Inequality magnifies climate impacts around the world, climate scientists write in their new book. »Yale Climate Connection

As co-founder and leader of the World Weather Attribution Initiative, climate scientist Friederike Otto is painfully aware of how climate change amplifies the destructive power of extreme weather.

Otto is a pioneer in attribution science, a branch of climate science that enables researchers to better understand how climate change affects specific weather events, such as the Los Angeles wildfires that broke out in early 2025.

Otto is a PhD trained physicist at the Liberal University of Berlin and is now a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute of London. (Editor's Note: Grantham College is supported by the Grantham Foundation for Conservation and Environmental Protection, a funder of Yale Climate Connection.)

After her first book, The Weather of Angry: Heat, Flood, Storms and the New Science of Climate Change (2020), the Times of Friederike Otto is one of the most influential people in the world in 2021.

But by focusing so closely on science, Otto began to realize her lack of the social, historical and cultural dimensions of the “natural” disaster. Her new book is the result of correcting the lens, and she sees climate change and extreme weather, a vision she wants to share with her readers now.

The following transcripts are edited for simplicity and clarity.

Yale Climate Connection: Your book’s title clearly shows your message: “Climate Injustice: Why do we need to fight global inequality to combat climate change.” Why do you have a climate scientist with expertise in attribution analysis feel the need to write a book about injustice and inequality?

Friederike Otto: I want to write this book because every attribution study I’ve been involved in shows that people who are always suffering from some form in our society, who pay the highest price for the effects of human-induced climate change. The more unequal a society hit by extreme weather events, the worse the consequences, the longer it takes for those to recover.

YCC: You attribute this question to what is called a “colonial fossil narrative.” What's this? When we encounter it, how will we recognize it?

Otto: I want to express by calling this narrative a “colonial fossil narrative” that the status quo is a postcolonial world with a large amount of wealth in the north of the world, based on the extraction of fossil fuels, leveraging resources and people in the south of the world.

We sometimes encounter this narrative very directly when people claim that fossil fuels are necessary for high standards of living, and the energy of fossil fuels enables society to develop in their own way. However, social mobility is only possible when the standard of living is growing, and only when access to cheap energy is available with access to education, social security systems, and access to health care. These latter factors are usually not mentioned or even actively dismissed.

We also encounter this colonial fossil narrative indirectly because almost every story we tell reinforces it. You watch the movie, and in the happy ending, the heroes drive into the convertible on Route 66 and enter the sun. Narratives are completely embedded in our art, our stories, our daily lives.

YCC: I want to go back to that one. After the introductory chapter, your book is divided into four parts, focusing on heat, drought, fire and flood. In each section, it seems that there is progress in the explanation of the impact to the impact on resistance and remedies. Is this a fair assessment of your strategy?

Otto: Yes. Each chapter in these sections looks at different aspects of inequality and then shows how we play it for it.

YCC: Your book begins with the destruction of Lytton, Canada in June 2021. After the town recorded a temperature of 121.3 F, the wildfire burned and the town was lowered to ashes. How far is the heat and fire that destroyed that town in Canada?

Read: Wildfires and Climate Change: What is the connection?

Otto: To make the video record break through 5 degrees Celsius, I don't think I've seen the temperature before. We have seen rainfall. In this book, I wrote about events in Nigeria, which is also higher than anything observed in history, even if it has been repeated now. So we do see the record elsewhere is strong, but Canada is definitely very extreme, but it still exists.

YCC: You said keeping records or failing to keep records is part of the African colonial fossil narrative. Can you explain it?

Otto: Definitely part of the colonial legacy, we have a better record of what happened in the north of the world than in the south of the world. This is a problem. If we do not have good weather and weather event records, we will not be able to calibrate satellite data or weather forecasts. And, without a good prediction, you won’t be able to develop a good early warning system, which could mean the difference between high and low deaths, regardless of the extremes of weather events.

One of the reasons we don’t take African heat waves seriously is that they are not recorded in much of the continent. Because, I think, it is not the rich and the powerful who die in the heat wave. They are already very vulnerable people, people living in poorly insulated houses, people with almost no information.

Read: Climate change plays a role in killing thousands of people in 2023

YCC: One of the many surprises in the book is the part about the drought, especially your discussion of different cities in Africa (especially different cities in Cape Town), and their attempts to manage water systems. You think sometimes climate change is accused of a completely different issue, namely government malfeasance or government mismanagement.

