Climate expert: We're talking about global warming ‘in the wrong way'

Leader Live

23-05-2025

Friederike Otto, who leads work on attributing the role of climate change in devastating heatwaves, floods and storms, said extreme weather was the way that people experienced rising global temperatures.
And she said climate change was a human rights issue, harming people's lives and livelihoods – particularly the most vulnerable around the world.
Amid a growing pushback against the drive to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 'net zero' to curb climate change, Dr Otto warned the costs of not doing net zero were 'massively expensive', for example continuing to have high energy bills from not insulating homes and importing gas from Russia.
But taking action on climate change had numerous co-benefits, she said.
In the UK, tackling the cost-of-living crisis with subsidies for insulating homes 'would not just lower bills, but of course lower emissions and at the same time help people to be more adapted to extreme heat', she said.
Reducing cars in cities and having more green space would lower air pollution and help cool urban areas and provide more permeable surfaces that would alleviate flash flooding in heavy rainstorms.
'There are a lot of these examples where the things you need to do, even if climate change were a hoax, you would want to do them,' she said.
She described US president Donald Trump's move to pull out of the global Paris climate treaty as 'ideologically stupid' and one which violated the rights of American voters, with many recent devastating climate-driven extremes hitting the US.
Dr Otto, who is based at Imperial College, London, spearheads work by the World Weather Attribution network on rapid analysis of the role of climate change in extreme weather events such as the UK's record-breaking 40C heat in July 2022 or the devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, last autumn.
She has now published a book, Climate Injustice, which examines the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather on people – particularly the most vulnerable who have done least to cause it – and how the crisis is exacerbated by inequality and a colonial extractive approach by western countries.
Speaking to the PA news agency ahead of an appearance at the Hay Festival, Dr Otto said she was inspired to write her book because 'I feel that we just talk about climate change in the wrong way'.
'We always talk, at least when we talk about it in public discussions, but also very often in the science, we talk about it like a physical issue that will affect the Earth or the planet and we don't talk about very much that it actually affects people,' she said.
'It's through changing extreme weather events that climate change manifests, and it does that everywhere.
'It's not something that happens some time in the future or somewhere else, but here and now.'
She said that World Weather Attribution studies had paid increasing attention to the vulnerability of a community to extreme weather, and how prepared they are, because 'it is usually what makes the difference between life and death'.
Extreme weather is 'how climate change manifests', she said, adding 'global mean temperature doesn't kill anyone, but what global mean temperature does to our weather, that is what destroys lives and livelihoods'.
She pointed out that the Paris agreement, the global climate deal agreed by countries in the French capital in 2015, is a human rights treaty which acknowledges climate change 'violates' people's rights and as a result the global community have agreed to address it.
'It is really important to know that when Trump says he steps back from the Paris agreement, it is not a treaty to save the polar bear that he decides is not important.
'It's a human rights treaty, and that includes the rights of all his voters that are dramatically violated by the impact of climate change,' she warned.
'Climate change is not a luxury problem, it is something that particularly affects those people who are already suffering under the growing inequality that we have, and they would benefit most, or very much, from mitigation or adaptation action that we would need to take,' she warned.
But she said: 'It has been politicised and there has been lots of ideological stupidity has gone into that.'
She said the current political situation had created a cynicism that there was no point in doing anything, with people feeling they had no agency to bring about change.
Instead, there are many things people can do in their sphere of influence, in their jobs, how they talk with friends, or get engaged as school governors or with the local council, she suggested, to create 'lots of very small revolutions'.
She said: 'It just needs the critical mass of people to fight for change, and I think they do actually exist.
'They just need to get enough reason to see that their fighting will be successful.'