Welcome to A Climate Change, the show where we talk with change makers and thought leaders who are taking action to stop the existential threat of climate change. I’m your host. Matt Matern, today, I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Davide Faranda, a climate scientist with the French National Center for Scientific Research. Dr. Faranda specializes in climate attribution, the study of how human actions are fueling extreme weather, aka climate change.

He broke down the science behind linking fossil fuel emissions to intense storms, and shared some of the real world impacts of his research. But I wanted to learn how Dr. Farandas work could help in holding major polluters accountable in court, and how this type of litigation could help drive real change in environmental policy without further ado. Welcome to the program, Davide Faranda.

Dr. Faranda is an expert in determining what effect climate change had on storms and things of that nature around around the world, and in particular, obviously, we’ve had a couple of recent hurricanes here in the US, but I’m actually thinking Dr. Faranda’s work as particular salience towards towards litigation. Since I’m a lawyer, I kind of think in these terms. And you know, I’ve talked to some attorneys that are prosecuting these types of cases. And it seems as though David A would be a expert, you know, called into potential trials in these types of cases.

And the problem with major polluters of fossil fuel industry has been that there has been no they haven’t paid the cost for their pollution. They haven’t. We as a society haven’t measured and and held them accountable for the cost of the pollution and and we need to kind of have them pay the true cost. That’s, that’s the way kind of capitalism works. And they they just haven’t been held to account. So I’m really excited for this climate attribution science to really take hold and to be used in the legal world, because that’s where these polluters, that’s the language they understand money. So let’s take their money and so without further ado, doctor, it’s great to have you on the program.

All right. Thank you for having me. So tell us a little bit. I always like to get into the background of how somebody you know got LED on the path to this career. What was it like, you know, as a kid, where? Where did you? Where did your journey start in in the environmental world?

Yeah, thanks for this question. My journey really start as a kid, because I was fascinated by thunderstorms. I grew up in Sicily, and so thunderstorms, Sicily is an island in the Mediterranean, and thunderstorms are not exceptional. They tend to happen at the end of the summer.

And I was fascinated by the lightnings, the hailstones and all these phenomena. So I didn’t have any doubt. For me as a career, I knew that I wanted to do meteorology, and then climatology came into the play, because basically when I grew up, it was the time of the first talks about climate change and the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses emissions in altering the climate.

And it was for me, sort of natural to follow a career that was mixing Climatology and Meteorology, and that was what I did, and that brought me to become a researcher in this field, which I it was my dream when I was a child. Well, that’s that’s great.

I visited Sicily a few years ago. What a beautiful island it is. So I may do a travel log here about telling us where to go to in Sicily, but Taormina and Sierra cosa and Palermo all, all amazing places. The center of the island is beautiful too. It kind of reminds me a bit of California, like Napa Valley, yeah, absolutely, it’s an incredibly beautiful place. But tell us a little bit about your your training at how you, you know, came to have the the expertise to tell to.

Attribute certain storms, and to attribute the power of certain storms scientifically, and not just like, hey, I think it happened, you know, really be able to dig in and and and make that scientific finding stand up, right? That’s all my background. Basically, I start by doing the physics of the atmosphere. So I’m a physicist by training.

By during my PhD, I studied more the statistics of extreme events, and that was kind of general in applied mathematics. So my PhD was sort of mathematics, and the idea was really to understand what is the recurrence of rare events in complex systems such as the climate.

And then, with this background that is mixed statistics and physics, I moved to France, and I start my research in a laboratory, where we were dealing with turbulence flows like the ones that are on the wings of an aircraft, or the ones that produce thunderstorms again.

And when I moved to climate, there was all these interests that was just taking off on trying to understand what’s the role of climate change, and when I say climate change is burning fossil fuels.

So let’s recap, that is linked to this in changing the intensity or the frequency of atmospheric extreme events. So in this framework, basically I jumped in with my mixed background as a physicist and as an applied mathematician, and I could basically came up with a new technique that is the basis now of climate meter, this international consortium that attribute extreme events to this changing climate. And basically it was a construction all around my career that starts like 10 years ago, when I start my position in the French National Center for Scientific Research.