Otto: Yes. It is very important to recognize that climate change is happening, that it is real and has an impact on today’s weather.

But sometimes, climate change is used as an alternative to “God’s actions.” Before, we may have said, “No one can see this storm coming. It’s God’s actions. There’s nothing we can do.” Now, “God’s actions” are “Oh, this is due to climate change.”

Even if climate change plays an important role in extreme weather, there is no climate change and there will be no extreme events. It seems to me that it is absolutely responsibility to prepare for it, you can’t use climate change as an excuse not to do so. You can definitely use climate change to say: “The fossil fuel industry should pay for certain damages, but it’s not an option without preparation.

YCC: You're just hinting at what you covered in the Stove section. You are there talking about the competition between climate litigation and false information. How do we get false about fires? How does climate litigation challenge this false information?

Otto: With fire, the effects of climate change are often dismissed: “Oh, it's arson or carelessness.” But it doesn't matter whether it's arson or not. Climate change still makes fires more likely to spread and become bigger.

There is only one reason for pretending that these things are false information. It protects the status quo. Instead of solving the cause, we pretend to do something, such as doing a witch hunt for arsonist.

Climate litigation is an attempt to get those responsible for profits and profit from burning fossil fuels. Moreover, they not only profited from a business model that obviously caused a lot of harm, but also spread misinformation, but also Naomi Oreskes recorded in the “Question Merchant”.

read: Our elected officials have known about climate change for decades

Therefore, from attribution studies, we have evidence that climate change is harming individuals, states and societies. We have archives and historians, such as Naomi Oreskes, [that the fossil fuel industry has deliberately spread misinformation]. Now we can bring these [two lines of evidence] Together in court. We'll see, but I'm sure there will be some success.

There is currently a case in Germany. However, the case has been a huge success anyway, as the court accepted that, yes, you can use this nuisance method for sidelines of the carbon major and you can ask if the carbon major is harmed by climate change.

YCC: In the last part about the flood, you can address the flood that destroyed western Germany in 2021. So, how do colonial fossil narrative characters in that disaster? How will the overthrow of the change of the narrative behavior of German colonial fossils be overturned?

Otto: I think it works in at least two ways. One idea is that in the Western world we are well prepared to have the best infrastructure and natural hazards are not that dangerous. Even with flood warnings, people don’t think they could be fatal. Therefore, no one invests in a system that can actually warn people about dangerous natural hazards.

In Bangladesh, when there is a tropical cyclone, everyone immediately warns on their phones. There are also warnings on television and radio in the United States. None of these exists in Germany. It's just that the weather forecast may flood. Obviously, this does not make people think that their lives may be at risk. [The colonial fossil narrative creates] A wrong sense of security.

Another reason why the flood is so deadly is that it is a very established area. Almost all surfaces are sealed. So when a relatively small river breaks the bank, the water has nowhere to go, but goes into the roads and houses, and therefore it will rise soon.

A national warning application was developed in Germany since then. However, in terms of building infrastructure, these courses have not been studied.

YCC: So our confidence in our security, climate-related disasters and the question of “there” in the global south is “there” – is this mentality part of the colonial fossil narrative?

Otto: Yes. This led to the death of the Germans, many of them, to death.

YCC: In your last chapter, you express dissatisfaction with the stories about climate change in news, movies and novels. You explicitly called “Don't look up.” What's wrong with the climate change story we tell?

Otto: What's the problem is that it doesn't provide an agent for our agency to change things. In “Don't look up”, no one can do anything. [it has to be attacked with superweapons]. Climate change is not like that. Climate change is a problem we are all creating, but we are also very important for solutions. If we don't accept that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds, then, if we say we want to live in a world where we can cross the road without worrying about our lives [share that view] For many people, this may allow us to create a movement.

If we talk about these examples in the media, if we ask why people die in these events, but what we can learn from the events, I think that shows us what we can do, we have agents. It is important to see that we all have agents.

What we say and how we tell stories is really important.

YCC: One of your closing suggestions I love: “Don't be an individual!” What do you mean?

Otto: Don't think that you're alone in the world, the only way to interact with it is to spend. Realize that we are all part of the community. You have neighbors. You may have kids going to school with your kids. You may see people you know in the bar from time to time. Talk to them. It’s important to tell them what they do. Whether they vote is crucial.

I think if I were to write this book again, I would take that more seriously. We are all part of the community; we all have influence. We can change things.

YCC: Thank you very much, Friederike Otto, for taking the time to talk to us about “climate injustice.”