Of the many life and death lessons to be learned from the swarm of monstrous wildfires raging through the Los Angeles metroplex, the most important is perhaps the hardest to grasp and to accept. The world we’re living in has become too hot, too dry, too windy, and it is getting hotter all the time. We can’t continue living in denial about our changing climate, and getting caught unprepared.
Heat exaggerates troubles beyond imagination. It turns passing dangers into staggering calamities. It normalizes the unbearable. The politics of denial fuels wildfires every bit as much as dry weeds and grasses do. It’s not too much to say that climate-change denial has become a form of arson.
There are no easy statistics to tell us exactly how much more dangerous overheating can make the world. But the data gathered from the Los Angeles
wildfires show the risks to be prodigious. California has been plagued by wind-driven wildfires for centuries, but never like the ten infernos that have invaded the weedy, dry, cement and asphalt wasteland of one of largest sprawling cities in the world.
Time magazine estimates that about 40,000 acres of the L.A. metroplex have been incinerated. 40,000 acres comes out to 62 square miles. The whole of Los Angeles is about 502 square miles, which by my calculation makes 40,000 acres around 12.4 % of the city. Imagine if Albuquerque, with our fierce winds and tinder dry scrub, weeds and Bosque lost over 12% of its area to wildfires! We’d be almost unrecognizable.
If climate heating is the world’s most dangerous problem, as most of the world’s scientific community thinks it is, it is also then the most dangerous issue in every inhabitable place on earth. No place is safe from heat-intensified storms, floods, and fires. L.A. proves the point.
City and county leadership in our neck of the woods, and in all hot dry places around the world, needs to make responding to climate heating the top priority in all future planning. Anything less is wicked stupidity.
Climate heating isn’t going to stop in our lifetimes and in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. We’ll all be spending the rest of our lives dealing in some way with the intensifying power of an overheated world and its capacity to turn what used to be containable troubles into unimaginable catastrophes.
Terrible fire conditions struck Los Angeles in 2011 with 80-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds, but there were no wildfires. Los Angeles was lucky enough then to not have been suffering from an 8-month drought as it has this year and last. Even with dry conditions, low atmospheric humidity, and fierce Santa Ana winds, current L.A. leadership was caught flatfooted with some of its water infrastructure actually down for repairs at exactly the wrong time. They were caught in old thinking, assuming that January was not a part of the wildfire season. It seems, as well, that many homeowners couldn’t be convinced to clean up the dry weeds and other drought debris around their homes.
It’s clear that the intensity of concern about potential fires in Los Angeles is still not in sync with the actual danger as climate heating steadily and unabatingly continues to grow.
It’s not just a matter of budgets either. L.A. upped the city fire department’s funding by 7% last year, probably not nearly enough, but something. Of course in hindsight, “something” just doesn’t cut it anymore. We still like to think, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, that “it can’t happen here.” Take Asheville, North Carolina. It used to bill itself as the “climate safe city.” Last year, Hurricane Helene, powered by a heated atmosphere, leapt the boundary of imagination and probability to flood inland Asheville almost out of existence. Old thinking, old expectations, old probabilities don’t cut it anymore either.
If we continue to refuse to make climate change-denying companies and politicians take the blame and pay the price for continuing to call climate change a hoax, and for adding to the danger, nothing will ever change, anywhere.
No bone-dry place is safe from wildfires. Albuquerque isn’t. What happens if the Bosque goes up in flames with high winds behind or ahead of them? If city leaders don’t make sure that city residents take climate change seriously, the odds are that horrific damage will engulf us too.
The situation is not helpless. There is much to be done to get the odds more in our favor, if we believe we have to. Fire resistant architecture in L.A. proved it works. Photos of standing building surrounded by neighborhoods turned to ash leave no doubt that successful protective remedies are possible, especially with government subsidy. As the fire chief of Los Angeles was quoted as saying, “home-hardening efforts are absolutely critical,” as are landscape cleanup and parameter building around houses.
All of us have everything to lose if we can’t manage somehow to snuff out the curse of the politics of denial plaguing Washington, D.C. and many state governments. Just as heating intensifies danger, stupidity and malice exaggerate harm. What’s to be done? First things first. Understand the present and don’t give up. That doesn’t sound like much but it isn’t just “something.” It’s place to start and a place from which to keep on going.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Photo by Frank Kovalchek)
Yes, a place to start. But the most effective place to start, in my mind, will be voting in political leaders who care about climate. Individual citizens can do “something,” but we need those in power to change laws, funding, and everything else that contributes to a responsible climate policy.
Thanks for this excellent rundown about climate change. And, of course, New Mexico is complicit in damaging the climate. O&G production in New Mexico is projected to almost double what it was a few years ago by 2030. And it is not declining to current levels until nearly 2050. Last year, sales of oil in New Mexico came to 71 billion dollars. I suspect that the recipients of those sales were largely out of state. Nevertheless, we are unlikely to end or reduce the production of oil, since it would mean less money for the state, and that is probably the case for the rest of the country as well, despite the effect it has on the crisis of global warming. What to do? Produce more renewable energy that is cheaper than the oil it would replace. Make oil producers pay for the damage they are doing to the climate.
Cheers!
An excellent article that every one needs to read, digest and heed..
Thank you.