With wildfires burning in Greece and Turkey, large chunks of the Mediterranean parched as drought spreads across the region, and all just weeks after the world experienced its hottest days on record, Celeste Saulo and I sit down to a sweltering lunch. It is almost 30C and we are eating outside on the shores of Lake Geneva.
“It’s really hot,” says Saulo, who has spent nearly 40 years studying the weather. In January, she became secretary-general of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, the first woman to lead the global agency that focuses on weather, climate and water in its 150-year history. The move, which saw her leave her job as the head of Argentina’s meteorological service and relocate to Switzerland, has made her one of the most high-profile climate scientists in the world.
The covered terrace of Restaurant La Perle du Lac, in Geneva’s leafy Mon Repos park, with views of Mont Blanc across the lake, affords some respite from the August sun. Still, it feels a bit on the nose to be sweating through our meal as we discuss how climate record after climate record was repeatedly smashed in 2023 and 2024.
Last year was the hottest on record and 2024 is on course to be even warmer. These temperatures and ever more extreme weather events around the world make clear that climate change is no abstract concept, Saulo says. “The climate is changing . . . These records are another demonstration that the warming is here. It is a part of our daily lives. This is a red alert for all of us.”
Yet even in the face of the overwhelming evidence, governments and businesses around the world have been slow to act. Politicians on the right have pushed back against robust climate policies, while businesses that pledged to be climate champions just a few years ago have rolled back targets.
Now there are growing concerns about whether the world can cut emissions fast enough to achieve the goals of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global temperature rises. Saulo and the WMO are at the heart of answering at least some of this question, with the organisation’s data used to understand just how quickly the world is warming.
While UN secretary-general António Guterres has warned the world is on the “highway to climate hell”, Saulo is more measured. Her job is to balance diplomacy with scientific rigour. “The climate crisis is a combination of climate change and inequality . . . It is a big, big challenge.”
First, we have a smaller but more immediate challenge on our hands. With both of us only speaking rudimentary French, Saulo reaches for her phone to look up écrasé — crushed — as we attempt to decipher the menu. A native Spanish speaker and fluent in English, she is trying to learn French, but “there are so many exceptions that you can become crazy”, she laughs.
The restaurant, which specialises in French food and is popular for business lunches, has no vegetarian main-course options. Like many others concerned about climate change, Saulo says she is reducing her meat consumption. Farming and land use changes, including cutting down trees to create grazing land for cattle, account for about a fifth of planet-warming emissions. Cattle through their belches are the single largest agricultural source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
“I am trying to eat less meat, but for an Argentinian, it is difficult to become veggie all of a sudden. I’m doing my best,” she says. “We should all go in that direction [of reducing meat consumption]. But a little bit of meat is something I cannot yet get rid of.”
Today, the 60-year-old is tempted by the main dish option from the cheaper menu du jour of entrecôte Parisienne, requesting it well done, while I order burrata followed by fera, a freshwater whitefish popular in restaurants in Geneva, from the à la carte menu. She declines wine.
Even as the conversation traverses the ravages of global warming, Saulo is bright-eyed and quick to smile. She points to co-operation between countries on weather monitoring as a source of optimism — and a lesson — when it comes to tackling climate change.
The WMO was initially set up as the International Meteorological Organization in 1873, tasked with helping countries exchange weather data and ensuring measurements were taken in a consistent and comparable way by each nation. Now more than 190 countries and territories follow those standards and share information.
At a time when global tensions run high between many countries, weather — and the WMO — is one of the “nicest examples of the value of collaboration” between countries, says Saulo. “We learnt from the very beginning that it was not about the boundary of a country.”
“Today every country is sharing the [meteorological] information. I would say maybe not 100 per cent of the information, but they are sharing data. Every country on Earth, despite their situation. Russia. Ukraine. They are sharing,” she says.
Born in Buenos Aires to a doctor father and a mother who worked in administration, Saulo has spent almost all her life in the Argentinian capital. She married her husband, a psychiatrist, “very young”, at 22 and gave birth to her two children, both now in their thirties, while working on her PhD. “It was crazy,” she says of the time juggling her doctorate and young children. “My career was frozen for four or five years until they started school,” she says, adding that even afterwards progress in her career was slower — “everything took me more time” — as she balanced work and family.
She ended up becoming a meteorologist not because of a fascination with the weather, but because she loved physics and maths. An aptitude test as a teenager suggested she would be best suited to a job that applied those subjects “to something tangible”, she says, such as geology or meteorology.
“I really became in love with meteorology when I started to understand what it was about,” she says. “It’s not only about weather forecasting. It is about how you measure the system, how you understand these interactions of the atmosphere with the water, with the ice, with the sea, with the land . . . It’s about learning how clouds behave, how rain will happen.” As a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, she taught cloud microphysics, developing a love of cumulonimbus thunderclouds in the process.
She argues that governments and the wider population often “disregard the importance” of meteorology, pointing out that even when meteorologists get nine in 10 forecasts right, everyone focuses on the one time it was wrong. Yet forecasting — and the science that underpins it — has become vital for everyday life, helping to inform decisions about transport, renewable energy and farming. It also protects lives, providing vital information on storms, heatwaves and other extreme events, she says, adding that understanding how the weather is changing is crucial as the world warms up. But this task relies heavily on countries working together.
