Angry Weather

Dr Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The Grantham Institute for Climate Change

During the summer of 2018, people in France, the UK, Germany, India, North America, and many other places around the world not only experienced what climate change feels like but became aware that the very high temperatures they sought to avoid in the shade were not just weather but part of a changing climate. The following northern hemispheric summer of 2019 again saw heat records being broken throughout Europe.

Extreme heat was also a key driver of the bushfires that destroyed lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems in southeast Australia. As before, new studies undertaken by the team described in this book [Angry Weather] found that without human-induced climate change, the heat in Australia would have been at least a degree less intense and less than half as likely as in today’s climate. Climate change also made the weather conditions leading to the fires overall at least 30% more likely, which means that without climate change the devastation these fires wreaked would have been significantly less severe. This book – which looks at how weather and climate change are linked and how we as scientists can now characterize and quantify humanity’s role in extreme events – has become even more relevant and timely than I imagined it to be. Or, in the words of a German radio station, it “provides the arguments for the Fridays for Future movement.” Not all of them, certainly, but in this book I describe the birth of a new way of doing climate science. Not only in specialist journals and highly complex reports, but as and when and where people ask scientific questions and need scientific evidence.

Climate change is a fact. We’ve known this for a very long time, with experiments confirming the greenhouse effect conducted by a largely ignored scientist, Eunice Newton Foote, as early as 1856 and fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius 40 years later. We have observed rising global temperatures over the course of the 20th century, and the science advisory committee of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency warned of global warming in 1965.

At the very latest, since the 1990s we have been able to attribute these rising global temperatures to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. However, global mean temperature rise is not killing people and ecosystems directly. Thus the one degree of global mean temperature rise we have today is for most of us just a number. It is a powerful and important number, but since we do not experience it directly, this number only allows (and crucially, requires!) us as a global society to tackle climate change with our intellect, not fuelled by direct experience and resulting emotions. Being human, we find that a very hard task at the best of times.

It hasn’t exactly been the best of times, though, with powerful interests and a lot of money devoted to characterizing the laws of physics as a hoax. Published research from historians shows that leaders in the oil industry knew about the consequences of continuing their business model (digging up fossil fuels to be burned) as early as the 1950s. Archived internal notes show that they did not doubt the scientific evidence but decided to publicly deny it to keep their businesses going. The United States demonstrates impressively just how successful they were in planting seeds of doubt.

Fast forward into the 21st century. Global greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise (the current temporary dip due to a world in lockdown does not change this picture). Climate change has evolved from a vague future threat to an everyday experience, albeit one that may not yet be recognized as such by everyone. Global mean temperatures of a degree above preindustrial temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere above 400 parts per million manifest as rising sea levels and changes in the frequency and intensity of some extreme weather events.

These changes are not just making European summers uncomfortably hot. They threaten decades of development gains, and they pose a clear and present danger to the social and economic welfare of communities and countries around the world. While the global elite was busy ignoring or actively denying human-caused climate change, the problem worsened and devastating weather events proved the science to be correct. The price is being paid by those who always pay – people in developing countries, people who have to work outdoors, people who can’t afford insurance – in short, people who have profited the least from improved living standards in a fossilfuelled society. And of course the price will be paid most by those who were not alive in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, when those with influence chose to ignore climate change. It is the people who have no responsibility for causing climate change who are now taking to the streets, the courtrooms, and hopefully soon all the circles where decisions are made.