Friederike Otto: ‘The climate backlash is the last attempt by those who don’t want change’

If, or perhaps when, fossil fuel executives find themselves in court, testifying about their climate impact, they may have Fredi Otto to thank. Her group’s modelling has helped link specific natural disasters to global warming. It has drawn connections that three decades ago would have seemed beyond humans’ grasp.

Otto’s team, for example, concluded that the 2021 heatwave in the Pacific north-western US was about 2C hotter than a once-in-100-year heatwave would have been without human-made climate change. Now, their study is being cited in a lawsuit brought by Multnomah County, Oregon, against major oil companies and consultancy McKinsey, claiming damages.

Otto, a 41-year old physicist, is convinced that it is only a matter of time before a big carbon producer is found liable in court. “The evidence is so strong. You can’t say forever, ‘Oh, we didn’t know and maybe this isn’t an issue for the courts.’ It kind of works now, but it won’t work forever.” She receives such regular interest from climate litigants that she could “just quit academia and run a consultancy business”.

Instead, as a senior lecturer at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, Otto’s concern has been to change how the public thinks about extreme weather.

Once, storms and heatwaves were dismissed by commentators as “just weather”; even scientists were able to say only that an extreme event was consistent with what we would expect under climate change.

By modelling different weather scenarios, Otto’s team puts things more precisely. This summer’s heatwaves in the US and southern Europe would have been virtually impossible without climate change; they are now expected to take place every 10-15 years, estimated one of their studies in July. September’s floods in Libya, which killed thousands of people, were up to 50 times more likely — and up to 50 per cent more intense — than they would have been in a 1.2C cooler climate. Otto’s team has also put the damage in financial terms. In 2019, Typhoon Hagibis caused flooding in Tokyo, with costs estimated at more than $10bn. A “conservative estimate” is that climate change caused $4bn of the damage.

The World Weather Attribution initiative, which Otto co-founded in 2015, has published 60 studies, often within days of the extreme event to maximise the media impact. Most, but not all, find that climate change was an aggravating factor.

Now she wants to switch the focus on to action: what authorities can do “to make the next of this type of event less bad”. That ranges from early warning systems, to plans for cooling cities. Pushing into policymaking is the logical conclusion of her work: “I don’t think you can do this kind of science and pretend it has nothing to do with politics.”

Otto will be among the 70,000 or so attendees at COP28, the climate summit that began in Dubai last week. Like many scientists and activists, she is wary, given the apparent influence of fossil fuel interests. “COP always is a tricky one but this year particularly. When you go there, you give legitimacy to something which is, to a large degree, a bit of a farce. This year, no one is subtle about it . . . I don’t think we should abolish COPs, but I think there should be better rules on how to run them. COP has become a trade fair for fossil fuel companies.”

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Originally from Kiel, Germany, Otto sees herself as part of a younger generation of climate scientists, who did not grow up facing bad-faith attempts to discredit their research, and who are therefore more relaxed dealing with the media. She wears loud earrings (they are “armour”), and writes in her email auto-reply: “Emails addressed to Mrs Otto will be forwarded to my mum.” She encourages other climate experts to engage with journalists: “If you can learn maths and learn to write Python programs, then you can learn to talk to the media.”

This year has been one of broken weather records. In Libya, the port city of Derna received 100mm of rain in a single day — historically, average rainfall was 1.5mm for the whole of September. “The Libya floods were definitely a big one. But there was something similar last year with the floods in Nigeria . . . For me, it feels the last three years have been really different — there’s no week where we couldn’t do at least five studies if we wanted to.” 

But attribution science, a relatively new field of research that links climate change to extreme weather events, assumes people respond rationally to evidence of climate impacts. In reality, despite 2023 probably being humanity’s hottest year ever, politicians have started to backtrack on green pledges. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak wants to reduce emissions more slowly. In France, Emmanuel Macron dropped a potential ban on new gas boilers, which would have come into effect in 2026. Both leaders argued their countries had already moved faster than peers.

Another risk is that climate change becomes what immigration was 20 years ago — an area where populists can leverage public anxiety and portray mainstream politicians as out of touch. Germany’s AfD has opposed the coalition government’s green policies, while in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s party has pledged to “stop the hysterical reduction of CO₂”.

“For me, what we are seeing with this political backlash is — maybe I’m overly optimistic — the last attempt by those who don’t want change, because it’s so obvious that the climate is changing,” says Otto. “This looks really like a desperate fight in the light of overwhelming evidence. Some of the lacklustre ‘oh, we just keep the topic under the radar’ doesn’t work any more so they have to be very loud and open about it again.”

COP28 is focusing more on adapting to higher temperatures, alongside reducing emissions. How can policymakers readjust for extreme weather, when the extremes go beyond historical benchmarks? Do we even know what we’re trying to adapt to? Otto insists we do. “We as scientists always communicate all the uncertainties, but you don’t build a society that is adapted to an exact threshold of temperature.” Governments can build resilience to a broad range of impacts. “We have wetter winters, we have more coastal flooding, we know the summers are much hotter. It doesn’t matter if you know what day London will hit 40C again — we do know what we need to build.”

Social media footage regularly shows cars being swept away in heavy floods. “Your car is only swept down the street because there is concrete everywhere. It would not be impossible to build a city that has a lot less concrete, where the surrounding countryside has a lot more space for the water to go. It is something you can definitely adapt to.”

Wildfires are “much less easy” to fix. But, even when the sky turns orange due to smoke — as has happened in California and New York — “if you have protocols in place, you can adapt so that the damages are lower”.  

Adaptation is about governance. The death toll from Libya’s floods would have been much lower had two dams not collapsed. The dams were built in the 1970s on the basis of what World Weather Attribution called “relatively short rainfall records”, and may not have been suited to a once-in-300-year weather event; they were also not properly maintained. Yet the context is a decade of political instability. “It’s really the human capacity. That is what makes the difference.”

The insurance industry has picked up on World Weather Attribution’s work to inform its own modelling. Some risks will almost certainly become seen as too great. “If you insure against drought or heat, in many countries that would have super high premiums, then no one can afford it, or it’s just uninsurable.” Coastal flooding, which her group works less on, will similarly make properties uninsurable: “Florida is the poster book example.”

However, Otto is sceptical that climate change is driving large international flows of refugees. “That people en masse leave a continent or a country depends on so many other factors. It’s not like suddenly an asteroid drops on half of Africa.” She emphasises that, even with increasing heat and drought, people and governments have choices.  

World Weather Attribution consists of less than a dozen people, based mainly in the UK and the Netherlands. (Otto’s fellow co-founder, Dutch scientist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, died in 2021.) Otto wants more groups, with different methods, to become involved.

Could machine learning, which now outperforms some traditional weather forecasting, assist? The trouble, Otto says, is that there is not enough data for AI companies to work with. “Sometimes machine learning companies say ‘can we help?’, and I tell them what the problem is, and they say, ‘OK, bye then.’” Observational data on wind tends to be particularly poor, hindering studies about hurricanes.

Attribution science is partly about accountability. Polluting companies and countries can be tied directly to the damages inflicted on vulnerable populations. But it is also a warning. Under a scenario of 2C global warning, a once-in-1000 year heatwave in the Pacific north-west — such as the one that killed 69 residents of Multnomah County, Oregon, in 2021 — would be another 1C hotter. For all the novel precision of her conclusions, the basic implication of Otto’s work is therefore an old one: “This will only get worse if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.”

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