FRIEDERIKE
OTTO
German
climatologist Friederike Otto was a lead author on the IPCC report | Joakim
Stahl/SvD/TT via Belga
The climatologist who put climate science ‘on the
offensive’
Friederike Otto has tailored her research to beat back
doubt about the link between extreme events and climate change.
BY KARL
MATHIESEN
August 9,
2021 3:17 pm
When this
summer's heat wave in the western U.S. and Canada obliterated records by
several degrees, the world’s media was seized by a burning question: Was this
climate change?
A
vanishingly small number of scientists have the skills and know-how to respond
in detail and quickly enough for journalists on deadline.
One of them
is German climatologist Friederike Otto. Along with her colleagues at the World
Weather Attribution (WWA) service, she is using what's called attribution
science to help answer the question of whether climate change made a heat wave,
hurricane or drought more likely.
“It's
extremely powerful to communicate just what climate change means, here and now.
To really bring climate change home,” Otto said in a phone call while walking
her dog near her home in Oxford, England.
North
America was still trapped in the heat wave when Otto and her team declared on
July 7 that the extremes of temperatures reaching almost 50 degrees Celsius, or
122 degrees Fahrenheit, would have been “virtually impossible” without the
extra greenhouse gases humans have loaded into the atmosphere.
No
scientist would have been secure in making such a rapid and decisive statement
until a few years ago. Normally, it would take months or years to research,
peer review and publish findings. Instead, WWA runs hundreds of computer
simulations to compare the probability of an event occurring in the world as it
exists and one in which there are no greenhouse gases added by humans. That has
brought a new speed and certainty to the slow-moving and tentative world of
climate science.
On Monday,
the approach was prominently enshrined in the bible of climate science: the
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) sixth Assessment
Report. The last time climate scientists pooled their collective research in
2014, attribution was treated as a promising, but exploratory field. Now, the
IPCC says: "On a case-by-case basis, scientists can now quantify the
contribution of human influences to the magnitude and probability of many
extreme events."
Otto, a
lead author on the report, said that recognition was a “very, very proud”
moment.
In just a
few years, the method she helped develop for probing single extreme events has
become a “routine endeavor within the scientific community,” said Ed Hawkins,
another lead author on the IPCC report.
That has
shifted the conversation in many newsrooms — traditionally cautious about going
out on a limb and linking any single event to climate change. Hawkins now says:
"The science has moved on and it would be great to see that reflected in
the news coverage of extreme weather events."
In her book
"Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate
Change," published last year, Otto said it had always been her intention
to put climate science “on the offensive.”
Rethinking
extreme climate science
Extreme
event attribution science had been around since the early 2000s. But in 2014 in
a San Francisco Starbucks, Otto and her mentor Myles Allen, a British scientist
who pioneered the field, met Heidi Cullen, an oceanographer who led the Climate
Central NGO.
Cullen
asked them if they could turbocharge their studies. The problem, as Cullen saw
it, was that peer-reviewed, comprehensive research arrived months or years
after a storm.
The solution
developed by Otto and her team circumvents the slow-by-necessity peer review
system; if a weather event is the same type as one they have already studied
and had reviewed, they don't wait for independent scientists to scrutinize the
findings. Instead, WWA will release a partial, rapid analysis, sometimes within
days of an event. A peer-reviewed study then follows. That allows their science
to fit within the news cycle of a major event.
What she
calls in her book a deliberate, albeit temporary, "breaking" of a
four centuries-old standard of the scientific method makes traditionalists
nervous. In 2014, WWA’s finding that rainfall from the U.K.’s Storm Desmond had
been made 40 percent more likely by climate change was subjected to the
extraordinary scrutiny of seven reviewers — most studies get two or three.
According to Otto, the research was rejected by two scientists who could not
stomach the pace of the analysis, but was eventually published in 2018.
But those
apprehensions have largely dropped away. "It's absolutely fine," said
Piers Forster, an IPCC lead author from the University of Leeds. “The
techniques are well established,” he said, adding that the WWA is “really
respected across the community. They are great scientists."
Scientific
criticisms largely center around whether the models are detailed enough to
capture localized weather. The more precise the model, the more computer power
(and money) is needed to calculate simulations. Otto and her colleagues argue
that imperfect models can still yield useful conclusions and in cases where the
analysis is impossible, they don't proceed. In some cases, they rule out
climate change playing a role in an event.
Otto also
works closely with lawyers using WWA research to develop lawsuits aimed at
forcing companies or governments to lower their impact on the environment or
even seek compensation for victims.
Because she
openly tailors her research toward political ends, Otto has been criticized as
an advocate. But she says it’s “nonsense” to knock scientists for considering
how their work can be used. She credits her second doctorate in philosophy with
her rejection of the purist view of science as solely the pursuit of knowledge.
Philosophers, she said, “take a step back, and then take another step back, and
then take another step back and see, OK, what is it actually that we are trying
to do?”
A guerrilla
operation
Despite its
broad acceptance as a scientific method and its significant command of media
attention, WWA remains a renegade, almost unfunded outfit, staffed by
volunteers. Otto pays for the upkeep of the website herself.
Her day job
is associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford
University. But, she said, the university is “not interested in World Weather
Attribution. So they have not been helpful.” The same goes for the Royal
Netherlands Meteorological Institute, which employs her main collaborator,
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. “It’s not the right kind of activity for research
council funding,” said Otto.
Instead,
green philanthropies like the European Climate Foundation are moving in.
But a lack
of proper funding means WWA has not been able to build up a team of people who
can independently perform the rapid, complex analyses that are the core of
their work. “The leading of the studies basically always hangs with Geert Jan
or myself or other senior researchers and so that's a key limitation,” Otto
said.
That limits
the number of events they can study and hampers their ability to respond to the
clamor for answers. Those weaknesses were exposed during this dramatic summer,
in which every week seemed to bring a new calamity.
Throughout
the past two months, Otto’s phone and email have been under siege from
journalists demanding to know whether floods in China, India, Africa and Europe
bore the fingerprints of climate change. What about the drought in Madagascar?
And of course, the extraordinary heat in the Pacific Northwest.
“It's gone
absolutely through the roof,” she said.
The strain
is evident and it clearly distresses Otto that she can’t keep up. “It's part of
why we do this, to provide these answers and to talk to people and to talk to
media. But it's gotten to a point that I just stopped reading my emails
completely because it was so overwhelming that I just couldn't do it,” she
said.
It's
unlikely she'll be seeing any respite.
On Monday,
the IPCC made it clear that the age of climate-driven extremes has arrived and
that means an even greater role for attribution science.
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