severity of droughts, heat waves, and floods; driving sea level rise that threatens infrastructure and aquifers in coastal regions; and increasing the intensity and impacts of catastrophic hurricanes and cyclones. In so doing, climate change is having devastating impacts on fundamental human rights, including the rights to food, water, sanitation, health, housing, and an adequate standard of living. Most fundamentally, and for millions of people worldwide, climate change impacts the right to life for this and future generations and jeopardizes the right to a balanced and healthful ecology that is our intrinsic right as human beings. Although climate change affects people from all walks of life, its impacts fall disproportionally and grievously on women, children, and marginalized populations, Potentially Profound Consequences on Human Lives and Human Populations were a Foreseeable Risk of Fossil Fuel Combustion for Many Decades While these impacts are tragic and regrettable, they were not unexpected. The role of human activities generally, and fossil fuel combustion specifically, in causing climate change and its resulting impacts has been theorized for more than a century, and has been actively studied and intensively documented for many decades. The possibility that fossil fuel combustion might significantly raise planetary temperatures was theorized in 1896, and remained the subject of debate in scientific and popular literature in the ensuing decades.4 By 1938, credible research, supported by historical data on fossil fuel combustion and weather records, suggested that carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel combustion was already accumulating in the atmosphere and theorized that rising CO2 might already be affecting atmospheric temperatures. 5 By the late 1950s, leading scientists were warning that humanity was conducting a vast and unprecedented experiment on the global climate; 6 climate theories were reported in national magazines in the United States;7 and the possibility that climate change might submerge entire cities was the subject of educational filmstrips on television.8 In 1965, buttressed by the first of many high scientific committees that would synthesize the state of science on the issue the President of the United States, in a special message to the U.S. Congress, warned that humankind was already “altering the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”9 And by the end of that decade, a growing body of scientific research not only supported and substantiated climate theories, but raised increasingly dire alarms about the potentially catastrophic if still uncertain impacts on agriculture, rainfall 4 Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), Oil Industry Knowledge of and Responses to Carbon Risk and its Relevance to the Responsibilities of the Carbon Majors under Human Rights and Other Regimes 4 (February 2016) [hereinafter “Synthesis Report”]. 5 See id. at 5. 6 See id. at 6. 7 See Science, One Big Greenhouse, Time Magazine, May 28, 1956, available at http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,937403,00.html. 8 The Unchained Goddess (Bell Laboratory Science Series 1958) (climate segment available at http://climate.nasa.gov/blog/447/). 9 See Revelle et al., Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, in Restoring the Quality of Our Environment 111-33 (President’s Science Advisory Committee, Washington, D.C. 1965), available at https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/labs/caldeiralab/Caldeira%20downloads/PSAC,%201965,%20Restoring%20the%20 Quality%20of%20Our%20Environment.pdf. 3