Angry Weather: Towards a Global Inventory of Climate Change Impacts
Let’s talk about 1.5 degrees.
In science, politics and even the media, climate change is measured in degrees. 1.5: the nearing threshold for catastrophic changes caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
What temperature fails to account for as a metric of climate change, however, is impact: rising sea levels, drought, warming oceans—angry weather and its impact on humans and the world’s delicate ecosystems.
For a long time it has not been possible to connect climate change and global warming to weather and climate-related disasters. But the tide—the rising tide, as it were—is turning.
Event Recording
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Leading that charge is German climatologist Dr. Friederike Otto, developer of the emerging field of climate change attribution, named an MIT Tech Review top ten breakthrough technology, and author of Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms and the New Science and Climate Change. Dr. Otto’s research moves the topic of climate change from an abstract future threat to a concrete and present reality. Her climate change attribution is a tool to quantify and establish the pivotal connection between climate change and its direct impacts.
Dr. Otto’s extreme event attribution also allows us to better understand where risks are coming from and how they can be addressed. Studies in the field open a window to help see who is most vulnerable and who is exposed. Instead of continuing to play a blame game, attribution moves the debate toward addressing risk.
Join us online Friday, April 30 at 2 PM EDT to hear Dr. Otto’s idea for a global inventory of climate change impacts. Such an inventory would:
- Aid disaster preparedness and adaptation at local and national scales
- Provide a comprehensive source of evidence for global stocktakes on adaptation and loss and damage such as mandated by the Paris Climate Agreement
- Finally put adaptation on equal footing with mitigation.
About Dr. Otto:
Dr. Friederike Otto serves as Associate Director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and leads the distributed computing climate modelling project climateprediction.net. With her main research interest being on extreme weather events, Dr. Otto develops methodologies to answer the question 'whether and to what extent external climate drivers alter the likelihood of extreme weather.' Dr. Otto was named a New Scientist “One to Watch” and one of just ten international climate scientists to join the core writing team of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).Associate Director, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University
The web-talk and Q&A will be held online on Webex Meetings. The event is free, but registration is required; a special access link to the meeting will be sent out the morning of the event. For help on how to join a Webex Meeting, see our step-by-step guide.
About the Series
This event is the second event in the series “Business, Science, Culture: Climate Edition” developed by the German Embassy Washington and the DWIH New York. For info on the series including the third and final installment, visit the series page on our site.
Event Information
April 30, 2021, 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Webex Meeting
Organizer(s): German Embassy Washington, Wunderbar Together, German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York