LA’s fires weren’t just a “natural” disaster but a climate-driven weather event, revealing how global warming is reshaping California’s future.
As the embers go cold and the smoke clears, Los Angeles assesses the devastation from one of its most catastrophic urban fires.
A stark reality emerges: not just winds but climate change played a significant role in this deadly and destructive event.
A new World Weather Attribution study found that human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of extreme fire conditions by 35 percent and intensified their severity.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Daniel Swain, a leading climate scientist at UCLA and the University of California’s Agricultural and Natural Resources division, frames the January disaster not simply as a fire event, but as “an extreme weather event with fire embedded in it.” This distinction, he explains, is crucial for understanding how climate change is reshaping California’s fire risks.
The disaster, Swain argues, resulted from a perfect storm of climate conditions: two unusually wet winters that promoted vegetation growth, followed by record-breaking heat and an unprecedented dry period, all culminating during southern California’s offshore wind season.
Swain details how weather and climate are intimately connected. This interaction is leading to what he calls “hydroclimate whiplash”: rapid transitions between wet and dry states that are becoming more frequent and intense globally.
The fires demonstrated the limits of human intervention. Even with an army of firefighting personnel and advanced technology, some blazes proved unstoppable. One policy response seems clear: reduce global warming to prevent such infernos from happening in the first place.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. Now that the fires have been extinguished and the smoke is cleared, the inevitable finger-pointing and search for answers has begun. Beyond the political rhetoric lies a fundamental question about the role climate change has played in what became one of Los Angeles’s most devastating urban disasters. A new study from World Weather Attribution finds that human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of the extreme fire conditions by 35% and intensified their severity.
While these numbers may seem modest, they represent just one facet of a complex transformation in California’s climate, one that has extended the fire season and doubled the probability of autumn droughts. The numbers tell their own stark story. Nearly 40,000 acres burned, 80,000 people evacuated, tens of thousands of homes destroyed. Yet beyond the immediate tragedy lies a deeper story about our changing climate and our capacity to respond. Few people have thought more deeply about these questions with my guest, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and at the University of California’s Agricultural and Natural Resources Division.
His research, writing, and public commentary helps us understand how climate change is reshaping California’s future. But he’s also challenged some of our basic assumptions about disaster response, arguing that we may be reaching the limits of our ability to fight nature with technology alone. His clear-eyed analysis has made him an essential voice during disasters, cutting through misinformation to help us understand what’s really happening on the ground.
And his insights about the intersection of climate, public policy, and human behavior offer crucial lessons on how we might better prepare for what lies ahead. It is my pleasure to welcome Daniel Swain here to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us.
Daniel Swain: Thanks for having me.
Jeff: It is great to have you here. We’ve talked a lot about this event that took place first in Pacific Palisades and Altadena as an extreme fire event, but really, what it was was an extreme weather event first. Talk about that.
Daniel: Yes. I think that is a helpful way to think about what transpired in Pacific Palisades and in Altadena on the afternoon, in the case of Pacific Palisades, of January 7th, and then later that night in the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys, as an extreme weather event with fire embedded in it. That’s a term that I’m borrowing actually from some colleagues who are meteorologists who predict fire weather. And I think that is an appropriate frame for thinking about this.
To it, I would also add, it’s also an extreme climate event. And so this gets into this dimension of what do we mean when we talk about weather versus climate, and how those things intersect with the natural world and with our modern society. So I look forward to getting into all of that.
Jeff: Talk about the way we should think about that, because so often, we mix up the weather and the climate and all of these things, they get thrown into the same basket. And it really prevents us from better understanding what precipitates these events.
Daniel: And here is where I’ll say something perhaps slightly controversial among my colleagues, which is that I think we separate weather and climate perhaps a bit too much, I think especially in our public conversations about both of them. And I say that as a person whose professional background was actually originally in meteorology, so weather prediction. My undergraduate degree is at atmospheric science and a lot of the people who were in my graduating class today work for the weather service or TV broadcast meteorologists or have jobs like that. And then, of course, I went on to become a climate scientist, and that was what my PhD training was focused on.
But I like to live a little dangerously, if you will, and mix my weather and my climate, not recklessly, but with purpose and with focus. And I think the reason why that matters is it’s absolutely true that weather is not climate. Weather is essentially this collective of individual episodic events. The analogy I’ve heard that I think is nice is the weather is essentially one outfit of clothing that you might wear, and climate is more akin to your full closet or wardrobe of all your possible outfits. So it’s a portfolio of clothing. And the analogy in the real world, of course, the climate is the full distribution or envelope of individual episodic weather events that we can experience.
So they’re clearly not the same thing. But on the other hand, they’re also clearly intimately related. And the reality is that climate change can be also viewed as weather in aggregate change because ultimately, it is weather events across time and space that makeup climate. And so if the climate is changing, so too therefore are the constituent individual weather events. And that does include extreme weather events. Even if climate change isn’t the only factor in any of these individual extreme weather events, it is increasingly an important player in many, if not most of them.
