Climate breakdown “has more dramatically altered heat waves than it has droughts or extreme rainfall”, in part because heat waves are directly connected to the temperature of the atmosphere, while droughts and rainfall “are also subject to slower intermediary processes”.
Systematically
Even before 2021, extreme heat had become five times more likely than it was before the industrial revolution of the 1700s.
The Pacific Northwest heat dome of 2021 was so unusual, that expressing the role of climate change in making it more likely as a number makes no sense.
The point, rather, is that climate change made it possible at all. And that the past will be a poor guide to how humans must prepare for the worst present and future heat waves.
Otto, who is based at Imperial College in London, specialises in attribution science, that seeks to quantify and model the extent to which climate change is a causal factor in weather events and disasters. The World Weather Attribution site, on which she works, is a valuable resource.
Otto describes her alarm when she started to research heat waves in sub-Saharan Africa – and found only three, since 1900, in standard databases. The information is missing, not because of a mistake, but because high temperatures are “not systematically reported in most African countries”.
Justice
The nature of heat waves in hotter climates – where a smaller variation in temperature can produce a cascade of other effects – makes things tricky. The absence of basic equipment and inadequate research capacity are also outcomes of colonialism and poverty. The media’s cynical disregard for sub-Saharan Africa does not help.
Research in The Gambia by Otto and her colleagues unveiled the complex of reasons that leaves its people vulnerable to heat waves.
The complete absence of any early-warning system. The failures of rich-country development agencies who like building dams, but not fostering the institutional development that extreme heat management requires. The crushing burden on women farmers who are responsible for putting food on the table, and are in most danger from extreme heat when working in the fields.
To readers of The Ecologist who have long thought about how climate breakdown impacts and social injustice are intertwined, some of Otto’s arguments will not be new. But it is significant that a prominent climate scientist is speaking out so clearly against the consensus.
Western societies have failed “to recognise what climate change actually means”, Otto writes in a section on floods. “We don’t have a technical issue; we have a global justice problem.”
Consumption
Loss and damage caused by climate change is acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, but in the corridors of power the concept is “decorative at best”.
The climate talks have balked at the idea of compensation for this loss and damage to countries outside the rich world; the 2022 decision to set up a fund for the most vulnerable countries remains, so far, “nothing but rhetoric”.
Some scientists, and the assumptions they make, are part of the problem, Otto writes, in a chapter about Pakistan. “Most scientists see themselves as ‘neutral’, removed from political contexts; to me, this is an illusion.” Many researchers “tend to exclude content with political connotations (like loss and damage) from the outset”.
An allied problem is that “the thoroughly colonialist and patriarchal structure of the scientific world and the IPCC”. Not a single computer model of climate trends has been developed in Africa, “which ultimately means there isn’t a single climate model for Africa”.
And the emissions reduction scenarios developed in rich countries “assume high energy consumption and continuous economic growth by rich countries until 2100”, which is reconciled with global targets “by assuming restricted energy consumption in the Global South”.
Society
Against these and other “fossil-colonial” assumptions, Otto insists we need “new narratives that aren’t aligned with the traditional understanding of justice, and are incomparably more attractive besides”.
Underneath the dominant discourse are “power structures”, that are ultimately “the main problem”. The world “has been squeezed into a corset of colonial and fossil growth” that must be “ripped open”, and the idea that growth per se is salvation cast aside.
How do these power structures, and the ideas that hold them together, work? The search for explanations leads us to “human economic activity and its associated narratives”, and the “constant conflicts between our notion of eternal growth and the finite nature of our resources”.
She observes that “we still celebrate the success” of fossil-fuel driven growth stories, such as that of Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, and “we still endorse a business model that should no longer exist”.
Otto’s argument does not sufficiently account for the way that society changes, and the conflicting forces in it, in my view.
Disasters
Who is this “we”, that applauds Saudi Aramco’s profiteering? Clearly, in these statements, the politicians and media in the global north, whose common sense Otto so convincingly challenges.
