Extreme weather Why the climate crisis is a matter of injustice and not misfortune

My research as a climate scientist is in attribution science. Together with my team, I analyze extreme weather events and answer the questions of whether, and to what extent, human-induced climate change has altered their frequency, intensity, and duration.

- Friederike Otto

When I first began my research, most scientists claimed that these questions couldn't be answered. There were technical reasons for this: for a long time, researchers had no weather models capable of mapping all climate-related processes in sufficient detail. But there were other reasons that had less to do with the research itself.

Let's imagine extreme flooding in Munich, Rome, or London and heavy rainfall in the slums of Durban on the South African coast. How the people in these various places experience this extreme weather depends on the local economic and social conditions and, fundamentally, on their political situation.

Researching weather—and thus, the role of climate change—in the way I do is always political, and this makes it an uncomfortable topic for many scientists. I believe it is important to show that both obstacles—the technical and the political—can be overcome; our climate models have become better and better, and we are coming to realize that research cannot take place at a remove from the real world.

For example, to know exactly how big the risk of a drought is—where and for whom—we need a whole lot of information. Three main factors come into play: the natural hazard, our exposure to the hazard, and the vulnerability with which we approach it.

In West Africa in 2022, entire regions suffered from dramatic flooding during the rainy season. These floods were caused in part by above-average rainfall that, as my team and I discovered, was significantly more intense than it would have been without climate change. The rainfall was considered a "natural hazard," but exacerbated so significantly by human-caused climate change that it was anything but natural.