That’s that’s a fascinating journey. And you know, it’s heartening to hear that, you know, somebody does this amount of study in order to get to this point, to make these statements, because so we hear a lot of people poo, pooing the science behind climate and saying, oh, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, smoke and mirrors. It’s the Chinese government that’s trying to do this. It’s like all kinds of crazy statements that are made out there in the world trying to discredit the science behind attributing man made, anthropogenic causes to climate change?

I guess, lots of questions there. I kind of like to go back to say the litigation aspect of it and hurricane Maria, we had somebody on the show a year or so ago, Melissa Sims, and she has brought a lawsuit against the major fossil fuel companies for hurricane Maria and and how the fossil fuel companies and their emission of CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere exacerbated the The condition. And I don’t know if you had been involved in any of the study regarding hurricane Maria, not Aragon Maria, but we covered quite well Aragon Maria.

We will cover it in a research papers where we are trying to sum up all the knowledge that we have on how climate change have affected the hurricanes in the Atlantic so far, but basically the main findings that we have so far is that we do detect changes in the intensity of this phenomena, and in particular, in changes in precipitation associated with this phenomena, which means basically more rain in these storms. And this is way more rain that what we see with mid latitude storms.

So there is some additional effects that makes precipitation in hurricane enhanced by greenhouse gasses emissions, way more than the 7% per degree Celsius of warming. That is what we expect by the law of physics. So there is a there are things to understand there. And this is not good news for for those living in the US Coast or in the Caribbean affected by the hurricanes, because it means that this storm are becoming potentially way more destructive cost to climate change than they were before.

So this is definitely a matter for climate litigation, and you mentioned that we need a strong background in physics and statistics to understand this phenomena. That’s true, there are two things that we need to understand when we do attribution. One is whether there are changes in the phenomena that we can detect, and for this, we need statistics.

But then the most important thing is that we have to understand what is the link between these changes and the physics of the phenomena of the cyclones, of the heat waves of the cold spell? Whatever we want to attribute, we want to understand how these changes are produced, starting from burning fossil fuel to increasing global temperature to changes that are not in mixing this phenomena.

So that’s the pathway. And we cannot just see, oh, there are changes. No, we have to understand and explain these changes. And that’s what makes attribution science, I would say, interesting, but also useful, because we understand not only the event that we want to attribute, but possibly how all the other events will change for a given reason.

So, yeah, for somebody who only took one statistics class in college, it, you know, it seemed obvious to me that if we’ve had 20 of the hottest 21 years in recorded history, back to back to back, from 2000 going forward, that that’s kind of really strong statistical evidence that we’re having global warming like that doesn’t happen absent, you know, a driving factor like global warming and that we are humans are causing this change?

Yes, but still, you will have skeptical people that will say like, but the earth is already underwent periods of undergone periods of warming in the past. So you have to prove, with the physics that burning fossil fuel corresponds to increasing the global temperature. And that’s very easy. You have two way of doing this. One you can do a lab experiment.

You can just take a tank and fill it with greenhouse gasses like CO2, then send some radiation here, there with a lump, and then measure the temperature. This is laboratory experiment. And then you will see that the temperature rise as you increase the concentration of the CO2.

And the second point that we can do this using climate models is that we can simulate the climate of our planet and simulate this climate into in a world without CO2 emissions, in a world that is with the present level of CO2 emissions, and we discover again that we warm the atmosphere as soon as we increase the concentration of the CO2 so physics is important to understand that the changes that we are producing at the global scale by burning fossil fuels are changing the climate, and they are changing the climate in such a rapid way that cannot be explained by other natural variability factors.

Such as, for example, the solar cycles, the ocean currents, the volcanos, and whatever we want to take into account the oil companies, you know, and Exxon did a study back in 1982 which I like to remind people of, that they predicted that We would have 450, parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that it would have, you know, devastating effects on the climate back in the 80s.

