Climate change keeps challenging our understanding of, well, everything. Carolyn Merchant and Bill McKibben famously argued that our quaint ideas of nature are dead. But nature was only one of climate change’s early victims. Other deceased include rationality and, in smaller terms, the way “we” use language.

But there’s one thing that climate change should kill: the act of God.

This isn’t a theological discussion; the term has actual legal meaning. Act of God provisions protect parties from being held responsible for “unpredictable and unpreventable” circumstances, usually extreme acts of weather like hurricanes, earthquakes, and lightning. They get written into insurance policies, business contracts, and foundational American environmental legislation like the Clean Water Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act.

Broadly, two criteria qualify an event as an act of God: 1) No human agency could have stopped the event, and 2) no human agency could have exercised due care to prevent or avoid the event’s effects. In other words, acts of God must be unpredictable, and their damage must be unpreventable. On that basis alone, the act of God is nearly obsolete, or at least it should be. While specific weather events such as hurricanes or fires may seem to be acts of God, our growing knowledge of climate systems challenges any vision of weather divorced from human activity. Humans meddle with the climate, which meddles with weather, and the two can’t be disentangled.

But legislators haven’t yet caught on. They’re stuck with a centuries-old precedent built on outdated understandings of nature. While no one person can be held legally responsible for causing a specific hurricane, it’s just wrong to say that weather events are uncaused or unpreventable by human activity—aka human agency. We can’t prevent all weather, but human action could have prevented the cataclysmic droughts, fires, and floods that lurk in the near future. The public now knows who triggers the growing spate of hurricanes, floods, and extinctions, and it is not God. Scientists have been warning the public about human-caused climate change for decades. In fact, the act of God’s obsolescence is just one symptom of a deeper disease. Our legal and intellectual frameworks have not kept pace with our understanding of the climate.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/act-of-god-climate-change-legal-environmental-defense.html