Dr. Fredi Otto: Attributing extreme weather to climate change

Transcript

NIALA BOODHOO: After every extreme weather event, we wonder: how much did climate change contribute? It can take years to have a concrete answer.

DR. FREDI OTTO: And we thought, this is not good that this discussion is playing out without scientific evidence.

NIALA: One scientist is working to link weather to climate change faster than ever.

FREDI: …to therefore hopefully change the perception of climate change and how extreme weather events and climate change are talked about in the media.

I'm Niala Boodhoo. From Axios, this is 1 big thing.

Extreme weather is being increasingly linked to climate change thanks to the work of scientists the world over. But Dr. Fredi Otto's contribution is unique: she is getting it done faster. That hurricane, that drought, that wildfire? Her team at World Weather Attribution can say the extent to which climate change was a factor…in days, not years.

FREDI: We are an initiative of scientists who come together when an extreme weather event happens, to answer the question whether and to what extent human induced climate change alters the likelihood and intensity of an extreme event, but not on usual science timescales with writing a paper and then having it published two years later, but we do the science within a week or two after the event occurred.

NIALA: In other words, she says it's fair to call them the world's only rapid reaction force of climate scientists.

This week, for part two of my reporting from COP28 in Dubai, we're bringing you my conversation with Dr. Otto from the sidelines of the climate conference.

Dr. Fredi Otto is co-founder of World Weather Attribution and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College, London. Dr. Otto, welcome to One Big Thing.

FREDI: Thank you.

NIALA: I first just want to ask you why you think we need precise assessments about the role in climate change when it comes to extreme weather versus just saying climate change is making things worse.

FREDI: We don't need necessarily precise information, but I think we need very concrete, place-based information on what climate change actually means to people that connects their experience with the science. We have very short memories, and so when we experience an extreme event, that is when people ask the question, has this anything to do with climate change, and if so, what? And when you then provide an answer two years later, or say, yeah, this is the kind of thing where climate change could play a role, it doesn't have the same effect on your perception of what climate change actually means as if you say, well, "This heat wave that you just experienced would have been impossible to occur without human induced climate change."

NIALA: Can you give us an example of some of the analysis that you've done on a recent extreme weather event and what you found? How you do this?

FREDI: Yes. Yeah. So we have just published, um, a study where we actually almost published the study before the event was over. There has been an extremely disastrous rainy season in East Africa this year. So East Africa, that part of East Africa has two rainy seasons. One, are called the long rains that are from March to May. And one are called the short rains that are going from October to December.

And these short rains this year have been extremely intense. So we work with the Red Cross Climate Center, and they are always the ones to alert us to humanitarian impacts of extreme weather.

So they said, we have this, whether there's heavy flooding, lots of people are affected, Can you do a study? And so then we contacted people in the region, contacted people from the Kenyan and Ethiopian MET services, asked if they want to join our study, and then we first looked at weather observations to find out what had actually happened, and that's when we found, okay, in this, these last 30 days, um, those were the wettest that have ever been recorded in that part of, of the Horn of Africa, and that was also the region where the, and the time of most of the impacts occurred.

And then we looked at, okay, in the world we live in today, what kind of event is that? Is that a one-in-10 year event, a one-in-a-hundred year event? And we found, That it is about a 1-in-40 year event in the world we live in today. That, of course, doesn't tell us anything about climate change yet, but because we know very well how many greenhouse gasses have been put into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and we know that global temperatures have warmed by a bit more than 1.2 degrees, we can, use climate models to simulate the world exactly as it is today, but in a 1.2 degree cooler climate. And we found that in that world, actually, the intensity of a 1-in-40 year event, heavy rainfall event, would have been only half as much as it is today. So climate change doubled the amount of rainfall that fell in this season.

NIALA: And so that's done with supercomputing, I take it.

FREDI: We use climate models from all sorts of, um, modeling centers around the world that have been run on supercomputers. Yeah.

NIALA: And so in that particular study, what is your certainty level when you're talking about the rainfall?

FREDI: So, we are absolutely certain that climate change played a big role in making the intensity of these floods, or of this, this heavy rainfall, higher. If it's an exact doubling, which is sort of what on average, when we take all the models together and all the observations we get, or if it's more like, a 2.5 increase or a 1.8 increase, that is, that is basically impossible to determine, especially in a region like that, where there are only relatively short weather records, but also, that is not so important. I think we are quite certain that the order of magnitude that about a doubling in intensity is right. And that it's not a 10 times increase in intensity or a hundred times.

