First came the drought. For three years, in the Horn of Africa, the rains had failed. Across the region, they had traditionally built “water pans” for this eventuality — small dams to harvest rainwater and store it for later. But there needs to be rain in order to harvest it. By 2023, the UN reported that 19 out of 20 were dry. It had been the worst drought in most people’s memory.
Then came the floods. In autumn the skies opened. Rivers overflowed. Soil that had been bone-dry became heavy and soggy. There were landslides throughout Kenya. Around 200 people died.
That was about the time that William Ruto, the president of Kenya, was invited to give a speech at that year’s climate conference. He stood up to give his address. He felt he had a timely anecdote, given the topic of the meeting.
“Catastrophic flooding has swiftly followed the most severe drought the region has seen in over 40 years,” he told delegates. “Kenya has been besieged by relentless torrents that have claimed lives and displaced countless communities.”
Then, watching at home, Friederike Otto, 42, from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, saw him cite some numbers — numbers she was very familiar with. “Scientific evidence clearly and strongly links these extreme weather events to human-induced climate change,” he said. “Studies indicate droughts are now at least 100 times more likely in parts of Africa.”
It was a bit of a moment for World Weather Attribution (WWA), the academic collaboration she helped found. “It’s always useful to put a number on something,” she says on a spring day in a courtyard of Imperial College London.
Thanks to Otto, named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2021, we can put a lot more numbers on things. Otto is a climate scientist. She has colourful trainers, more piercings than most academics and — I now know — a very scary email autoreply that begins by explaining how many messages she gets and ends, “Emails addressed to Mrs Otto will be forwarded to my mum.”
Back when the now Dr Otto still lived with Mrs Otto, as a child in Germany in the Nineties, her geography teacher told her that her country “was lucky to have no natural disasters”. The weather was — as befitted a civilised country — civilised. In the years since, it has become a little less civilised.
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In 2021, for instance, in Germany and the Low Countries, Storm Bernd dropped a month’s rain in a day. Rivers burst and Liège was evacuated. An estimated £35 billion of damage was caused. Germany suffered 184 deaths, the worst natural disaster in 60 years.
It seemed clear to most people we were seeing climate change, but was it clear to scientists? For a long time when journalists wrote about extreme weather, there was a form of words we had to use. It went something like this: “Scientists emphasise that no individual weather event can be attributed to climate change. However, we know that warmer temperatures make such storms more likely.”
The problem is, extreme weather has always happened. If something was previously a 1 in 500-years event, as with some of the extremes seen due to Bernd, it might be that its appearance is due to climate change. It could also just be that our half-millennium is up.
These days, we have a different form of words, which are similar — yet so much more useful. After an event like Bernd, we can usually say something like, “Climate change has made events like this four times more likely.” In fact, in the case of Bernd (because science is always a little messier than we would like), we can say it is 1.2 to 9 times more likely.
There are other things we can say. We can say scientists estimate the heatwave last summer in the US southwest and Mexico, which saw 52C in June, was 35 times more likely. We can say they think last year’s drought in the Amazon, where many waterways became impassable, was 30 times more likely. We can say that this year’s Los Angeles wildfires, where thousands lost their houses, including actor Mel Gibson (but not, he said, his chickens), were also more likely — a longer dry season means that the winds come when the ground is still parched.
The reason we can say this is in a large part thanks to Otto and her colleagues.
In 2014, Otto helped found World Weather Attribution. The idea was simple. Journalists were quoting responsible scientists, who were saying that no single event could be attributed to climate change. But what if it could, in a way? What if we could indeed put a number on how much more likely an individual event was?
Each Friday at 2pm, the WWA team gets together over Zoom to decide what to look at. What has the climate been up to that week? Their criteria are not just meteorological. “We monitor the networks of the humanitarian aid organisations and use criteria based on humanitarian impacts to trigger events for us. So, for example, for floods, is it more than one million people, or 50 per cent of the population, affected?” They consider whether they have the expertise and the contacts in the area. They also consider impact. “Is it somewhere like South Sudan, where not much attention has been paid? Is it somewhere where scientific evidence would be useful, like the LA fires?”
Then they get to work. They look at historical data. They look at climate models — running them without the CO₂ from emissions. They work out the likelihood of the event in a non-warming world, then compare the two.
“When you have the numbers, you can tell people why it matters, how it matters and to whom it matters,” says Otto.
Dr Otto did not get the “Dr” bit for climate work. After graduating in physics from the University of Potsdam, she switched to a PhD in philosophy of science. She didn’t like it. Over the course of three and a half years, she met her supervisor twice. It involved “sitting alone with your books, never talking to anyone”, and by the time it was over, she’d had enough and wanted to move to climate science. In Oxford, she found someone who liked her background, rather than considering it weird. He “thought a philosopher with a physics background would do a better job than someone raised as a modeller”.
On the morning we meet, Otto has just held a press conference. It was, as it happens, on South Sudan. A 42C heatwave had led to school closures. Their analysis was that these sorts of temperatures were ten times more likely because of climate change. Otto was especially worried about the children missing school.
“They will be put to work, in the fields or households. It’s a huge trap, particularly for girls… It just leads to even more instability. And that’s not only bad for South Sudan; it’s bad for the whole world.”
She knows how this sounds. She knows that, at a time when Europe has to deal with Russia on one front and with a lack of growth on another — a lack of growth that is plausibly due to energy policies — people don’t want to think about South Sudan. “It is an unpopular story at the moment, but I think that makes it even more important to tell it, and to try to tell it whenever there is the opportunity.” This is why she has written a book, Climate Injustice, telling a more human story of the effects of climate change.