So this isn’t anything new, and the oil companies did the research themselves. They’re not stupid. They they knew what they were doing, which is kind of the most outrageous part of this is that people knew that they were going to cause devastating effects and kill people, and they continued to engage in this behavior, recklessly disregarding the lives and safety of billions of other people.

It’s just phenomenally, you know, heartless, yes, indeed. So the basic mechanism that I’ve just explained that is co do increasing global temperature rising and more extreme events. These are more intense ones. These are the basics of the climate science, and it’s known since a long time, as you mentioned, and I.

Um, that’s the basic So, in fact, we could expect, and there are already the first IPCC reports and other reports that are, as you mentioned, older than me, that can basically track the climate change and also the potential effects that it will have on the extreme events, and nothing, or very little, has been done so far to reduce the CO2 emissions and to go on a trajectory that is safer for the planet.

So now, we are already experiencing events for which the signature of climate change is large in terms of increase of precipitation, increase of temperature, increase of winds in them, in the cyclones, and we can detect these changes.

So the attribution science nowadays is at the level that we can go beyond what was done 3040, years ago, and for each single event, really detect the changes in the atmospheric variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind that are produced by burning fossil fuels. And one thing that it’s interesting to understand, how good are we now doing attribution science is that we can detect these changes at the scale of a city.

So that’s the information that was missing in 1980 1990 is how a cyclone has been modified by climate change in Atlanta, in Tampa, in Miami. So that’s the kind of information that we provide now with attribution studies and in climate media. And that’s really the important information that you need then for climate litigation, because it’s in the city that people are living. It’s in the city that the business are and where the damages can be accounted.

So it’s there that we can ask this. We can make this climate litigation and ask the oil companies that were aware of the climate change already decades ago to pay for the damages, because they have contributed to producing them, right? You know, in terms of a lot of different questions come up with that one, what’s happening in the Arctic? And I think that that, to me, is one of the most shocking things, that the Arctic is warming so much faster.

And question number one, how? How fast is it warming? And for the audience, as well as, what do you see as the effects downstream from from that warming, if, if we don’t stop polluting? Yeah, so the Arctic is warming three, four times faster than the rest of the world, and that’s because it has a very fast response to changing temperature.

So I remind that globally, the temperature has raised now by 1.5 degrees Celsius. That is about the level that was the guard level of the Paris Agreement, the level not to overcome, because otherwise the climate would become unstable in terms of extreme events that happen on the surface. And this 1.5 level corresponds already to a warming that is of order three four degrees in the Arctic.

And the reason is simple, the Arctic is covered in large part by ice, and the ice is very sensitive to the rising temperature. So we are changing the landscape of the North Pole and also of the South Pole. Until a few years ago, that was only the North Pole that was starting to react climate change.

Now we have evidence that also the South Pole and the Antarctic continent is starting to become unstable. And the importance for the rest of the world is that at mid latitude, so the latitudes where we have the United States, Europe, China, Japan.

The climate is basically depending on the jet stream. The jet stream is a current that goes from the west to the east at mid latitude, and it is the current that makes travels faster when we go, for example, from New York to Paris than vice versa. And these currents do not depend on the global temperature, but depends on the temperature difference between the tropics and the Arctic. And so you see that if you change faster the.

The temperature in the Arctic, then you change this current that transport the storms, but also the anticyclones, the ones that produce heat wave. So we are changing the proportion of storms and anticyclones that we get at mid latitudes, and that changes also the extreme events that we can produce at this latitude.

Yeah, it’s just mind boggling how bad this can get if we don’t do something about it immediately. And you know, I guess maybe you can paint a picture for us and say, Hey, what happens when if we don’t do anything about this and we add yet more CO2, more methane, more greenhouse gasses to the mix, where, where does this go?

Yeah, it can go very far. Unfortunately, we already see that some of the storms have increased the precipitation up to 30% so we have more rain that falls in the storms. And this is both for tropical cyclones, but also for extra tropical storms. We have heat waves that are even up to five seven degrees warmer than in the previous climate.

