Global Warming and Wrongful Death Cases in Georgia: A Bridge Too Far?

Title: When the Heat Kills: The Legal Challenge of Linking Individual Deaths to Climate Change Hazards

In a groundbreaking legal development, a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Misti Leon against seven major oil and gas companies could reshape the way the legal system approaches climate change liability—particularly in cases where the cause of death, like extreme heat, is not easily attributable to a single action or entity. This case is the first of its kind to link an individual’s death directly to the effects of man-made climate change, raising profound legal implications for future tort litigation in environmental law.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the tragic death of Juliana Leon, a 65-year-old poet from Washington state who died of hyperthermia during the historic 2021 heat dome in the Pacific Northwest. Her body temperature was recorded at 110°F. The complaint alleges that the excessive heat, deemed “virtually impossible” without anthropogenic climate change, was a foreseeable consequence of decades of fossil fuel combustion, disinformation, and public deception orchestrated by the defendants: Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company.

Causation and Legal Hurdles in Climate Death Cases

As lawyers, we often refer to the “three-legged stool” as the analytical framework of whether a case will succeed or not. If any of the three are totally absent, there is no case. What we often get are legs of different lengths. The first leg is damages, is there a serious enough harm to merit a lawsuit. The second leg is recoverability or insurance coverage. If we win is there anyone ready and able to pay the damages. The third leg is causation, will I be able to prove that the wrongdoer breached a duty which caused the alleged damages.

The third leg is what is at issue here, causation. In traditional tort claims, plaintiffs must establish a clear link between the defendant’s conduct and the harm suffered. In Ms. Leon’s case, the legal challenge is magnified: how do you prove that a specific death—amid hundreds during a regional heat wave—was caused primarily by the defendants’ emissions? There are subdivisions within the analysis.

Was the decedent more than 50% responsible under Georgia law for not going to a cooling center, or buying a fan or hydrating etc.
Would a jury find that oil companies are more likely than not to be the cause of increased temperatures.
Have those temperatures increased by a factor such that the old temperatures would not have caused this death.
How much of climate change is a natural cycle on the earth vs greenhouse emissions?

The plaintiff’s attorneys argue for a “chain of causation” beginning with corporate knowledge and production of fossil fuels, leading to the greenhouse effect, global warming, the heat dome, and ultimately Leon’s death. While novel, this logic follows precedent set in other areas of tort law, such as asbestos or tobacco litigation, where courts have accepted epidemiological evidence and industry knowledge as sufficient to establish liability.

Cindy Cho, a former federal prosecutor and law professor, acknowledged that while causation is a steep hurdle, the framework is “reasonable” if the allegations are taken at face value. Nonetheless, meeting evidentiary thresholds in court will require robust scientific and forensic testimony.

The Role of Scientific Attribution

One of the most potent tools for the plaintiffs is the emerging field of climate attribution science. Organizations like World Weather Attribution have concluded that the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of human-caused global warming. This kind of evidence, if admitted, helps bridge the gap between general climate phenomena and individual events.

Yet courts may hesitate to admit probabilistic models or draw causation from climate science that doesn’t pinpoint individual-level outcomes. The legal system is more accustomed to binary causality—was the defendant more likely than not to have caused the death?—rather than multivariate models assigning partial responsibility to global systems.

This makes Juliana Leon’s case a high-stakes test of whether scientific modeling can meet legal standards of proof in wrongful death claims related to climate change.

Failure to Warn and Product Liability

Beyond the wrongful death claim, Ms. Leon’s lawsuit includes allegations of public nuisance and failure to warn under Washington’s product liability statute. Here, the plaintiff argues that fossil fuel companies continued selling dangerous products—i.e., fossil fuels—without adequately warning the public of their risks, even after internal studies confirmed the potential for catastrophic warming.

