The first study to assess the economic impacts that individual countries have caused on other countries - through their contributions to global warming - shows that five national emitters of greenhouse gasses generated $6-trillion in global economic losses from 1990 to 2014. At a deeper level, the study now provides a solid scientific basis to show that anthropogenic warming constitutes a substantial international wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy.

There is no denying it anymore - countries that have historically developed off the back of cheap and dirty fossil fuels have caused measurable financial harm to poorer countries and a new, first-of-its-kind study has the numbers and physics to back that claim up.

The authors explain that the study emphasises "that the culpability for warming rests primarily with a handful of major emitters and that this warming has resulted in the emitters' enrichment at the expense of the poorest people in the world" adding that they "quantify those costs to individual countries and who precisely is responsible for them".

With this integrated end-to-end attribution analysis conducted by researchers at the prestigious Dartmouth College, a sound scientific basis for climate liability claims between individual countries has been established. "The...