A World on Fire

Tim Hirschel-Burns evaluates Friederike Otto’s “Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change,” translated by Sarah Pybus.

By Tim Hirschel-BurnsMay 18, 2025

• Environment

• Politics

IN JANUARY, fires ripped through the Los Angeles area. The skies turned red. Homes that people had built a life in were reduced to charred spoons. Insurance payouts will reach into the tens of billions of dollars. Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, and Billy Crystal lost houses; 30 people lost their lives.

But for many Americans, even all of this could not make climate change shed its cloak of invisibility. Some mainstream media outlets raised the links with climate change, but in the information sources that reach much of the population, the topic never came up. Donald Trump claimed that Democrats prioritized protecting the delta smelt over sending water to Los Angeles. The Grammys and Oscars featured special segments paying tribute to victims of the fires but never mentioned climate change. Climate change–fueled fires had burned the eyebrows off the rich and powerful, but many of them still could not see it.

All this highlights a key challenge before us: climate change is tremendously hard for the naked eye to see. Invisible gases float into the atmosphere, causing effects years or decades later in places that bear no relation to the origin of the gases. One can see the fires these atmospheric equations spit out, but as Joe Rogan pointed out when countering claims that climate change caused Los Angeles’s fires, the area has always been dry and fire-prone. And human decisions mediate the relationship between changes in the climate and the impacts on our lives: better disaster preparation and response really could have reduced the damage.

One of the best-placed people to address this dilemma is Friederike Otto, a pioneer in the field of attribution science, which studies the extent to which climate change causes extreme weather events. Her 2023 book Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change, newly translated into English by Sarah Pybus, melds big-picture thinking on climate inequality with detailed but accessible accounts of climate science.

Fast-working attribution scientists like Otto provide a promising solution to climate change’s invisibility cloak while also demonstrating why the phenomenon is such a beast to address. For instance, according to a study by World Weather Attribution (a group Otto cofounded), human-induced warming through the burning of fossil fuels made the conditions that drove the Los Angeles fires 35 percent more likely. This 59-page paper came out three weeks after the onset of the fires, a timeline that is spectacularly quick for scientific publishing but weeks behind the height of the news cycle. As impressively rigorous as the study is, it reads as a thicket of probabilities and complex climatological dynamics.

Studies like Otto’s show that climate change is inflicting escalating damage on our lives, but they do not resolve the challenge of making the general public see climate disasters as climate disasters. Those who had hoped that the growing prevalence of extreme weather events would spur ambitious action perhaps did not think through the fact that the link to climate change would hinge on complex concepts like “hydroclimate whiplash.” What do you do when climate change has set the house on fire, but it just looks like a plain old fire?

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Climate Injustice is divided into four sections, each focusing on a particular type of extreme weather event: heat waves, droughts, fires, and floods. Each chapter examines one case study, taking the reader on a journey stretching across six continents. Throughout the book, Otto argues that the causes and consequences of climate change are shaped by the “colonial-fossil narrative” that shapes our world.

Otto is a talented science communicator, even if her writing on injustice sometimes opts for jargon-heavy telling over showing. In the book’s opening, she underlines the profundity of climate change’s consequences by comparing global warming to a fever. A temperature rise of 1.2 degrees Celsius makes a big difference, whether for a human body going from 98.6 to 100.76 degrees Fahrenheit or for a planet warming.

But as good as Otto is at translating complex studies into accessible language, there is no getting around the fact that climate science is frustratingly complicated. She explains that climate change has increased heat waves more than droughts or floods, making extreme heat five times more likely on average since the Industrial Revolution. But that ratio varies depending on local conditions—for instance, the 2022 South Asian heat wave was 30 times more likely due to climate change. And not all heat data can be trusted: if air temperature is not measured at the official height of 6.56 feet off the ground, its comparability is limited. Nor are most heat wave–related deaths recorded as such, because they generally result from exacerbating preexisting health conditions.

A recurring theme in Climate Injustice is the extent to which social and economic conditions determine who suffers from climate change. “The formula is frighteningly simple,” Otto writes: “the richer we are and the more privileged our lives, the less susceptible we are to the physical consequences of global warming.” For example, life-threatening heat stress is particularly common in West Africa. This is in part due to its location but also because people there often live in dense settlements and perform strenuous outdoor labor. Even in the Los Angeles fires, much of the worst damage was felt by Black residents of west Altadena, who received an evacuation order hours after neighborhoods to their east.