And this is, for example, what we have seen with the Canada heat wave in 2021 where, even in Canada, we reach temperature of 50 degrees Celsius. So that these consequences that are what we are observing now in the current climate will be enhanced by keeping burning fossil fuels.

And what we can imagine is that we will live in a world that is much warmer and where the variability of the phenomena increase, which means that we are likely to have years that are totally dry with mega drought, such as the one that we observed in California and In the western state, as well as in the Mediterranean.

And then years that are extremely wet, like the one that, again, we observed in California in the previous year, or in Europe in 2023 2024 so this extreme variability will continue in time and will produce more severe extreme events, both dry, such as heat wave and drought and wet, severe convective storm, tropical cyclone, extra tropical storm.

So we will live in a world of extremes. And for these extremes, there will be not climate heavens. So there will be no city that will be spared from this. There will be city that will get warmer, but too dry, and then this heat will accumulate and will explode with thunderstorms or cyglons that will be causing floods. So we will go from these extremes so quick and so fast that adaptation will hardly be possible in any of the city of the world.

Yeah, we saw that with the hurricanes recently, in a town, Asheville, North Carolina, which got inundated with floods which they would have never thought they were kind of affected by hurricanes because they were kind of far from the coast, and yet this devastating event occurred in that area? Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so in the climate meter that is this international consortium that I’m coordinating and perform the attribution study, for example, for Oregon Ellen, we have seen that the possibility for these storms to move farther north due to the fact that oceans are warmer is increasing, and they carry all the wet kit, all the moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, way far from the north to the north, so that they can produce these tropical phenomena, even in areas that are very far from the tropics.

So that not only happened in the US, in North Carolina, as you were mentioning, but just two weeks ago, also in France, where, again, areas or in the surroundings of Paris, have been completely flooded, areas where we do not expect to see this big amount of precipitation falling from the sky.

And the reason is simple, the warming is extending the tropical zones to the middle latitude, and so we expect that the tropical cyclones such as Ellen can move further to the north and reach areas that were before safe from this phenomena. And the tropics are also warming faster than the.

Other areas of the world, for example, Amazonia, or some areas in Southeast Asia. And in this area, there are vulnerable ecosystems such as the rainforest, and they’re also in in danger. And when I say danger, it means that they could disappear if we keep doing the warming.

So tell us a little bit about how you’re using AI to map these storms and to study this and maybe if it could be used to help us come up with some solutions so that we don’t end up in the disaster zone. I will start from the from the end. There are no solutions without reducing burning fossil fuels, because we are increasing the temperature over thresholds that are not sustainable for the planet.

As it is now, this is the same as, for example, fever for the human body, you can use artificial intelligence. You can have the best doctors in the world, but if your temperature is over 42 degrees Celsius, you are dead. So that’s the same for the planet. There are thresholds that we should not overtake otherwise the planet as basically no possibility of recovering.

But what we can do if we keep the CO2 emissions low is that, in fact, using artificial intelligence, we can discover the link between the impacts of some phenomena and the origin of this phenomenon. So when I talk to about impacts, I really means the economical damages. I really means that the the impact on mortality, for example, if you’re talking about heat waves. So for these things that belong to social science or to economics, there is not the physics that can make the link with the climate and weather phenomena.

So we can discover if there is a link a connection, using artificial intelligence. And we need data for this. So that’s another problem that we have in our communities. Most of these data are all by the insurance company, and they are private, and so they we cannot have access. So there are many things that we can do in terms of science there, but we struggle to be fast and effective in doing this because the insurance company to not free this data.

So let me ask you, what, what in particular data does the do the insurance companies have that you’d like to get your hands on? Yeah, so they have data are at the scale of each buildings on how much, for example, the building has been flooded. What are the damages, the economical damages in terms of really dollar that have to be ensured and have to be covered.

So they have a very, very detailed data matrix scales that we do not have access to as climate scientists, and this can help in understanding what are the most vulnerable areas when there is an extreme events that happen, they also have data about the social indicators. So those who have both the insurance, well, they have the social data of these people that have the insurance.

