Mojib Latif turns 70: Climate protection has to be fun, says the researcher

Mojib Latif is one of Germany’s best-known climate researchers. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, he takes stock of his research and explains how climate protection is becoming popular.

Professor Latifyou will be 70 years old in a few days. What was your most exciting weather experience?
Northern lights are truly unique. When I was in Greenland I saw some of them – spectacular. You can see how much we are influenced by the sun.

Throughout your entire research life you have collected evidence that man-made climate change exists and that it is progressing. Where are these changes most clearly visible?
Actually everywhere in the world, including here in Germany. You can see this primarily in the temperatures, the increase in hot days, the decrease in frosty days, but also in the increase in heavy precipitation and the rising sea level, which is already happening on our coasts. We also see it in the growing season, which in this country lasts two weeks longer than before. Climate change is all-encompassing, you just have to open your eyes.

To person

Mojib Latif, born in Hamburg in 1954, is a professor at the Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, where he heads the Maritime Meteorology research area. He has been President of the German Society Club of Rome since 2017. His research areas include, among others: the anthropogenic influences on the climate

Is our weather becoming more unpredictable due to climate change?
Weather forecasts are short-term predictions – and they still work extremely well. They will continue to work well in the future. The longer-term developments in weather patterns over decades depend heavily on how we humans behave in the future. This is of course not predictable.

What does that mean?
For future developments we can only make so-called projections, i.e. if-then calculations. If people emit more and more greenhouse gases, our climate will develop in this way and this way and this or that weather phenomenon will become more likely or more intense. And if we emit fewer greenhouse gases, things could look different. This results in a wide range of how our climate could develop in the future.

Does that mean the climate/weather is automatically becoming more and more extreme?
This is very plausible based on simple physical considerations. Some phenomena will change linearly, others exponentially. The Earth’s average temperature is expected to develop linearly over the next few decades. It is more difficult to predict the development of the so-called tipping points. Where are such points and at what level of warming would they actually be exceeded? These uncertainties are the best reason to pursue climate protection. Because at the moment we are behaving like a driver in thick fog who doesn’t know what’s coming and is still driving in the left lane at top speed.

One of these tipping points concerns the North Atlantic Current, which supplies us in Europe with warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. Every now and then there are studies that are supposed to show that this flow could stop. How likely is such a “point of no return”?
A scenario like the one in the movie “The Day after Tomorrow” is nonsense. Even if the North Atlantic current were to stop, we would never have an ice age in Europe. In fact, the few measurements we have show us a lot of fluctuations from year to year, but no long-term trend at the moment.

It seems to be different with another tipping point. What would happen if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet completely thaws or breaks off?
The result would be a global sea level rise of three meters. But something like this would not happen within the next few decades, but would take a relatively long time. Without such an event, I assume that sea levels will not rise more than one meter by the end of the century. Nevertheless, it is already foreseeable that the residents of certain island states such as Kiribati or Tuvalu will lose their homes due to sea level rise.

The 1.5 degree global warming target agreed in Paris in 2015 has long been a thing of the past. There were several months last year where it was torn. Do we need a new target?
Many politicians need such goals to work on. I always thought it was a big mistake to write the 1.5 degree target into the Paris climate agreement. It was already clear to me back then that it was completely illusory that global warming could be limited to 1.5 degrees. At this point we were already at about one degree of warming, and the world will not stop emitting greenhouse gases overnight. The CO2 content of the atmosphere will continue to rise, also because countries like India are just beginning to develop industrially. That’s why, although I hate to say it, we’re also going to tear down the two degrees. At the moment we are on track for around three degrees.

That’s quite a lot.
That’s a hell of a lot. We are already seeing dramatic effects at around 1.5 degrees of warming. Not just the climate, the weather, the sea level, but also the federal budget. The Ahr Valley flood alone cost 30 billion euros. We can somehow compensate for this, but not constantly. And there are anyway limits to the ability to adapt to such masses of water as those that recently fell in Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. When people lose everything and the government then says, unfortunately we can’t help you, that creates a lot of social explosiveness.

When the ozone hole was discovered in the 1980s, there was quickly a global agreement to save the ozone layer. Why do we get this from the CO?2 not there?
At the time, there were only a handful of companies producing ozone-depleting CFCs, and they had already developed substitutes. This allowed them to maintain their business model. When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, there are an incredible number of lobbying interests that prevent a reduction, for example the countries that promote fossil fuels and the industries that rely on them, such as the car industry. And there are politicians and parties who specifically spread fake news about climate change, such as Donald Trump and the AfD. Many people are willing to believe this because it is simply convenient and then they don’t have to change anything.

Climate protection played a very important role in the 2019 European elections and the 2021 federal elections. The topic seems to be annoying everyone now – keyword: heating law. How can you still take people along and convince them to act in a climate-friendly way?
By benefiting from it. There is no other way. Why does almost everyone have a cell phone today? Because it is useful and because it is affordable. Something like the original 9 euro ticket was a good thing. Even the later 49 euros for the Germany ticket were not affordable for many. I think many politicians no longer have any sense of how significant parts of the population are actually doing. How little money they have because rents and other prices have exploded. And then the federal government comes along with the heating law. You wouldn’t believe what was going on with me as a bystander. I got a lot of calls from people who told me where they should get 60,000 euros for a new heating system.

People are also putting on the brakes when buying electric cars.
Many years ago I repeated like a prayer wheel that the German automotive industry was in danger of completely losing its business model to other countries. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. We are not future-proof with our big combustion engines and we have obviously not been able to build sensible electric cars that everyone can afford. While German manufacturers simply replaced their conventional engines with electric motors, Asian manufacturers, for example, built computers on wheels. This puts them miles ahead of us.

We here in the global north can think about things like climate adaptation or funding programs for more electric cars. How does the global south see this?
There is no climate justice. This is why emerging countries like India are so disappointed. As the main cause of global warming, the industrialized nations are doing far too little to help them. But tell me in the USA or Germany, we are now sending money to countries like China or India for their climate protection. This is not possible or at best at the expense of development aid.

As a professor, you have trained hundreds, if not thousands, of students. You hardly hear anything about Fridays for Future anymore. How do you motivate young people to get involved in climate protection even though nothing seems to be making progress?
I think it’s a bit unfair to put everything on young people. Actually, we older people have a responsibility. Yesterday I was with students who were around 15 or 16 years old. They are already very interested. They know exactly what it’s about, but they also see that their parents and grandparents don’t want to do anything. And that’s why there’s a certain powerlessness among them.

Was there anything in your academic career that you misjudged?
I was naive because I thought knowledge leads to action. But that’s not the case. I have been communicating about climate change for 40 years now and the success has been very manageable. A neuroscientist explained to me a few years ago why this is so: because we are not interested in the future, because we cannot feel it, because it does not affect people emotionally. That’s why it either has to hit us really hard for something to change, which I hope it doesn’t. Or people have to benefit from climate protection.

You come from a very religious home. Where do you draw your confidence from?
From technological development. I know from the past that technological disruptions always happen extremely quickly. The transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles happened incredibly quickly, within just a few decades. We don’t need coal, oil or natural gas; there is enough renewable energy on earth and the technology to use it. But the framework conditions must be attractive. Not by subsidizing renewable energy, but by eliminating subsidies for climate-damaging products such as diesel or aviation fuel. An electric car should not be more expensive than a combustion engine and organic products should not cost more than conventional food. This is the only way it will work.

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