Victims of climate change may soon be suing the West

Would you have enjoyed the coziness and warmth of Christmas with your children or grandchildren just that little bit less if you knew that other people's children were dying because of it?

More than four million children under five years old are now at risk of acute malnutrition in the Sahel, an area of the world that is one of the clearest victims of the rich world's addiction to fossil fuels.

About 18 million people in the Sahel - the vulnerable pan-African strip of land that runs from Senegal to Sudan along the southern edge of the Sahara - faced famine last year and science is increasingly pointing a finger at those to blame for the persistence of drought - us.

This is an ineluctable consequence of improving the computer models of climate change. Of course, there are still large uncertainties. But what has long persuaded me of the strength of the scientific case for human-induced climate change is that climate-sceptic scientists have not managed to build a model that explains global warming without human-induced effects. The human hand is indispensable in understanding what has happened.

There are legitimate doubts about the scale of the impact, and about other offsetting factors that may reduce it. But what should be a wake-up call is science's growing ability to highlight the blame for particular extreme events, and not just in the Sahel.

For instance, a recent paper by Fraser C Lott and colleagues examined the increased probability that the 2011 East African drought in Somalia and Kenya can be attributed to human-induced climate change. Pardeep Pal and others investigated the impact of climate change on the £1.3 billion (HK$16.7 billion)insured losses from the flooding in Britain in 2000. Peter A Stott and others looked at the hot European summer of 2003, and its heatwave-related deaths.