Climatologist: ‘No place is safe’

The monster that rampaged through Los Angeles County last week is still alive, but firefighters appear to be hunting it down. People are starting to return to their hometowns, or what is left of them. If you have insurance, it’s a whole different battle.

The focus now has shifted to what happened, why it happened, and what will happen next. This disaster is as bad as anyone here remembers…but is this really just the new normal?

“Nature tells us, ‘I can’t take this anymore. If you keep treating me this way,'” said John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World , I can’t support you.”

Vaillon says climate change is making wind-driven disasters like the Los Angeles fires more intense. “We could see fires of this magnitude, or even worse, in the future,” he said. “The types of fires we’ve seen in the past 10 years are qualitatively different than in the past 100 years.”

“Are there different types of fire?” I asked. “How has fire changed?”

“In many ways. The most powerful and frightening method, and the most obvious to ordinary people like us, is to move faster and with more force. If you talk to firefighters who know even a little bit of history, they say “It’s often an unfightable (firing) action. ”

And Vaillon says the cause is what science has been telling us for decades: the CO2 that combustion engines continue to emit into the atmosphere. “We don’t feel it, we don’t smell it, we don’t notice it,” he says. “But if we put the engine of the car that brought me here on the floor here and ignited it, we would go deaf and die from exhaust fumes. And that’s under the hood of every internal combustion engine. There are hundreds of millions of motor vehicles, which means emissions from the trillions of fires we start each day create this artificially warm climate. ”

That leads to more intense fires, more powerful hurricanes and hotter heat waves, he says.

Climate scientist Peter Kalmas has been sounding the same alarm for years, but he feels no one is listening to him as he tries to share the science of climate change with the world.

In 2022, we met him near his home in Altadena, California. He was about to move his family to North Carolina.

“So for a few years now I’ve wanted to move somewhere a little less hot,” he said this week. “But let me be clear: I don’t think any place is safe from climate change.”

Kalmus learned this firsthand last year when North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helen. And the California wildfires were also a disaster for him. His old house in Altadena and a friend’s house were all burnt down. “If there’s a silver lining to this tragedy, it’s that people are going to wake up and be angry and say, ‘We have to do something about this. Enough is enough,'” he said. .

Scientists like Kalmus have been warning the world about impending climate disaster for years. But on January 6, as the fires approached Altadena, perhaps the most effective warning came from an amateur meteorologist.

Edgar McGregor has been picking up trash in Altadena every day for more than five years. He is also interested in meteorology and runs a weather Facebook page. In the days before the fire, he warned his Facebook followers about the dangerous situation, and on January 6 he posted a video telling them to leave everything and get out of town.

“I said, ‘Get out,'” McGregor explained. “I stood in the middle of my street, photographed myself with the blazing mountains behind me, and told people, ‘This is a big deal. Get your Social Security card. Your right to a home. Get your books and get out. This is it. This is not a joke.”

Jen Siebert, an Altadena mother of two, didn’t have to hear those words twice. “I think he certainly saved my family’s life,” she said. “We all listened to him and thought, ‘This kid knows what he’s talking about!'”

Her own house somehow survived. Her neighbors weren’t so lucky. “My best friends seem to have lost everything,” Siebert said. “They’re alive, because I imagine it’s probably because of Edgar. It’s because of Edgar that everyone in the Beautiful Altadena group is alive right now.”

Siebert had never met McGregor in person, but hugged him when they were introduced. “I really appreciate you,” she said. “You saved my family and you saved many people. So, thank you.”

Experts say the fires are a larger warning that unless action is taken on climate change, the Earth will continue to become drier and more unstable. . But of course, warnings only work if people listen.

I asked Vaillant. “Have we pushed nature too far?”

“The benefit of all this is that nature is sternly inviting us to engage again,” he replied. “It’s only going to get hotter. So nature is saying, ‘Wake up! We’re in this together.'” It is the duty of all of us to understand that it can actually happen not only to people, but also to us, you, and me. ”

Read an excerpt: “Fire Weather” by John Vaillant

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Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: George Pozderek.

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