These claims parallel those in tobacco litigation, where companies were held liable not for the inherent danger of the product, but for concealing known risks and actively misleading consumers. Numerous investigations, including congressional inquiries, have established that oil companies did indeed sponsor decades-long disinformation campaigns about climate change, despite early internal acknowledgment of its risks.

If courts treat fossil fuel emissions akin to hazardous consumer products, the failure-to-warn theory could create new liabilities for energy producers, not just in civil suits but potentially under regulatory regimes.

Precedent and the Expanding Battlefield

This case is part of a broader movement of climate accountability litigation. Until now, cities and states have filed civil suits alleging deceptive marketing and damages from extreme weather events. However, none have successfully made it to trial.

Recent legislative developments, such as Vermont’s climate superfund law and New York’s similar statute, indicate growing state-level efforts to recoup environmental costs from corporate emitters. While those laws focus on public infrastructure and property damage, a wrongful death claim brings the battle into deeply personal, emotionally charged territory.

Challenges and Future Directions

Despite its boldness, the Leon lawsuit faces a series of practical and doctrinal challenges:

Standing and Justiciability: Defendants may argue that courts are not the appropriate venue for broad policy disputes involving global climate systems.
Preemption and Federal Jurisdiction: Past climate cases have been dismissed under arguments that federal law preempts state tort claims, especially if emissions regulation is deemed the domain of the Clean Air Act or international treaties.
Proof of Specific Harm: Establishing that Ms. Leon would not have died “but for” the defendants’ actions—rather than age, preexisting conditions, or other variables—will be heavily scrutinized.

However, the social and symbolic power of this lawsuit cannot be overstated. It personalizes climate change, assigning names and faces to otherwise abstract statistics. Juliana Leon is no longer a number in a mortality report; she is a person whose death has allegedly been caused by preventable corporate actions.

A Deep Dive on Legal Causation

The wrongful death lawsuit brought by Misti Leon against major fossil fuel companies raises significant and novel questions about legal causation, a core element in any tort case. Specifically, it tests whether the causal chain from corporate emissions to extreme heat to individual death is legally sufficient to hold defendants liable. This issue is even more complicated when viewed through the lens of longstanding U.S. tort doctrine—particularly in light of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 248 N.Y. 339 (1928), a seminal case decided by the New York Court of Appeals and often treated as a foundational precedent for proximate cause analysis, even in federal courts.

Causation in Tort Law: The Palsgraf Paradigm

In Palsgraf, the court—through Justice Cardozo’s majority opinion—held that a defendant is only liable for harm that is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of their actions to a foreseeable plaintiff. Cardozo emphasized the limits of duty and proximate cause, asserting that liability must be confined to injuries within the “zone of foreseeable risk.” If harm to the plaintiff was not foreseeable, then even a direct link between the defendant’s act and the injury does not create liability.

This framework introduces two critical hurdles for the Leon case:

Foreseeability of the Plaintiff’s Harm
Legal (Proximate) Cause vs. Factual (But-For) Cause

Let’s examine both in light of this lawsuit.

1. Foreseeability of Harm to a Particular Individual

Fossil fuel companies will likely argue that even if emissions cause global warming and even if global warming contributes to extreme heat, it was not foreseeable that a specific individual—Juliana Leon—would die in her car on a particular day in Washington state due to a heat dome.

Using Palsgraf, they may claim that Ms. Leon was not within the zone of foreseeable victims when they engaged in fossil fuel production. Climate change is diffuse and global, and while its effects may be broadly known, the individualized impact on specific persons at specific times may not meet the foreseeability standard.

However, the plaintiffs can counter that the foreseeability standard has evolved. Today, courts often apply a more flexible understanding of foreseeability in mass tort and environmental litigation, recognizing that defendants cannot escape liability simply because the victims are numerous or the harm widespread. Plaintiffs may also cite World Weather Attribution studies and congressional reports showing that oil companies were not only aware of the risks but actively worked to suppress them—suggesting knowledge and thus foreseeability of harm to individuals like Ms. Leon.