Over the course of her career, forecasting has been transformed, especially with the advent of satellites. Forecasts have become much more precise: meteorologists, for example, are able to pinpoint with increasing accuracy the path a hurricane will take and where it will make landfall days rather than just hours in advance, ensuring people can be evacuated or take precautions.
“The technology has improved massively,” she says, adding that artificial intelligence should help drive further improvements in forecasting.
Still, gaps remain, she argues. The WMO wants more ground observations — measurements taken on land — especially across Africa, Latin America and islands throughout the Pacific. “You can drive many things using artificial intelligence once you have data. But if your data is poor, your assessment will be poor as well.”
By this stage, we have finished our starters. Her green salad is “very good”. My burrata is delicious, both smoky and creamy with sweetness from the figs.
We return to climate change and the slowness of the world’s response. Greenhouse gas emissions need to fall by 43 per cent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels in order to meet the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C and ideally 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. But, other than a small decrease during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, emissions continue to rise.
The lack of urgency from governments and business clearly frustrates Saulo. “We cannot remain doing the same things when we know people are dying,” she says. Climate change is an “existential crisis” for some countries, especially small islands which risk being submerged by rising sea levels. But it is also affecting every country around the world, she argues, pointing to examples of floods in Germany and heatwaves around the world that have resulted in deaths.
“We have to do something. It’s not about sitting at home and looking at this [climate change] as if it were a movie. This is not a movie. This is real life. You cannot turn off the TV and pretend nothing is happening. You are in the middle of the story,” she says.
We talk about climate doomers, people who acknowledge that climate change is a threat while arguing that it is too difficult, too costly or too late to tackle. But Saulo is not buying it. “If you were diagnosed with an illness, what would you do? You would do everything to survive. You would do the treatment. You would do what the doctor says. Most people would rely on science . . . So why wouldn’t you do the same in this case [of climate change]?”
Saulo has previously criticised allowing the economic interests of a small proportion of the world to determine the future of the planet. When I ask if it is frustrating that the business sector seems to have more sway over our global response to climate change than scientists, she is unequivocal: “It is, of course. The economy cannot be detached from public wellbeing. The economy is also part of society. It is not only about numbers. It is about people also.”
All of a sudden, one of the many birds loitering on the terrace flies dangerously close to my head as it eyes up our main courses. The Argentine is happy with her entrecôte. “This is really good,” says Saulo. “It is different but still good.” Dripping in butter and pan-fried, my fera fish — which I have defended from the bird, though the breadsticks were less fortunate — is delicate and tasty.
Saulo says we need to start adapting to a warming world where wildfires, heatwaves, floods, droughts and other extreme weather events are more intense. “We have to get used to this. We need to get real,” she says, pointing to the 28 disaster events in the US alone where costs ran to at least $1bn each in 2023.
Governments also need to invest in so-called early warning systems, she argues, where meteorological information is turned into comprehensible messages disseminated using text messages, radio bulletins, sirens or other options. The UN has set a lofty target for all people to be protected by an early warning system by 2027.
Saulo points to Tropical Cyclone Idai, which caused billions of dollars of catastrophic damages and killed an estimated 900 people in Mozambique alone in 2019. Four years later, after Mozambique prioritised its early-warning system, community radios and car-mounted megaphones were used to warn people to move to shelters on higher ground ahead of Tropical Cyclone Freddy making landfall. More than 180 people died. “It is still unacceptable, of course, but it was five times less [than Idai]. Early warnings work. They really work,” she says.
Even without large-scale disasters, people will need to adapt to hotter temperatures. In Geneva, as in much of Europe, homes rarely have air-conditioning. “But it is becoming warmer and warmer,” says Saulo. Switzerland is heating up at almost double the rate of the rest of the world.
In future, cities will need more green spaces to help with cooling, she says, adding that we might also need to rethink when and how we holiday. This summer, many parts of southern Europe have struggled with extreme heatwaves, with days hitting 45C.
The waiter arrives with a trolley laden down with impressive desserts, but we regretfully decline. Instead we order tea and coffee, which come with a plate of petits fours.
In a few months, Saulo will travel to Baku for the UN COP29 climate conference. These annual summits, which are attended by tens of thousands of people, have become too big, she argues, but they are still important meeting points at a crucial time. “All of the scientists are telling us the time window is very small [to prevent the worst impacts of climate change],” she says.
When asked if the world can still limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, the goal of the Paris agreement, Saulo circumvents the question. “We should keep the ambition . . . although it may look difficult, we should move in that direction,” she says.
We need to urgently cut greenhouse gas emissions, she adds. And that means the world must stop subsidising fossil fuels and shift to renewable energy. “It’s happening, but the room for improvement is huge.”
Still, she is hopeful that businesses and governments will soon step up, driven by concern for their families but also the profits they can make. “The business sector has huge opportunities in renewable energy. And I do believe that, in the end, decision makers will be concerned about climate and how the climate will affect their families, their grandsons, granddaughters, and they will start to care about that in a way that still is profitable for them.”
There are also other signs of hope, she adds, most recently the election of climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum as president of Mexico. “The expectations are huge on her,” she says.
After decades spent teaching, Saulo is also putting her faith in young people. “I have seen many incredible examples of the role of education and children understanding that their decision matters.”
We leave the restaurant and take the sticky 10-minute walk back towards the WMO’s office, seeking the shade of trees and buildings as we go. When it comes to tackling climate change, Saulo insists that she is still hopeful. “I’m more optimistic than pessimistic.”
Attracta Mooney is the FT’s climate correspondent
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