Fredi Otto

Friederike Otto, known to most people as Fredi, is a British scientist renowned for studying the effects of climate change on the weather. From her base at Imperial College London, she leads World Weather Attribution—a resource that can prove, within a matter of days, whether a storm, flood, heat wave or drought was caused by the climate crisis. Not so long ago, people used the malignancy of nature or the whims of gods to explain why the weather careened between dangerous extremes. We now know these extremes are often caused by climate change—but until Otto’s research, it took scientists months or even years to gather the evidence that would definitively prove the link.

When I meet Otto at a café close to her home, not far from the banks of the River Thames, the sky is finally c...