Regarding Angry Weather: A Climate Conversation with Fredi Otto and Janette Winterson

On Thursday 21 July 2022, climatologist Fredi Otto sat down for a conversation about her new book, Angry Weather, with the writer Jeanette Winterson, to discuss what we–as artists, writers and concerned citizens–should make of increasingly random and extreme weather events around the world, and how we might respond.

Angry Weather explains how recent weather disasters—including heat waves, massive forest fires, and hurricanes—can be definitively linked to climate change, through the revolutionary method of World Weather Attribution.

This new ability to determine climate change’s role in extreme weather events has the potential to dramatically transform society—for individuals, who can see how climate change affects their loved ones, and corporations and governments, who may see themselves held accountable in the courts. Otto’s research laid out in this groundbreaking book will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind.

Friederike Otto

Friederike Otto is a Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College, London. A physicist with a doctorate from the Free University Berlin in philosophy of science in 2011, she joined the University of Oxford in the same year where she was director of the Environmental Change Institute. Otto’s main research interest is on extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves and storms, and understanding to what extent these are made more severe due to climate change attribution as outlined in her publication Angry Weather.

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, and adopted by Pentecostal parents who brought her up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington. After reading English at Oxford University she wrote her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, when she was 23. It was published a year later in 1985. Since then, she has published more than a dozen books including the memoir 'Why be happy when you could be normal?' and 'The Daylight Gate', and has won various awards around the world for her fiction and adaptations, including the Whitbread Prize, UK, and the Prix d'argent, Cannes Film Festival. Jeanette Winterson was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester in September 2012. She was awarded a CBE for services to literature in 2018.

Climate Conversations

Presented by the World Weather Network, Climate Conversations brings together extraordinary international artists, designers, architects and writers with leading climate scientists, policy makers and activists, for one-to-one conversations about the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. Each conversation focuses on topics of shared interest between speakers from different cultural and disciplinary perspectives, and fosters pluralistic approaches to global challenges.

Your Weather is Our Weather