Inequality magnifies climate impacts worldwide, climate scientist writes in new book » Yale Climate Connections

As the cofounder and leader of the World Weather Attribution initiative, climate scientist Friederike Otto is painfully aware of how climate change can magnify 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 is influencing specific weather events, such as the Los Angeles wildfires that erupted in early 2025.  

A physicist by training, with a doctorate in the philosophy of science from the Free University of Berlin, Otto now serves as senior lecturer in climate science with the Grantham Institute of Imperial College London. (Editor’s note: The Grantham Institute is supported by the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, which is also a funder of Yale Climate Connections.)  

After the publication of her first book, “Angry Weather: Heat, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change” (2020), Time named Friederike Otto one of the world’s most influential people of 2021. 

But by focusing so tightly on the science, Otto came to realize she was missing the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of “natural” disasters. Her new book is the result of correcting the lenses through which she views climate change and extreme weather, a vision she now wants to share with her readers. 

The transcript below has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Yale Climate Connections: The title of your book clearly signals your message, “Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change.” Why did you, a climate scientist with an expertise in attribution analysis, feel the need to write a book about injustice and inequality? 

Friederike Otto: I wanted to write the book because every single attribution study that I’ve been involved with has shown that it’s always those who are already suffering in some form in our societies who pay the highest price for the impacts of human-caused climate change. The more unequal the society that is hit by an extreme weather event, the worse the consequences are, and the longer it takes for those people to recover.

YCC: You attribute this problem to what you call “the colonial fossil narrative.” What is it? How would we recognize it when we encounter it?

Otto: What I want to signify by calling this narrative “the colonial fossil narrative” is that the status quo is a postcolonial world with a lot of wealth in the global north exploiting resources and people in the global south, based on extracting fossil fuels.

We sometimes encounter that narrative very directly when people claim that fossil fuels are necessary for a high standard of living, that the energy from fossil fuels allowed societies to develop in the way that they have. But the standard of living has only grown, and social mobility has only been possible when the access to cheap energy was coupled with access to education, with social security systems, and with access to health care. Those latter factors are not usually mentioned or are even actively dismissed. 

We also encounter this colonial fossil narrative indirectly because almost every story we tell reinforces it. You watch a movie, and in the happy ending, the heroes drive off in their convertible across Route 66 and into the sunshine. The narrative is totally embedded in our arts, our stories, our everyday life.

YCC: I want to come back to that. After your introductory chapter, your book is divided into four parts, focused on heat, drought, fire, and flood. And within each part, there seems to be a progression from impacts to explanations of the impacts to resistance and remedy. Is that a fair assessment of your strategy? 

Otto: Yes. And each chapter within these parts looks at a different aspect of inequality and then shows what we can do about it.

YCC: Your book starts with the destruction of Lytton, Canada in June 2021. After the town recorded a temperature of 121.3 F, a wildfire ignited that then reduced the town to ash. Just how far off the charts was the heat and fire that destroyed that town in Canada?

Read: Wildfires and climate change: What’s the connection?

Otto: To have a record broken by five degrees Celsius, I don’t think I have seen that before with temperature. We’ve seen it with rainfall. In the book I write about an event in Nigeria that was also way, way, way above anything that has been historically observed, even though it’s now been repeated. So we do see very strong records being broken elsewhere, but the one in Canada was definitely very extreme and still stands.

YCC: Keeping records, or failing to keep records, you say, is part of the colonial fossil narrative of Africa. Could you explain that?

Otto: It’s definitely part of the colonial heritage that we have much better records of what happens in the Global North than in the Global South. And that’s a problem. If we don’t have good records of weather and weather events, we can’t calibrate satellite data or weather forecasts. And without good forecasts, you can’t develop good early warning systems, which can mean the difference between a high and a low death toll, independent of how extreme the weather event is.

One of the reasons we don’t take heat waves seriously in Africa is that they are not recorded at all in large parts of the continent. Because, I think, it’s not the rich and the powerful who die in heat waves; it’s people who are already vulnerable, people who live in poorly insulated homes, people who have little access to information. 

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

YCC: One of the many surprises in your book came in the section on drought, and in particular your discussion of different cities in Africa, especially Cape Town, and their attempts to manage their water systems. You argue that sometimes climate change is blamed for a completely different problem, which is government malfeasance or government mismanagement. 

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

But sometimes, climate change is used as a replacement for “an act of God.” Previously, we may have said, “No one could have seen this storm coming. It was an act of God. There was nothing we could do.” Now, “act of God” is replaced with, “Oh, this is due to climate change.”