And so I know it’s a little bit of a nuanced take on this that goes a little bit beyond the soundbite, but I think it’s difficult to simplify to the soundbite because if we either engage in these overly strict binaries that weather is not climate and therefore don’t confuse the two or all extreme weather events are clearly caused by climate change, I think both of these end up writing yourself into a scientifically unjustifiable corner.
Whereas the reality is if we think about climate change essentially as a large-scale global shift in the kinds of weather events that are possible at any given place and any given time, I think that gives us a more helpful frame for thinking about both specifically in this case with the fires in Southern California and more generally, how we will actually experience global warming as individuals who typically live in some particular place on Earth.
Jeff: And to bring it back to the whole meteorological aspect of it, it is also predictable. Both the climate side and the weather side are both predictable within a certain range.
Daniel: Yes. And I think this is something that is important to realize is that for example, the antecedent series of climate events that facilitated this wildfire disaster in Southern California was really twofold. One of them is a little bit counterintuitive, which is that it was actually really wet for two consecutive winters before this winter. And you might say, “Why do really wet conditions increase fire risk?” They don’t in the moment, of course. And then as you might expect, we did have two really quiet fire years in Southern California following those two wet winters.
But then what we’ve got is an ecosystem in Southern California where there are large areas that are primarily characterized by grass and woody shrubs known as chaparral. And in those ecosystems, the wet years are often the years where you get a bunch of extra vegetation growth. Just imagine what happens when you either choose to water your lawn if you’ve got a lawn or don’t. It really does affect how much lawn you have. And you can actually experience the biomass by if you ever mowed a really lushly watered lawn and how heavy that is versus one that’s brown and dry, you get a lot more material.
That literally means that in a place like Southern California, following these wet periods, you actually have more potential fuel for the fires to come. So we had that as recently as last spring, so, May, June 2024. Then we had our usual long dry summer. Summers for those outside of California are pretty much always bone dry along the coast. In California, that’s normal. But then we had an exceptionally hot period at the end of summer and early fall. In fact, some record-breaking heat all across the LA Basin in early September that coincided with the first major outbreak of wildfires this season, where some hundreds of structures were destroyed then.
That, of course, pales into comparison with what we saw this past month. But any case, very hot conditions in September, and then a really dry period thereafter. In fact, it didn’t rain at all in LA from the fall through the present. And so that particular sequence now, you can imagine, from really wet conditions that result in a bunch of extra growth of grass and brush, more potential fuel, and then this fuel desiccation period, if you will.
The usually long dry summer combined with a near-record warm period in fall, and then now a record-breaking low precipitation period, the driest start to the winter rainy season on record. That particular order of events from exceptionally wet to exceptionally dry is probably the worst set of conditions you could imagine for wildfire risk in Southern California, particularly if you add to that the fact that the winter, so December and January, is offshore wind season. So Southern California does tend to see these strong dry– I’ve called them blow dryer winds because they’re just really disruptively, windy and dry, and uncomfortably so even.
If you’re outside, you feel it in your skin and your face, and your eyes. That peaks in December and January. So what we have now is a one, two, three punch. It was wet, there was more growth, it was record dry. We had all of that growth dried out to summer dryness levels, and then we continued that right into the typical wind season when it’s usually wet. By this point, usually, it’s rain, but it hasn’t this year, the winds came and we’re the catalyst for this extreme weather event with fire embedded in it that we saw that was so devastating.
Jeff: And this goes to this idea, which you’ve written about and researched and talked about of what you call hydro climate whiplash. Explain that.
Daniel: Yes. It definitely does. And what we are currently experiencing in Southern California is a literal classic textbook definition. This is a classical wet-to-dry whiplash event as we defined in this recent review paper, the motivation for which was drawing together some disparate threads about how we understand changes in hydro-climate, so the portion of the earth’s climate system that relates to water. So either its abundance or lack thereof.
And in this review, what we found was after looking at 200-odd papers that have explored different angles of this over the past couple of decades and synthesizing them and then also conducting our own summary analysis on top of that, to look at some of the most recent data and tie it up into a bow, is that there has already been an increase in the globally aggregated level of what we call hydro climate whiplash.
These rapid transitions between either wet and dry states or drying wet states, they’re symmetric in that sense and that this is actually expected to become even more intense and more widespread in regions that haven’t yet experienced this historically, as the climate continues to warm to the point that at around 3 degrees centigrade of global mean warming, about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit of global mean warming, which is only slightly above the median estimate of where we’re headed on our current policy trajectory in terms of global warming, that we will probably see more than a doubling of the historical frequency of hydro climate whiplash.