NIALA: For this specific event?

FREDI: This specific event, yes. It, it can be very different in different parts of the world. So we've done, we've looked at heavy flooding in, Nigeria earlier this year and found that there actually the intensity has much more than doubled, whereas in other parts of the world, for example, for Hurricane Harvey, we did a study, we found that the intensity increased by about 15 percent. And that's why I talked about the warming effect, which is the same everywhere, but then we have the weather-changing effect, and that's very different. And therefore we get this different numbers.

NIALA: How were you able to do that so fast?

FREDI: The reason why we can do this so fast is because we have a team of people who have been doing this for, it will be almost 10 years. So next year is our 10th anniversary. So, we have a team of people who know exactly what they do. We have, yeah, a protocol. So we have peer reviewed papers that describe. Exactly what we do, step by step, and so, we sort of have a recipe. We usually find something we have to change, but that's just small changes, and, yeah, but then also, we don't, in this two weeks that it then takes to do this study, we just don't do anything else.

So I think in terms of people power, it doesn't take less time than a normal scientific paper. It's just very concentrated. It's just a lot of people. So we usually, we have between 10 and 20 people working on a study. So everyone does a bit and we do it very concentrated in, in one or two weeks, where we basically don't do anything else.

NIALA: We have to take a short break…back in a few with more of 1 big thing.

Welcome back to 1 big thing, from Axios. I'm Niala Boodhoo.

I'm bringing you my second conversation from COP28 in Dubai – this time with climate scientist Fredi Otto, who is a co-founder of World Weather Attribution, out of Imperial College, London. Her team of scientists studies to what extent extreme weather can be attributed to climate change.

So Fredi once the analysis happens, what actual effect does it have, do you think?

FREDI: So, that's a good question. One effect that we do see, there is always a big interest in the media in our studies, so when we publish a study, we always write a scientific report, which is a 20 page long document that describes exactly what we did, which models we used, what data we used, but then, and then we write a summary, which is also on our website, which just set of the key messages and a brief summary of what happened and we write a press release that we send out to journalists.

And we also always do a press briefing where we explain to journalists what, what we did and what that means. And there are sort of around 700 media stories worldwide, usually, on average, I would say, generated from our stories.

But I think the more important impacts that we have seen is, the Red Cross teams in the country also do take up these reports and use them to say, okay, here, for example, we found that the early warning system, was operating, but actually it didn't reach all parts of the population.

There were a lot of people that weren't reached. So that's something to focus on. To hopefully prevent impacts from further events and our studies have been also used in by politicians, so we did one on the drought in the Horn of Africa that actually preceded this flood which may meant that the impacts of the flood were particularly disastrous because people were already suffering from, from the effects of drought. The Kenyan climate minister has used the study in parliament to discuss, that adaptation measures need to be put in place, so they have some impact, how much that happens is really hard to know.

NIALA: Do you think you are seeing changes though in how extreme weather and climate change are perceived because of your work? Certainly, I imagine that's the intention.

FREDI: Yes, that is the intention because that's sort of our raison d'etre. So we, we founded World Weather Attribution because the question was, what's the role of climate change was still asked 10 years ago.

But everyone was having an opinion on it, but only the scientific community was silent. And we thought, this is not good, that this discussion is playing out without scientific evidence. And so our aim was to have scientific evidence as part of this story, and to therefore hopefully change the perception of climate change and how extreme weather events and climate change are talked about in the media.

I think it has changed. Of course, it's a bit hard to say this is all just because of us, but I think it definitely has played an important role. Uh, I think it also played a role that we just have seen, especially in the last three years, so many extreme events and so extreme, extreme events that I think, yeah, even without us, it would probably have been hard to ignore that something is changing.

NIALA: Are there events that you have researched where you found climate change hasn't played a role?

FREDI: Yeah, those exist. There was a drought in Madagascar that was quite severe where we found that it was a really rare event. But it was within the natural variability of, of climate, and that the, the reason why there have been such strong impacts, and hunger and food insecurity was really poverty, and extreme neglect of that part of the region, of Madagascar, and it was really the social elements that, that played a role there.

NIALA: I wanted to ask you, you've been part of a campaign to use humor to translate climate science in the UK. Do you think, I mean, we're talking about these things that are quite grim and obviously life changing for many people involved. How important is it though to have humor or levity be part of getting people to understand?