Even if climate change plays a big role in extreme weather, it’s not that without climate change, there wouldn’t be extreme events. There is an absolute duty to prepare, in my view, and you can’t use climate change as an excuse not to do that. You can definitely use climate change as an argument to say “the fossil fuel industry should pay for some of the damages, but doing nothing to prepare is not an option.

YCC: You just alluded to something that you take up in detail in the section on fire. There you talk about the contest between climate litigation and disinformation. How are we being disinformed about fire? And how is climate litigation challenging that disinformation?

Otto: With fire, the role of climate change is often dismissed: “Oh, this was arson or carelessness.” But it doesn’t matter whether it was arson or not. Climate change still made the conditions that make fires more likely to spread, more likely to become bigger.

Pretending these things have just one cause is disinformation. It protects the status quo. Instead of addressing the causes, we pretend to do something, like have a witch hunt for arsonists. 

Climate litigation is one way of trying to hold those responsible who are profiting and have profited for a long time from the burning of fossil fuels. And they have not only profited from a business model that demonstrably causes a lot of harm, they have also spread misinformation, something Naomi Oreskes documented in “The Merchants of Doubt.” 

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

So now we have evidence, from attribution studies, that climate change is harming individuals, countries, and societies. And we have evidence from the archives and historians, like Naomi Oreskes, [that the fossil fuel industry has deliberately spread misinformation]. Now we can bring these [two lines of evidence] together in courts. How well that will go, we will see, but I’m pretty sure there will be some successes. 

There’s a case pending in Germany right now. But however it’s decided, the case is already a big success because the court has accepted that, yes, you can use this nuisance law against a carbon major, and you can ask whether that carbon major is responsible for damages because of climate change. 

YCC: In the final section on floods, you address the floods that ravaged western Germany in 2021. So how does a colonial fossil narrative figure in that disaster? And how would the overturning of the colonial fossil narrative change behavior in Germany?

Otto: I think it plays a role in at least two ways. One is this idea that in the Western world we are so well prepared, we have the best infrastructure, that natural hazards aren’t that dangerous. Even if there are flood warnings, people don’t think they could be lethal. So no one has invested in a system that would actually enable it to warn people about dangerous natural hazards. 

In Bangladesh, when there is a tropical cyclone, everyone immediately gets a warning on their cellphone. Same in the U.S. There are warnings on TV and on radio. None of that existed in Germany. There was just the weather forecast that there might be flooding. That obviously didn’t lead people to think that their lives might be in danger. [The colonial fossil narrative creates] a false sense of security. 

The other reason the floods were so deadly was that it’s a very built-up area. Almost all surfaces are sealed. And so when the relatively small rivers broke their banks, the water had nowhere to go but into the roads and the houses, and so it rose very quickly. 

A national warning app has since been developed in Germany. On the building infrastructure side, however, the lessons have not been learned.

YCC: So the confidence that we’re safe, that climate-related disasters and the problem of unpreparedness are “over there,” in the Global South – that mindset is part of the colonial fossil narrative? 

Otto: Yes. And that led to Germans, quite a few of them, losing their lives.

YCC: In your final chapter, you express dissatisfaction with the stories we tell about climate change, both in the news and in movies and novels. You explicitly call out “Don’t Look Up.” What’s wrong with the way we’re telling the story of climate change?

Otto: What’s wrong with that is that it doesn’t give us agency to change things. In “Don’t Look Up” there is this big external force, an asteroid, that no individual can do anything about; [it has to be attacked with superweapons]. Climate change is just not like that. Climate change is a problem we are all creating, but we are also all really important for the solution. If we don’t accept the status quo as the best of all possible worlds, if we say, well, we’d like to live in a world where we could cross a road without fearing for our lives, and if we could [share that view] with lots of people, then that might allow us to create a movement.

And if in the media we talked about these examples, if we asked why people died in these events, but also what can we learn from the events, I think that would show us what we can do, that we have agency. It’s important to see that we all have agency.

And it really matters what we say and how we tell our stories.

YCC: I loved one of your closing pieces of advice: “Stop being an individual!” What did you mean by that?

Otto: Stop just thinking that you’re alone in the world, that the only way you can interact with it is by consuming. Realize that we are all part of a community. You have neighbors. You might have kids that go to school with their kids. You might see people you know in a pub now and then. Talk with them. Tell them it matters what they do. That it matters if – and how – they vote. 

I think if I were to write this book again, I would put much more emphasis on that. We are all part of a community; we all have spheres of influence. We can change things. 

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