Although Otto stresses the inequitable impacts of the effects of climate change, she devotes curiously little attention to global inequalities in the causes of climate change. Climate Injustice focuses on climate damages, where data on the disparities between rich and poor countries is incomplete, much more than countries’ contributions to climate change, for which the data is strikingly simple. The United States has pumped nearly seven times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as India, even though India has four times more people. Perhaps because Otto wants to convey the many ways the fossil fuel industry has sabotaged climate action, her account understates the importance of energy. But energy consumption’s tight relationship with economic development amplifies the inequality of climate change. Poor Indians do not just suffer from climate change because of their poverty: the sweltering heat waves they experience are a by-product of the fossil energy Americans have used to get rich.

Our saving grace is that renewable energy can now replace almost all uses of fossil fuels, but getting there requires a transformation in how we charge our phones, power our cars, and cool our homes—and requires that we make room for the people who do not yet have phones, cars, or air-conditioning to obtain them without frying the planet. This energy transition touches nearly all parts of our lives. It is alarming and unfamiliar to many ordinary people, and it threatens powerful incumbent industries. The challenge that climate change presents is how to win political backing for such dramatic action when so many people struggle to recognize the problem it is meant to address.

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Some progress can be made outside the standard political process. Otto describes one promising use for attribution science in the courts, where there are well-established doctrines requiring actors to compensate those they have harmed. When applied to climate change, this can create space for cases like that of the Peruvian farmer Saúl Luciano Lliuya. Because the German energy giant RWE contributed to 0.47 percent of all human-generated global carbon emissions, Lliuya’s lawsuit argues that RWE should pay that share of the cost of building flood protections against a nearby melting glacier. Climate science’s dependence on proportions and probabilities may struggle in an information ecosystem dominated by 280-character posts and 60-second videos, but courts are used to assigning damages on this basis.

Fortunately, when it comes to public opinion, even people who are not motivated by climate change will be able to see the benefits of many climate solutions. Compared to fossil fuels, renewable energy offers lower generation costs, less air pollution, and less energy dependence on unsavory fossil fuel–producing countries. As the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, Europe shifted toward renewables, and China launched a mass scale-up in renewable energy production, economic motivations were key factors just as much as climate-focused goals.

Similarly, there is a wide variety of ways to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather, as Otto emphasizes. People want protection from fires whether climate change made them more likely or not, and politicians perceived to mismanage disasters will suffer political consequences.

Still, to rely on climate-agnostic policy would be to accept an ambling pace of action that condemns large swaths of humanity to unlivable conditions. For climate change itself to motivate consequential policy changes, narratives will have to do much of the heavy lifting. It is vital to protect the perception of climate scientists as credible, but it is unrealistic to expect ordinary people to become experts in climate science. If people associate a hurricane with climate change and a study later fails to establish a link, so be it. It is far more important that people buy into a general trend backed by extensive evidence than that they understand every nuance.

Otto is also right to think that a story of fossil-fueled crises is incomplete without an accompanying sense of global solidarity. Climate change’s visibility challenge is doubly difficult because the links between its causes and effects are spread over time and space. More people in rich countries might come to realize that climate change contributed to the fires in front of their eyes, but they are never going to witness the full extent of climate damages inflicted on people on the other side of the globe. In a world as geographically segregated as ours, humanizing stories—ones that acknowledge both our commonalities with distant strangers and the inequalities that divide us—will have to do the work that personal experience cannot.

The good news is that the way people see the world is shaped by much more than what their eyes see directly. The Right knows this. Fears of crime rise even as crime falls. People in rural areas with few immigrants are more likely to think their country is being overwhelmed by uncontrolled immigration than those who live alongside immigrants are. These narratives work by tapping into fears of out-groups. A fair response to climate change requires activating our sense of togetherness—with those in our community and those in distant countries, with those sharing the world today and those who will inhabit it in the future.

Climate advocates are on the back foot. The energy transition has slowed, and right-wing authoritarians backed by fossil capital are ascendant. But the emptiness of the Right’s promises combined with the disorganization and cruelty with which it seeks to implement them is nearly certain to result in a chaotic and painful next few years. In a moment of global disorder, it may not be so difficult for people to understand that the world is on fire and narrow conceptions of self-interest have led it there.

No easy fix to the climate crisis awaits, but there is plenty worth saving that is still in our hands. And, as Otto recognizes, the path to a climate response on par with what the science demands will require much more than just the science.