The veteran scientist on Trump’s limited impact, Russia’s ruthless climate stance and on the urgency of COP26 in Glasgow
Prof Peter Stott is a forensic climate detective who examines the human fingerprint on extreme weather. A specialist in mathematics, he leads the climate monitoring and attribution team of the Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services at the Met Office in Exeter and was part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that won the Nobel peace prize in 2007. Since he started in the field more than 25 years ago, Stott has often found himself on the frontline of the battle against the fossil fuel lobby, petrostates and sceptical rightwing US politicians, which he details in his new book. Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. He is also exploring new forms of scientific expression and is co-founder, with his wife, of the Climate Stories initiative, which brings artists, scientists and members of the public together to respond to the climate emergency by creating new poems, songs and pictures.
You have spent a quarter of a century in climate science. On a personal level, how does that feel?
At times I have felt exhilarated about the progress of our science and hopeful that it will be acted on. In other moments, I felt dispirited that our warnings were ignored, such as at Copenhagen in 2009, or worried when we were attacked as in Moscow in 2004, or in the US and UK after Climategate. At those times, I felt I was uncovering an uncomfortable truth and there were people who were literally trying to stop me from saying it. Now I feel anxious that the clock is ticking on the whole issue. Another very hot year has gone by and there is no sign of action that is sufficient to change the data trends. That makes me concerned about the science I have spent 26 years doing. I hoped this work would make the world a better place, but I am increasingly anxious that this will not happen in time.