And that’s not a small change at all. That’s actually a really big number given that these events historically have been very disruptive, as we just saw, illustrated in pretty dramatic and tragic fashion in Southern California.
Jeff: And how much of this is indigenous to the particular aspects of climate and geography in California, and how much really is true on a much broader frame, regardless of where we’re talking about?
Daniel: One of the things that I found most interesting from doing this review on the analysis associated with it is just how geographically widespread the projected increase in hydro climate whiplash with global warming actually is. It’s true across virtually all global land areas with very few exceptions. That’s not true of all that many metrics related to global warming. Of course, temperature is one of them. It’s getting warmer everywhere, although there are different rates of warming depending on where you are. But if you look at changes in average precipitation, for example, while some places are getting wetter, of course in a warming world, other places are going to get drier.
But when we looked at this whiplash metric, it transcends that, where both places that get wetter and drier on average both tend to experience increases in this sudden transition between wet and dry states. And that I thought was actually a little bit of an epiphany in the sense that it really, I think, illustrates that one of the signature flavors of global warming, at least when it comes to water, is more volatility. Regardless of what you’re used to in your local background state, regardless of whether you live in a dry place, to begin with, or a wet place to begin with, expect more of the unexpected.
Expect more of these wild swings. And this appears to be true in California as well as other regions. I’m not sure the metric we use specifically for this review is the best one to illustrate it for California. But we’ve done it using other metrics that are a little more California-specific, and they show very large increases in precipitation whiplash, particularly again in Southern California, which is directly relevant to the conversation we’re having right now. But I think that this is something that’s likely to emerge not only in California but broadly.
And so I think that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to write this review and offer this framing, which was that I think it’s a useful way to bring together some disparate threads and some maybe counterintuitive ideas about how global warming is affecting the water cycle. We already knew that it was intensifying the water cycle, but what that means in tangible terms, I think is encompassed in this increase in hydro climate whiplash.
Jeff: And as this increase happens, one of the things that seems to be a reality is it becomes more difficult all the time to fight these fire events, and in fact, at a certain point reaches the limits of any of our ability technologically or physically to fight these fires.
Daniel: Yes. And I think the main connection between global warming and increasing wildfire risk, both in places that were historically wildfire-prone and in some places that were not, is through the dryness of vegetation. So essentially increased landscape level aridity. And the whiplash angle on this is that that happens not only in places that are getting drier on average, but it happens at least episodically in places that are getting wetter on average, because of course, if you’re in the middle of a historically severe drought, even in a wet place, you’re still going to have some major problems.
So as the climate warms, the degree to which the vegetation is likely to be flammable in any given place is increasing. And the dryness or flammability of that vegetation is a big part of what drives wildfire intensity, both literally in how hot the fires burn, but also how extremely the fires behave in terms of how rapidly they advance across the landscape, which is a major risk factor in structural loss and lives loss. We know fires, and we know that fires are moving more quickly across the landscape and the intensity at which they burn. So literally the accumulated thermal energy that these huge combustion reactions release, which we have also seen now is observationally increasing.
It also is associated with larger fires, which I think is a less perfect metric simply because it doesn’t tell us as much about the impacts in terms of structures lost or lives lost, or even ecosystems disrupted potentially. So the acreage burn is used as a metric a lot of the time because we don’t have long historical records that we would like for these other quantities. But we’ve seen links between climate change, mainly through vegetation dryness or landscape aridity, and increases in all of these quantities. And why that matters on the ground is that contemporary wildland firefighting– So all of the kinds of tactics and equipment and personnel that we see fighting these fires in LA County, for example, this month, it takes an army.
Literally, there are 10,000 to 15,000 people whose job it is right now to fight or manage these fires and their aftermath in Los Angeles County specifically. We’re not even counting all the people who are assisting in a secondary capacity. We’re talking about primary wildland fire personnel. It’s in the five figures. That’s a huge number of people. That’s an almost inconceivable firefighting force when you combine it with the hundreds or even low thousands of fire vehicles and the dozens of firefighting aircraft. That starts to sound like the standing army of a small nation.
In fact, I bet you that it is larger than the standing army of some small nations. Devoted specifically to firefighting in California, and right now almost solely focused on one county in California. And yes we’ve seen that they have had a lot of successes. There have been a lot of fires that started under these extremely dire risk conditions and did not become destructive configurations. In fact, the vast majority of them did not. There’ve been dozens of fires that started under these conditions, and only two of them became hugely destructive.
Of course, it only takes one and we got two, unfortunately, and they were truly catastrophic events. But I think there’s two things going on here. One is a bit of a mismatch between people’s expectations that we’re always going to be able to, I guess, for lack of a better term, conquer nature in its extremes. And I think part of that comes from this idea that when the conditions are not so extreme, we’ve demonstrated a pretty robust ability to engineer or build or adapt our way out of a lot of problems, including fires. We’ve gotten way better at fighting wildland fires than we were even 20 years ago.