And so that’s important because it can also help us to understand which social classes are more vulnerable to some extreme events. So all of these can enter in our attribution. And the idea is that soon we will be able if we get this data, and if we get artificial intelligence to do the job of linking the impacts with the meteorological variables we can get to the attribution of impacts.

And that’s the interesting thing that goes back to your question of climate litigation, because once we have the damages that have been caused by a a storm that is now announced by climate change, then we have a number where we can basically ask those company to pay for, yeah, that’s what we call blackboarding a damage number, so putting it in front of a jury here in the United States and saying, here’s the cost of of hurricane Helene, you know, Exxon contributed 25% to it.

You know, Chevron contributed 10% so on and so forth, and And ladies and gentlemen the jury, you know, make them pay for X amount of billions of dollars is that they cause through their pollution.

Exactly. We are not at that level yet, or we are getting to that level, but it’s a lot of pain to get this data and to make them useful. There is, of course, a lot of uncertainty when we enter in these models that are data driven and for which there is no physics, or there are many other factors that can contribute.

So it’s all new science to be done there, and we are moving as a scientist towards this new science of attribution. So I would imagine that over the past 40 years, there’s been a ton of new data that’s accessible to you as a scientist, that wasn’t available back in 1982 when they did these first studies, and that, for example, NOAA here in the US and NASA and and there’s a lot more satellite stuff.

I would imagine there’s a lot more things in the ocean that are collecting data tell us a little bit about all this new data that you’re getting. Where are you getting it? And, and where’s the next level of data going to come from? What? What are the types of things that you’d like to have your hands on, and, and how soon are you going to have them?

Yeah, so to do attribution, you have understood that we need Observation in a world without greenhouse gasses emissions, so to compare with the present data that are realized in a world with greenhouse gasses emissions. So the idea is that the most complete data sets that date back in the past we can get, then this is useful for us to perform attribution.

So currently, today, we have many data sets that cover basically anything we need. They cover precipitations at very high resolution. They cover, of course, the variables such as temperature wind, but they also cover variables that were not available before, for example, lightnings, or we can detect the tornados from the radar, or we can detect the sides of the hailstone, again, from from the from the radar.

So we have many things that came into play in the last 40 years with the satellite of the first generation, and in the last 20 years with the satellite of new generation that are capable of very high resolution. And then we have data sets such as lightnings that are there only for the past 15, 15, 20 years, new data sets that are coming in every day.

But I will say that what we miss is to reconstruct back in the past the data, and this is a challenge that mix the current instrument with what we call paleoclimatology, that is how we reconstruct the climate of the past. And for this, unfortunately, there are few groups in the world working at these problems. There is also a field that is called paleo tempestology That like by looking at the sediments in the ocean, by looking at the corals and how the coral reef have been destroyed by storms in the far past, could help us to detect, for example, hurricanes or tropical cyclones that we have missed.

So my interest as a scientist working in attribution is not of having the most resolved data set in the present, but is to invest some of the money that is in research to reconstruct better the past. Okay, that’s fascinating. I know that seeing pictures and videos of them doing ice cores at the, you know, the North Pole, at the South Pole, and trying to determine based upon those ice samples what was happening, you know, 1000s of years ago, or 1010s of 1000s, or maybe even longer.

But I would imagine, yes, there’s lots of other things, as you were talking about the sediments in the ocean and the corals and things like that, that would show some of the effects of climate change as well. Yeah, and that we can for sure detect the most extreme events, those that cause some kind of breakdown in some properties of the sediments, of the trees, of the corals.

So the idea is to reconstruct some key events in the past that been outstanding events in terms of wind, precipitation or temperature, and then that will help us also to understand if some of what we call return period of the extreme events, for example, you were mentioning the floods in North Carolina, is that happened already at least once.

