‘I am an optimistic person’: the scientist who studies climate catastrophes | Climate crisis | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/29/i-am-an-optimistic-person-the-scientist-who-studies-climate-catastrophes“He said to me: ‘Look, we have this large ensemble of climate models here, do something with it.’
“So I was handed this huge gathering of data, and what that allows you to do is build statistics about rare and extreme events.”
Otto was armed with the information which would lead her a few years later, with her late colleague Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, to create the world’s first climate attribution unit to examine to what extent human driven climate change is responsible for extreme heatwaves, droughts and floods.
The journey from the creation of the World Weather Attribution unit to its current iteration, began with a paper Otto and Oldenborgh wrote on a heatwave in Russia in 2010. It was a classical academic paper, peer reviewed and published long after the event.
But when Heidi Cullen, one time chief scientist at the NGO Climate Central, suggested the work would be more powerful if it could be carried out faster, it was a breakthrough moment. “There was no reason we shouldn’t be able to do it faster,” said Otto. “We had the methodology that in principle doesn’t take a huge amount of time technically to run, so we could do it.”
Otto’s conclusions now come at speed, but are still written within the structure of scientific rigour and the available evidence. A great part of the work is communicating to the wider public and politicians the dangers of extreme weather and the message, most crucially, that it is being created by us.
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. “One of the biggest scientific surprises for me this year was the floods in Nigeria because there was such a huge climate change impact,” said Otto. “They were made 80 times more likely as a result of climate change. That makes me think: ‘Oh wow, there is really a lot that we don’t understand in Africa’.”