An attempt to figure the costs of climate change down to the Exxon, Shell, or Chevron level.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. Scientists say they've come up with a way to measure how much liability individual corporations would have for the economic damage caused by climate change.

The total cost over decades is calculated at $28 trillion about the size

of the U.S. economy, the whole thing, in a year, with researchers saying 10 fossil fuel companies

are responsible for more than half of that amount. Marketplace's Nova Safo is here with details.

Yeah, interesting new study, David. It comes from a research team at Dartmouth College, published in the journal Nature.

Researchers say they've developed a computer modeling technique to figure out how much of the

heating up of the Earth's atmosphere of various major corporations are responsible for.

Now, they looked at 111 companies, and this is a backwards-looking effort, looking at figures up until 2020.

So the numbers are still going up because the Earth's atmosphere continues to warm.

Determining responsibility to do what?

Sue companies, right?

Well, that's one of the studies authors, a very plainly put goal.

This is about lawsuits helping courts evaluate liability

claims for losses resulting from climate change and weather-related disasters. And that concept

is a global phenomenon. Here in the U.S., Vermont last year passed a law trying to hold

companies accountable for weather disasters like extreme flooding. We've also seen a

farmer lawsuit in Peru, 68 in total around the world, mostly targeting fossil fuel companies,

and that's according to one research group that's been keeping track of the lawsuits. And what

the studies authors say is that they now have a lot more data to help in determining liability

in those lawsuits because we have a historical record of emissions and we now have a robust climate data going back several decades.

Put those together and that's how they've come up with this new model.

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