Climatologist Friederike Otto On Attribution Science, Conspiracy Theories And What We Are Facing
EDIT
You write about the Pacific north-west heatwave of 2021, which caused more than 1,000 deaths and had enormous economic impact. Does it concern you that tragic events like this don’t appear to be wake-up calls?
We do need wake-up calls, but we need more than that. Without having an idea of what to do, they won’t suffice. But we have learned some things from these events. For example, the biggest difference in every extreme event for the death toll is whether there are functioning early warning systems or not. We saw this with Hurricane Helene: in Florida people are used to hurricanes and are aware that if there is a forecast that says evacuate, you have to evacuate. But a bit further north in the Appalachians, [where] people are less used to it, they didn’t. Plus there was a lot of disinformation and the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] was attacked for trying to help people. So the death toll was much higher.
One Republican congresswoman suggested that the US government created the hurricane.
The fact that you can say that and probably half the people who would listen to you would think: “Yeah, why not?” That’s a big issue. I don’t know how to solve the “facts don’t matter any more” problem.
Calling those people climate-crisis deniers seems inadequate.
The more incredible the lie, the better it sticks. We have so many lines of evidence and so much data and it all shows the same thing. By questioning the data, you can’t create arguments that climate change isn’t happening. So I guess the fact-free approach is actually the result of the success of science.
You described the Pacific north-west heatwave as being “mathematically impossible”; that it was so rare that it could only happen once in 100,000 years.
Yes, if you don’t take climate science into account. Once you take global warming into account, it goes from being outside everything you would expect from a normal statistical assessment to 1 in 100 or 200.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/19/climatologist-friederike-otto-the-more-unequal-the-society-is-the-more-severe-the-climate-disaster