and also by showing that there is absolutely no rigid science that can link a particular company with a single weather event.
It is astonishing that it has even got this far – anyone with a modicum of scientific knowledge (or just common sense, for that matter) would laugh this nonsense out the door.
Hopefully the demolishing of the paper which this is based on ruins the reputations of the “academics” who shat it into existence.
I hope you are correct, but I suspect that we will see just how biased our activist judges actually are.
I hope Shell doesn’t go for the easy win. Encourage the Greenies to make ever more stupid claims in the court and then demolish them – and get the media to report it.
I suspect the Greenies are also actually hoping the case to be quickly dismissed so they can pretend in the media that ‘vested interests’ biased the court.
Yes, it would serve us all if this actually proceeds to a lengthy court hearing in which the plaintiff’s case is surgically demolished and shown to rely on emotion and ideology alone, without any underlying substance. A stright dismissal would play into the hands of the cultists and allow them to wallow in their “victimhood” at the hands of capitalism.
Let’s say worst case, Shell lose. Exactly the same principle then applies to governments action, just the same as it does to companies? So we can go after all politicians past and present for damages… I wonder if they’d like that? Hmmmm
This is so obviously a vexatious claim I’m surprised they’ve found a court that’ll hear it.
Good luck guys.
No surprise to find Imperial College involved.
A number of these nuisance cases in the US have failed.
Will the people suing stop using all products and services that rely on petroleum generated energy or use petroleum derivative products or products where petroleum is used in their manufacture, and also accept that they have used them up to now and are therefore only entitled to a proportion of the money they are asking for and then sue the entire population of the Philippines, every firm operating there, the Philippine government, and assure us that no petroleum was involved in the lawsuit? This would also apply to the people the plaintiffs have hired to represent them.
Sure. Like Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam did when he was admitted to hospital after a bike crash
Lol
In July 2024 he was sentenced to five years in prison, reduced on appeal to four.
Reduced in real life to one year and one month when he was released from prison in August 2025.
This country is on the brink. It desperately needs radical, root and branch systemic and societal reform. I will vote for Reform, but have no faith that Farage will do what needs doing. If he doesn’t, then voting will have proven itself to not be the way out of our problems.
That’s brilliant and far from exhaustive… very good
This is unlikely to be a jury trial, hence decided by judges, not renowned for scientific acumen, or for any immunity to social justice tendencies.
This may actually be an opportunity for climate change sceptics, as the oil companies will be looking for talent to be their independent expert witnesses. That word “independent” is interesting, no doubt the word “shill” will be deployed by one side, so this will be a chance to establish that both words apply to both sides.
Perhaps there should be a law concerning the misuse of computer modelling, with compensation for all those harmed by actions based upon it.
In 1692, during the Salem witch trials, dogs were not spared from accusations of witchcraft. At least two dogs were executed after being implicated in supernatural activities. It seems the same quality if thinking is being used against oil companies.
” …chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to [should] be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature”
James Hansen Prominent NASA climate scientist:
” …every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.”
George Monbiot UK Guardian environmental journalist:
OWID has some useful info graphics especially when paired. This may not have been OWID’s intention but the graphics clearly show that fossil fuel economies have the cleanest air.
This is already a specious claim because Shell isn’t responsible for people burning stuff they sought to buy in order to burn it. The people who actually burnt it are.
As Chris points out, it will be interesting to see how these outlandish claims stand up to forensic cross-examination at the behest of Shell’s defence lawyers.
The logic goes similarly to the following analogy. A murder was committed at X location in a large city at exactly midnight. On the other side of the city Chef Joe was known to have been sharpening a large kitchen knife a week before the incident was logged. Joe is arrested and charged owing to an “attribution study” that automatically identified Joe’s knife as the murder weapon, with no recourse to forensics, fingerprinting or witness testimony. Joe is instantly deemed guilty.
Anything non-falsifiable is also necessarily non-verifiable. If Shell are to blame for 2% of the dreamed-up distant causes of a typhoon in the Philippines, then who else is culpable. Are we going to see the green blob pursuing the mass of Chinese oil companies and coal-fired power plants in a similar manner? China, of course, churning out a much greater per-capita volume of greenhouse gasses, and being in much close proximity to the Philippines?
Don’t use a leaf-blower on Christmas Eve, or you might just get sued for bringing down Santa’s sleigh!
We ran the same computer program twice with different parameters and it produced different outputs! is certainly not evidence that some A caused a B in the real world. Even more so when taking into account that the program was specifically written to do exactly that. But the case shouldn’t be allowed to go ahead at all because Shell just supplied certain raw materials to other entities seeking to put them to some use and it’s these uses which possibly caused CO₂-emissions and not Shell supplying a product.
The weather attribution study cited in the Greenpeace article and linked in this article is a EGUsphere preprint manuscript under discussion and review, not a peer reviewed study. Neither of the reviewers recommended publishing it in form submitted. The authors responded on 8 August 2025 saying that they would make major revisions. Nothing further appears in the Discussion section. It is unclear whether the manuscript has been rejected by the editor or the authors have been dilatory in revising it.
I notice that in our area Shell petrol is expensive. Obviously they need funds to fight such stupidity as this. I will get down to the Shell station and fill up.
Why just Shell? Are there only Western oil companies?
Saudi-Arabia is a developing country and hence, it’s CO₂ emissions officially don’t affect the climate.
I’d guess they’ve considered the larger ones, and decided they’ll either tell them to FRO, or they’ll be very, very unlikely to be successful based on their home countries… Shell, a nice Anglo-Dutch organisation, perhaps more likely to roll over…
I do not share your optimism.
Sounds like the Johnson and Johnson anti Talc action. Given how many babies were dusted one would expect a greater causal link than I used it and then got cancer from a handfull of ambulance chasing lawyers. Problem is that it’s often cheaper to settle than have the expense of defending cases that have no basis in fact
If Oil companies are to be sued, then those suing them should have monies deducted from any award they get for the better health, longer lifespan, freedom from back breaking labour and preventable disease that the oil company have provided them by giving them a standard of living their parents and grandparents could only dream of. ——-It will likely turn out that these people suing Shell would actually owe the company huge sums