FREDI: I think it's absolutely important that we use all kinds of media, because, I think what we have done so far, scientists, but also journalists, what we have done wrong is, that we still sort of, continue to tell, or to support this narrative, that the world we live in today is the best possible of all worlds. And that if we, that climate policies are taking something away from people, or you can't use your car, or you can't eat meat, and that's the only stories that are told.

But we don't tell the story that well, actually, your life will get a lot better if we put climate policies in place, not only because you will be much less vulnerable to extreme heat or flooding, but also other problems like air pollution will get better and your city doesn't have to look like the city we are currently in, where you just have concrete and asphalt and cars and actually nothing for humans.

I think we have to use art and literature and humor and everything to remind us why we are talking about climate change. And that the Paris Agreement is a human rights treaty. That is the reason why we do this. And if we don't put climate policies in place, then we are violating human rights on a really large scale.

And yeah, you can say that very seriously and with a lot of moral, but I think you also have to say it in other ways because, I think we only change narratives if we, if we try and do it in very different channels.

NIALA: As we're speaking on Sunday, countries are fighting about the language of fossil fuel phase out. I just wanted to ask you very quickly what you think the science says about this.

FREDI: So the science says very clearly that with the current infrastructure that we have in fossil fuel infrastructure, we can't reach the goals in the Paris Agreement, that the most important things to do and the cheapest things to do to reach, the 1.5 goal is to massively increase solar and wind, but we have to dramatically reduce burning fossil fuels or emitting fossil fuels. And we can only achieve that by stop burning all the fossil fuels that we can. The science is very clear that we have to stop using cars with internal combustion engines.

We have to stop using fossil fuels in housing, in heating, in all these things. And we have to do that first. And then there might be a very small role that carbon capture and storage could play for the really hard to abate fossil fuels. But we cannot just continue to burn fossil fuels slowly, slowly, maybe a little bit less every year. There has to be a dramatic stop in burning fossil fuels on almost all sectors.

NIALA: Dr. Fredi Otto, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. I appreciate it.

FREDI: No worries.

You can find out more about Dr. Fredi Otto and World Weather Attribution in our show notes.

And an update on what came out of the COP 28 climate conference: The final agreed upon text for the first time included language recommending moving away from fossil fuels. One key passage refers to quote "Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science…" Climate activists have hailed this as a big step for the world in reducing greenhouse gas emissions - saying that these talks could be remembered as the beginning of the end of fossil fuels. But…that they said also fall short of the level of commitment needed to phase out coal, oil and gas fast enough.

As I reflect back on my nine days in Dubai and at COP28, I did some reporting I wasn't expecting to, about the air pollution.

After a couple of days, my throat was hurting and some of my colleagues were complaining about their lungs feeling like they were on fire and we thought it was jet lag or allergies. And then we realized it was likely from the air pollution. From the kitchen window of my Airbnb in Dubai, we could see methane flares, it looks like clouds of smoke coming up.

And it's a byproduct of oil production. Former vice President, Al Gore actually brought this up in a conversation with my colleague, Andrew Freedman.

AL GORE: By the way, have you been breathing the air here today? It was 12 X higher than the who minimum standards for healthy air. Three days ago, it was 14 X yesterday, it was 11 X.

NIALA: Al Gore isn't the only one human rights watch in a report released last week said that air pollution caused by the country's vast fossil fuel production spew toxic pollutants into the air. The official line from the UAE is that pollution is caused by sandstorms in the desert. And the human rights watch also pointed out that people in the UAE who want to report on or speak out about the risks of fossil fuel expansion and its links to air pollution, face, quote, unlawful surveillance, arrest detention and ill treatment. And maybe because of that, it was kind of one of the most under reported stories of the climate talks. Although I have to say it was something I had a lot of side conversations with people about. According to that Human Rights Watch report, the World Health Organization estimates that about 1800 people die every year from outdoor air pollution in the UAE. All of this is yet another reason why climate activists told me it's so important to curb fossil fuel production.

And that's all for this week's edition of 1 big thing. You can always send feedback by texting me at 202 918 4893 - or emailing podcasts @ axios.com.

The 1 Big Thing team includes Supervising Producer Alexandra Botti and Sound Engineer Jay Cowit. Alex Suigura composed our theme music. Aja Whitaker-Moore is Axios' Executive Editor, and Sara Keuhalani Goo is Axios' Editor in Chief. Thanks to Fonda Mwangi for her help on this week's episode.

I'm Niala Boodhoo. Thanks for listening, stay safe, and we'll be back with you here next Thursday.