We know that is increasing in terms of frequency and intensity for climate change, but the question is that happened already and what we should be prepared for. Knowing the past, it helps us also to understand better the present and prepare for the future. So we have to reconstruct this past the best way we can. Well, I know that I’ve been reading a lot about one one in 100 year storms, and now we’re starting to see one in 500 year storms and one in 1,000 year storms, meaning that it the likelihood of seeing the storm was one in 1,000, once in 1,000 years.

And some places they’ve seen these one in 1000 year storms within, you know, five years of each other exactly. Yeah, that’s definitely something that it’s also in the language of the statisticians in calling the return period for some phenomena as one in 1000s of year. But the problem is we have only a few decades of data in a changing climate, so the things that we are trying to change in this language is that we have to measure this return period now in a climate that is changing, and things can go much faster than these, and we have to update our language.

So having two one in 100 year storms in two years, it means that either we’ve been particularly unlucky, but this is not the case. We know that climate change is at play. It means that we have now an event that is one every five years.

Okay, so something like this, and we have to provide this information, otherwise we will won’t be able to adapt our society for this phenomena, knowing that sometimes there is no adaptation possible, because I’m thinking to what happened in the US with these two hurricanes, basically, well, three, if we count, also Beryl Allen and Milton striking in the same hurricane season, almost the same area of the US, whereas before, we were expecting these ones In every 10-20, years, right?

So how do you prepare for this? This is also showing us the limit of what we can do as adaptation, because if we have these events in succession, that is too close, we are using, for example, all the money and all the efforts to recover from the first event, and then we have immediately a second one that strikes, and then the third one, and so on and so forth.

So our resilience is is going down, is now lower because of this phenomena. And we have to think at this in a integrate way. So as a country, for example, for the US, or as the European Union for Europe, or as the United Nation, if you really want to move forward, right?

You know, I am diametrically opposed to Trump’s policies on on the environment and you know, you know, his denial of of the the effects of climate change is is really ridiculous. And I mean, you even see the oil states, the petro states, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, getting behind phasing out fossil fuels at COP28 so why would these countries agree to phasing out fossil fuels if they, if they didn’t get the science, they understand the science.

They are well, of course, they’re facing extreme weather events themselves, and I think they’re they’re aware that this is unsustainable. They may not like it. They’d love to keep pumping oil, but they recognize that it’s going to be the death of them. So they’re starting to kind of get with the program.

Yeah, indeed. So I think they also have understood something else, or in this story, that is, there is a lot of money they’re out waiting for the ecological transition and for this renewable energy now, they are so competitive with oil, and they are even better in terms of economics and in terms of financial products that you can sell associated with this, with this renewable energy that we should keep oil for the things that, for the moment, cannot be run without it.

So for example, and they are very little, I will say, just for example, airplanes, because now we start to have alternative for many other things. So I think that the many states even producing oil. They totally understood that its economical advantage to be first in selling renewable energies, in developing renewable energy, plus there is a problem of independence from the fossil fuels.

So fossil fuels are good if you can find them in your own country, but if you don’t have them, you just you’re just dependent on some other countries. And United States is not the top producer of fossil fuel. So it suffers when there is an international crisis as Europe from the prices of the oil going up. So even as a matter of national security, it’s better to have all the energy produced in state and produced with renewable energy, because this guarantee you some safety, even in times of crisis.

Well, great to have you on the show. You know, really enjoy the conversation and look forward to, you know, seeing your work in the legal field, because we certainly need it, because we need to hold these polluters responsible for the damage that they’ve done to our planet. And it’s about time that they they answer for this, this cost that they’ve imposed on all of us.

Thank you very much for having me and yes, follow us in www.climameter.org to see what are our next studies and extreme events that we will cover? Okay, well, we’ll look forward to following you and seeing all the great work that you’re doing. And thank you again,

Davide, for being on our program. Thank you very much.

Bye, bye.

And that was Dr. Davide Faranda. If you want to follow his research and learn more about climatemeter, visit climameter.org that’s C-L-I-M-A-meter, dot O-R-G, to learn more about our work at a climate change and how you can help us reach our goal, planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year.

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