But there is another “we”: the mass of people who have no shares in Saudi Aramco, or any other company; the hundreds of millions outside the rich world, whose suffering from climate change and inequality Otto unpicks, and the propertyless majority within it.
These are not only victims, but potential agents of change: the Brazilian forest dweller who said federal and state governments had forsaken their duty to protect the forest, so “we are the ones doing it”; the Australian bushfire survivors who took legal action to compel environmental protection bodies to take climate science into account; South African community associations who participated in the struggles over water supply and protection from drought.
This is the “we” that needs the new narratives Otto aspires to develop.
Another significant argument in Climate Inequality is that labelling disasters as climate-driven, when they have proximate social causes, can reinforce the dominant discourse.
Unprepared
Otto examines Madagascar’s three-year drought, that was followed by the 2022 famine, declared by the UN World Food Programme to be the first ever “climate change famine”. While that claim was “understandable from a humanitarian perspective”, the connection between climate change and famine was not easily substantiated, Otto writes.
Like many African countries, Madagascar has inadequate weather records. Climate change may have made the drought more likely, but that could not be verified.
There is no doubt, though, that a century and a half of colonialism left the island’s economy, infrastructure and institutions woefully unprepared to deal with drought. “Hunger and malnutrition in southern Madagascar have less to do with the arid climate, and more to do with British missionaries and French colonialists”, Otto writes.
Vulnerability
Madagascar’s structural problems are “founded in the same colonial-fossil politics of the former occupying powers that also led to climate change”.
When politicians, journalists, and even scientists make global heating “the sole culprit” for weather-related disasters, that “puts responsibility on a vague higher power”, she warns.
These narratives make climate change “an abstract phenomenon against which authorities, organisations and nations are seemingly powerless”. Climate change “takes on the role traditionally played by Zeus, Thanos, Zanahary and other cosmic entities”.
But down here on earth, “human vulnerability is caused by human actions”: poorly thought-out urbanisation processes; “exclusions […] based on systemic injustice”; marginalisation due to religion, caste, class, ethnicity, gender or age.
Ecosystems
In a chapter about the frightful role of climate change in accelerating Amazon deforestation, and the way it combined with government policy under president Jair Bolsonaro, Otto decries the focus in public discourse on such metrics as global temperature, rather than on the already-visible effects of climate change in poor countries.
Political discussions on climate change “focus mainly on physical parameters like sea level height, the intensity of a drought, or the amount of water in a once-in-a-century rainfall” – and that is to the detriment of people “already suffering the consequences of climate change”, Otto writes.
The global north treats limiting global warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels “like an economic cost-benefit assessment” that measures damage to property, but takes no account of “human lives, ecosystems or any damage to health, livelihood and culture”.
Otto sees potential in the Brazilian Supreme Court decision, in 2022, to recognise the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change as a human rights treaty.
Dialogue
This verdict lays the legal foundation to challenge failures of climate policy that endanger human lives. But it “barely made headlines in the Global North”.
Climate Injustice was published well before the International Court of Justice’s July 2025 advisory decision on climate change – the outcome of years of grassroots campaigning in the Pacific islands – stating that failure to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, including by constraining fossil fuel production and use, could constitute an “internationally wrongful act” by any state.
No surprise, though, that Otto and her colleague Alaa Al Khourdajie greeted the decision with open arms, arguing that it “fundamentally reshapes the legal landscape for climate action” and “turns much of the current climate policy discourse in the global north on its head”.
Social movements dealing with the climate crisis urgently need real dialogue with scientists, rather than lofty pronouncements. Friederike Otto’s book is a contribution to that dialogue that should be welcomed with open arms.
This Author
Dr Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham in the UK, and author of Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Pluto, 2018). He writes a blog at peoplenature.org. You can follow Simon on BlueSky at @simonpirani.bsky.social.
Climate Injustice is available at Bookshop.org. An excerpt from the book has been published in the Guardian.