2. But-For Cause vs. Proximate Cause

In negligence law, causation has two components:

But-for (factual) cause: But for the defendant’s actions, would the harm have occurred?
Proximate (legal) cause: Is the harm too remote from the defendant’s conduct to justify liability?

The but-for test is problematic in climate cases because of the “many hands” problem: numerous entities contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. No single company’s emissions may be a but-for cause of an individual heat-related death, but collectively they are.

The Leon case essentially argues for a market-share theory of liability or collective causation, akin to theories used in toxic torts and product liability (e.g., Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories), where manufacturers were held liable even without pinpointing which company’s product harmed the plaintiff. Courts have sometimes accepted that where direct causation is scientifically elusive, shared liability may be imposed on all contributors to the hazard.

Still, Palsgraf stands as a reminder that liability in tort is not merely about physics or statistical causation—it is about legal limits to responsibility. The fossil fuel companies will likely argue that the causal chain from fossil fuel extraction to Ms. Leon’s death is attenuated and intervened by multiple other causes: government regulation, consumer behavior, atmospheric systems, and personal circumstances (e.g., Ms. Leon’s decision to drive alone on a 100-degree day).

Chain of Causation: How Long is Too Long?

Another doctrinal concept drawn from Palsgraf and subsequent jurisprudence is the concern over the length of the causal chain. Courts are often reluctant to impose liability where numerous independent events lie between a defendant’s action and the plaintiff’s injury. Fossil fuel companies will argue that:

Emissions are just one step in a vast chain involving global atmospheric processes.
Ms. Leon’s specific conditions—e.g., traveling 100 miles alone on an exceptionally hot day without sufficient cooling—were independent and superseding causes.

Plaintiffs must persuade the court that climate-related death is not only foreseeable, but that the chain of events leading to it is direct enough to warrant legal liability. They will rely on contemporary climate science showing that the heat dome would have been “virtually impossible” without human emissions. That removes the randomness from the chain and replaces it with foreseeable systemic risk.

Implications for Tort Doctrine

If the Leon case survives a motion to dismiss or summary judgment on causation grounds, it may mark a doctrinal evolution in how courts evaluate proximate cause in the context of systemic environmental harms. The law may need to stretch or evolve in the same way it did for asbestos, tobacco, and opioids—where the sheer scale and pattern of harm justified shifting causation standards to accommodate public interest.

Moreover, it may test whether fossil fuel companies owe a broader duty not just to consumers, but to the general public whose health is jeopardized by climate instability, particularly when those risks were long known and purposefully obscured.

Conclusion: The Tension Between Classic Doctrine and Modern Science

The legacy of Palsgraf looms large over the Leon case. It challenges whether a framework built for railroads and exploding packages can sufficiently address the reality of a planet transformed by corporate-scale emissions. The legal causation issues here hinge on modern science, evolving foreseeability, and judicial willingness to hold corporations accountable not only for what they do—but for what they fail to warn, mitigate, or disclose.

If a court finds that Ms. Leon’s death is a proximate, foreseeable result of corporate climate misconduct, it could set a precedent as profound—and as disruptive—as Palsgraf was nearly a century ago.

Conclusion: A Turning Point in Climate Litigation?

The wrongful death claim in Leon v. Big Oil could mark a watershed moment in environmental jurisprudence. It tests whether traditional tort law can adapt to the complexities of planetary-scale harms and whether courts will allow scientific attribution models to influence findings of proximate cause.

Regardless of the outcome, the case signals to corporations, policymakers, and the public that climate change is no longer a distant or diffuse threat—it is immediate, personal, and litigable. As climate disasters increase in frequency and intensity, more plaintiffs may come forward with claims linking specific deaths to the long-known hazards of fossil fuel emissions.

If courts begin to accept those claims, the legal—and financial—liability for climate inaction may finally become as real as the heat that claimed Juliana Leon’s life.