Statement for the Commission on Human Rights Inquiry Hearing Brenda Ekwurzel, Ph.D. September 20, 2018 It is an honor to give this statement for the Republic of the Philippines Commission on Human Rights for the National Inquiry on Climate Change. I am the Director of Climate Science at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and have discussed my plans for the presentation with legal representative for the petitioners, Hasminah Paudac along with Kristin Casper, litigation counsel, Greenpeace. I submit the following statement, my Curriculum Vitae, and the PowerPoint to be presented during the fourth round of public hearings in New York, USA on September 27, 2018: The climate assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demonstrate the advances in science attributing human contribution to climate change. The second assessment report in 1995 briefly defined the difference between detection and attribution: “Detection and attribution studies attempt to distinguish between anthropogenic and natural influences. "Detection of change" is the process of demonstrating that an observed change in climate is highly unusual in a statistical sense, but does not provide a reason for the change. "Attribution" is the process of establishing cause and effect relations, including the testing of competing hypotheses.” It then declared, “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate” (IPCC 1995). By the fifth assessment report (IPCC 2013), the advances in both detection and attribution for temperature trends were clear: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.” “It is extremely likely1 that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” The largest contribution to this change arose from human activities, in particular the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from fossil fuels (Myhre et al., 2013). Heede (2014), found that nearly two-thirds of all industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions can be traced to the products of a small number of major industrial carbon producers; 83 producers of coal, oil, natural gas, and 7 cement manufacturers. 1 IPCC 2013 defines extremely likely as a 95-100% probability of an outcome or result. 1