Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
All the specific circumstances of L.A.’s fatal firestorm are not attributable to climate change. But there is no doubt it set the conditions for the hellish devastation that has enveloped the City of Angels.
As whole neighborhoods were reduced to ash, it was reported last week that temperatures on the planet rose past the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) mark set by the Paris Climate Accord as a dangerous threshold beyond which calamity calls. For those living in L.A., calamity is already here.
In part, the catastrophe that struck the most populated county in the U.S. was collectively self-inflicted by real estate developers, lax lawmakers and residents seeking to nestle their dwellings in the natural beauty of the state, all of whom dismissed the well-known risks.
Long before widespread human habitation of the hills, mountains and canyons, the Indigenous Chumash named the San Fernando Valley “the valley of smokes.” That was because the chaparral-covered terrain that surrounds the flatlands there, like much of the rest of the now urbanized southern California landscape that stretches from the desert to the sea, burned every few years.
As development sprawled into those very fire zones over recent decades, the chaparral has been prevented from burning. When it does finally ignite after such long intervals, all that pent-up fuel explodes beyond control when desert winds fan the flames and carry their embers far and wide, including to the sensibly settled flats, as happened in lower Altadena during this particularly ferocious episode.
Other factors behind the firestorm are more directly related to climate change, most notably what is called the “hydroclimate whiplash.” That is when rainstorm deluges foster lush growth of grasses and bushes in one year, followed by bone-dry drought in the following cycle where that abundant flora becomes desiccated tinder ready to ignite at the smallest spark.
As University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain explained to the Los Angeles Times, with each additional degree of warming, the atmosphere absorbs and releases more water. It is like an “expanding sponge” that leads to more intense downpours. “The problem is that the sponge grows exponentially, like compound interest at a bank,” he said. “The rate of expansion increases with each fraction of a degree of warming.”
In those years when La Niña conditions across the Pacific dominate, the spongy atmospheric rivers that carry heavy precipitation to Southern California are diverted, replaced by sustained periods of low humidity and drought. The alternating dance of these cycles demonstrates how the interrelated effects of global warming reinforce each other in an accelerating cascade of consequences.
According to climate scientists, a warming atmosphere also disrupts the normally stable flow of the polar jet stream. A “wobbly jet stream” can result in the back-to-back juxtaposition of high- and low-pressure systems that generate ever-stronger winds, like the extraordinary gusts of up to 80 miles an hour that whipped through the California southland last week.
In The Aftermath
The aftermath of California’s calamity will bring other challenges to the fore. Following years of ever-more destructive tropical storms and wildfires across the world, insurance companies are beginning to buckle, facing either bankruptcy or denying coverage and raising rates to unaffordable levels.
Unlike the incoming occupant of the White House, there is no skepticism about climate change here. As Lloyd’s of London CEO John Neal puts it, “You’ll never find an insurer saying ‘I don’t believe in climate change.’” The unprecedented costs of the worst urban fire disaster in modern American times could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Another issue that will soon arise concerns the massive task of cleaning up the toxic ruins of more than 10,000 structures and rebuilding. Who is going to do that? One would be hard-pressed over the last decade to find a crew at any construction site in L.A. that is not mostly immigrant workers from Mexico or Central America, surely a good portion of them undocumented. How is the cleanup and rebuild going to proceed at the very time when the Trump administration is launching a mass deportation drive?
What More Can Be Said?
What more can be said about the urgent need to mitigate climate change that has not already been said?
One might think that, with each successive climate event more severe than the last, going on with business as usual will finally be seen as untenable. Looking out over the Hiroshima-like burnscape of the Pacific Palisades, it is hard to believe we aren’t arriving at that point.
“One might think that, with each successive climate event more severe than the last, going on with business as usual will finally be seen as untenable.”
While buffeted last week by the blasting squalls here in L.A., the current retro-revival of Bob Dylan brought to mind one of his most famous anthems that marked the 1960s — “Blowin’ In The Wind.”
In those days, the civil rights movement was in full swing, and the Vietnam War was rapidly beginning to go wrong. Dylan fathomed the zeitgeist. The poet’s intuition told him that something in society was about to break, that the winds of change filled the air. Are we on a similar cusp now? Today one imagines he might refashion his plaintive cry like this:
How many homes must burn to the ground
before you can hear people cry?
How many times must a man look up before he can see why?
How much farther must the embers fly
before fossil fuels are forever banned?
Across how many seas must the temperature rise
before we finally get wise?
And how many years can some people exist
before it’s too hot to survive?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
and pretend that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
