By Anna Lewcock
"The idea of going to court on climate change might sound a little bit wacky," Mr Peter Roderick, barrister for the Climate Justice Programme, told the BA Festival of Science.
"But this is obviously very important," he said. "Can anybody be liable for climate change damages?"
Roderick, an ex-Shell employee, has taken oil companies to court for pumping toxic fumes that exacerbate global warming into the atmosphere. In the US, there are several injunctions against power firms and damages claims against car companies for their contributions to climate change.
2003 saw a massive heat wave across Europe that caused thousands of deaths in countries that simply weren't prepared for such high temperatures. A report published the following year concluded that human activities had at least doubled the risk of a heat wave like the 2003 event occurring.
"Hopefully these kinds of legal actions will wake people up into understanding that we really significantly have to change the way that we generate our energy and the way that we move around," says Roderick.
Roderick showed a newspaper clipping from as early as the 1950s declaring that carbon dioxide was warming the Earth, and suggesting that "this gas could in time substantially change the Earth's climate."
Yet it has taken many years for this realisation to result in today's calls to cut carbon emissions.
Mr Roderick commented on the turnaround over the last 17 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the worldwide organisation set up to assess the latest information on climate change, since its first report in 1990.
The original report was sceptical about any human impact on climate change, saying increases in temperature were "broadly consistent with natural variation." By the time of its fourth report in 2007, the IPCC had changed its stance, saying there was "a very high confidence" that human activities were a cause of global warming.
In other cases of damage to people's health or the environment, companies responsible have been taken to court and fined or forced to pay compensation.
If the welfare of the planet and the human race isn't enough to make these companies change their ways to reduce their impact on global warming, then according to Roderick, dragging them to court and hitting them where it hurts - in their pockets - may be the only way.