There is another story she tells that is probably even more unpopular. Because if you can attribute cause, you can also do something else: attribute blame. If a fraction of a disaster can be attributed to climate change, and a fraction of that climate change can be attributed to specific people, countries or companies, then how much of the costs could be loaded onto them? This is not a hypothetical. After we speak, Otto will be briefing some German lawyers about a case, currently going through the courts, that tests just this principle.
Will the glacier lake above my home burst?
Lake Palcacocha in the Peruvian Andes is almost as high as Mont Blanc, and surrounded by mountains a lot higher than Mont Blanc. It is clear, picturesque, bucolic and also rather bigger than it used to be.
RWE, 6,500 miles away in Essen, is a German energy company. It is not clear, picturesque or bucolic, but it is also — in the share price sense — rather big.
The two are not obviously connected. But they are. And the connection is a man, Saúl Luciano Lliuya. He lives in Huaraz, beneath the glacier lake. It has been growing as the glaciers retreat. The lake is looking more threatening, as the permafrost thaws. He is worried it will burst, as it did 80 years ago, and inundate his village.
Citing calculations by Carbon Majors that estimate 0.4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1854 have been caused by RWE, he believes that 0.4 per cent of that worry is also caused by RWE. Now he wants them to pay 0.4 per cent of the bill for sorting it out.
RWE, which has never operated in Peru, denies legal responsibility. The lawyer representing RWE at the latest hearing said that the facts of climate change or their role in it were not in dispute, but that the chaos that would follow from this precedent, with the resulting cases attributing blame, would in no way “help combat the climate crisis”.
It’s a test case, but the precedent could be terrifying
What is crucial about this, says Otto, is no one need claim RWE initially acted illegally. “In most jurisdictions there is nuisance law, about doing something on your ground that is then inflicted on a neighbour. Planting a tree is not illegal, but damaging your neighbour’s property with it is. It’s the same argument — burning fossil fuels is not illegal, but actually flooding far away might be.” It is, fairly obviously, a test case. Equally obviously, for polluters — which sort of includes all of us — the precedent could be pretty terrifying.
There seems, to me, to be an imbalance here. If we are making RWE pay for all the bad done by climate change, should we not at least consider that there might be something on the other side of the ledger? Maybe the newly successful vineyards of Kent should be paying them back? Otto is modelling the bad things that happen because of climate change, but, I ask her, aren’t there also bad things — blizzards, big freezes — that haven’t happened, also because of climate change?
“I mean, we’ve tried. We have done studies on cold waves. But it’s hard to figure out how to do a study on an event that hasn’t happened.” She accepts, though, the broader point. “There are benefits from warming. You can now do farming in parts of the world where you couldn’t. The problem is the speed this is happening. We have built our societies in places that had stable climates. If we had 500 years to adapt, that would be fine. But the climate has changed dramatically in just ten years.”
‘The UK would massively benefit from net zero’
That is not all that has changed in the past ten years, I tell her. Ten years ago, people like her seemed like the future. The Paris agreement had just been signed. The world was working together to beat climate change. Nations were cooperating. Then Trump got in. Then he got in a second time.
Today, I say, she feels a little like the past. What is the point of fighting climate change, when it appears that we alone in Europe are the ones doing it? Clearly, the world is going the other way.
“Don’t you think that what we’re seeing now is precisely because of that, because we made progress? This is the last hurrah of those who massively profited from the old model.” They consider green policies an imposition on their freedom, she says. “This idea that freedom is burning the most fossil fuel you can and then driving your car down Route 66? It’s just really stupid.”
For someone like me who considers himself a cosy centrist, Otto can be bracing. Her book uses the word “patriarchy” 12 times, “colonial” 89 times, “colonial-fossil” 31 times.
Otto writes about a false consciousness, particularly among journalists. Of how we “live our entire lives in the colonial-fossil narrative dictated by a handful of lobbies to maximise profits for a few and to the disadvantage of almost everyone else, particularly the poor”. This is, for her, the obvious reason why we haven’t acted fast enough on climate change.
I’m sure she has a point. I also see in Britain, I tell her, a massive effort to do something never achieved in human history. We are voluntarily moving away from cheap and easy energy towards a wholly new net zero system, as a conscious political choice — because of exactly the climate worries scientists have been warning about. Now, you can think that’s laudable or foolhardy, but it’s not nothing, and it is hard.
It also seems reasonable, I say, to ask whether Europe is being taken for a fool by apparently doing this alone. She sits opposite me with disappointed eyes. I know from her book that she has come across journalists “for whom self-reflection is too much effort”, who view her idea that lobbyists are manipulating us as a bit of a conspiracy theory.
“Even if only the UK would implement net zero, and no one else in the world, the UK would still massively benefit. All the measures that you need, like insulating homes, like having fewer cars, having better public transport, have huge health benefits that just increase the quality of life.”
Even if it comes at the expense of growth? “You’re staring at GDP and feeling mediocre?” I am, I admit.
That’s silly, she says. GDP is not the only number. She’s right of course. She knows the power of a number. And her career has been about reminding us that there are other ones that matter too.
Those ones, she thinks, are why the world will catch up. “We are already seeing that things are getting difficult in some regions, and that’s not sustainable. Even if there’s a backlash now, I think we will stop burning fossil fuels eventually. I’m an optimist; I do believe people don’t want to live in misery.”
Climate Injustice by Friederike Otto (Greystone Books, £22) is published on April 24. To order, call 020 3176 2935 or go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
