Climate change is not just a problem of physics but a crisis of justice

In an exclusive extract from Friederike Otto's new book, she says climate disasters result from inequality as well as fossil fuel

My research as a climate scientist is in attribution science. Together with my team, I analyse extreme weather events and answer the questions of whether, and to what extent, human-induced climate change has altered their frequency, intensity and duration.

When I first began my research, most scientists claimed that these questions couldn't be answered. There were technical reasons for this: for a long time, researchers had no weather models capable of mapping all climate-related processes in sufficient detail. But there were other reasons that had less to do with the research itself.