How we talk about climate change matters a great deal, Friederike Otto argues in this very welcome book. We need to think not about “the whole world ending”, but about the parts of the world “already being destroyed by the global injustice amplified by climate change”.
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| Soft drinks on sale at sunrise, Ghana. Photo by Awuah Kingsley / Creative Commons |
Metrics such as global average temperature or centimetres of sea level rise, important as they are, can obscure the impacts of heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires, and the ways that they intensify, and are intensified by, poverty and social injustice.
They can obscure the human agency of governments, corporations and other power structures who have made populations outside the rich world vulnerable by their actions.
“Climate change is no asteroid”, Otto insists (page 44):
It is a human-caused reality that escalates the inequality and injustice in our society. An injustice we consider so normal that often we don’t even talk about it. But we need to start talking.
Heat waves are normalised. “The planetary apocalypse fails to materialise; local disasters become the new normal”, she writes, in a chapter about the unprecedented heat wave on Canada’s west coast in 2021.
Otto has identified an important issue here. The political mainstream – although not significant extremists like Donald Trump – has largely abandoned crude denial of the causal connection between the fossil fuelled-economy and global heating. But new ways have been found to depict the heating as external.
It is gutted of content, stripped of its origins in human economic activity and social hierarchies. The responsibility of powerful humans in corporations and governments is concealed.
Climate change is “injustice”, Otto writes (page 175), not “an undeserved stroke of misfortune”. And the normalisation of actual climate-related disasters, in which people are suffering and dying now, has an unpleasant twin: the climate-change-as-apocalypse-movie narrative.
Why did Don’t Look Up, a hit Netflix movie, make do with comparing climate change to an asteroid, an analogy that doesn’t help us at all. Why doesn’t Hollywood produce a thrilling blockbuster about a lawsuit against ExxonMobil?
Good questions. (Although I nevertheless thought Don’t Look Up used black humour to good effect against right-wing climate-science-denying populism.)
In Climate Injustice – a model of clear writing about complex subjects for a general readership – Otto explains the interaction of social, economic and political factors with the physical changes brought about, or exacerbated, by climate change. In the first part, she tackles heat waves.
Climate change “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” (page 25).
Even before 2021, extreme heat had become five times more likely than it was before the industrial revolution of the 1700s. But the Pacific Northwest heat dome of that year 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”.
The nature of heat waves in hotter climates – where a smaller variation in temperature can produce a cascade of other effects – makes things tricky. But the absence of basic equipment and inadequate research capacity are 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 who have long thought about how climate change 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 (page 195). “We don’t have a technical issue; we have a global justice problem.” 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” (page 206).
The climate talks have balked at the idea of compensation for this loss and damage to countries outside the rich world (page 213); the 2022 decision to set up a fund for the most vulnerable countries remains, so far, “nothing but rhetoric” (page 219).
Some scientists, and the assumptions they make, are part of the problem, Otto writes, in a chapter about Pakistan (page 217). “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 “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”.
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” (page 198).
Underneath the dominant discourse are “power structures”, that are ultimately “the main problem” (page 199). 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 (page 200).
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” (page 43). “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” (pages 48-49).
Otto’s argument does not sufficiently account for the way that society changes, and the conflicting forces in it, in my view. 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” (page 135); the Australian bushfire survivors who took legal action to compel environmental protection bodies to take climate science into account (pages 169-170); South African community associations who participated in the struggles over water supply and protection from drought (pages 95-101).
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.
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” (page 118).
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| Photo by Miragracious / Creative Commons |
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 (page 119). 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.
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 (page 152).
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. 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” (page 151).
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.
🔴 Climate Injustice at Bookshop.org. Excerpt from Climate Injustice in the Guardian.
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