Certainly much better than we were 50 or 100 years ago where we essentially had no ability to fight them at all. We have all this technology. We have all this personnel, these vehicles, these aircraft, although as many ground crews, people who are actually boots-on-the-ground firefighters will tell you some of the most effective tools we have a lot of the times are actually very low tech. It’s the hand tools. It’s the axes. It’s the chainsaws. It’s the shovels, the Pulaski’s, all of these literal tools that you lug around on your back climbing up and down these steep hills.
But we also have the high-tech stuff. We have these jet aircraft outfitted with these huge tanks that can drop these clay-laden fire retardant slurries. We have night vision-equipped helicopters that can fly in darkness and fly into narrow canyons and drop water on fires in the middle of the night. And so we do see the increases in technological advances. We have this camera network now throughout California where any individual can look from the top of most of the mountaintops live in real-time and see what’s going on, whether there is fires or anything else.
And I think these are all helpful and beneficial up to a point. But on the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fires, I’ll just paint a picture for those folks because this is not a visual medium, that the winds on some parts of these fires were blowing at 80, 90, even locally 100 miles an hour gusts. So keep in mind that hurricane-force winds start at 74 miles an hour sustained. And these fires were burning in vegetation that was literally as dry as it has ever been at this time of year. So there has not been a point in recorded history where the brush in the hills above Pacific Palisades or above Altadena was as dry as it was this month.
And so we combine that with these almost ludicrously strong winds, and these winds were causing damage in their own right, by the way. They knocked trees down. There’s some gas station canopies that were blown over. These are damaging winds in their own right. And then there were a couple of fire ignitions at the worst possible place, at the worst possible time. And there’s footage of the Eaton fire in particular. And it’s actually been pulled from the Internet. I think this may have to do with liability over who’s concerned with who might have been responsible for this ignition, but in any case, it may reemerge.
Maybe it’s out there somewhere, but it essentially shows this fire, which is initially very small, maybe a half acre or an acre or something and the winds are just ferocious. And within 10 or 15 seconds of the footage beginning, it just looks like the flames are flowing like lava down this hill slope directly towards the neighborhood that this person is filming from. And this person is just despondent over what they’re seeing in disbelief, which I probably would have been too because they knew what was coming because there’s a fire.
The wind is blowing directly from where this lava-like fire is rolling off the hill with incredible speed directly towards where they are and when the video ends, you start to see these glowing dots flying past. And that’s what’s known as an ember storm. And there’s other footage that’s easily available right now. You can go look it up yourself. There’s ring doorbell footage, and there’s ABC and NBC News correspondent footage from on the ground showing what is literally called in wildland firefighting circles, the ember storm. It is this literal blizzard of embers.
It really looks as if it’s a blizzard with snowflakes, except that all the snowflakes are glowing embers and each of them could potentially go on to create its own new spot fire. Hurricane-force, blizzard of embers as far as the eye can see. And then once this ember storm reaches structures and a few of them catch on fire, each one of those structures starts then producing its own individual personalized new ember storm of thousands or millions of embers emanating out and blowing as much as 2 to 3 miles away from the closest open flame.
Again, each of these embers is essentially an opportunity for the fire to hopscotch along, sometimes skipping over miles at a time. This is why obstacles like six-lane freeways and rivers and roads and irrigated golf courses are not really a barrier to this wind-driven fire under record dry conditions. And the reason I’m emphasizing the visuals so much is that I think it’s hard to conceive of conditions like this if you’ve never personally experienced them. They are so extreme that there is a genuine limit on the physics of extinguishing combustion in that setting.
And there were hundreds of fire engines almost within an hour or two on scene in these fires. But the reality is that even if there had been an almost unlimited water supply coming out of the hydrants, you wouldn’t have been able to greatly affect the outcome once the fire reached that point burning structure to structure to structure. I think all of this just collectively speaks to the collective disbelief over the scale and the extremity of these kinds of extreme weather events with fire embedded in them. I’ve experienced one of these personally in Colorado during the Marshall Fire back.
It was coincidentally also a winter fire in December with wind gusts that were around 100 miles an hour. And this ended up becoming the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history similarly burning from structure to structure and neighborhood to neighborhood. But I think a lot of people struggle to grasp the scale of what happens because it’s so far outside of the realm of regular experience. You’re used to seeing perhaps a structure fire in your neighborhood and the fire department comes and 5 or 10 fire vehicles show up and that one structure might burn down, but eventually they put it out and the adjacent structures are usually okay.
But imagine what happens– That doesn’t scale if there were 10,000 structures on fire simultaneously adjacent to one another. That’s not 10,000 times harder, which would already be a big increase. It’s essentially an impossibility to manage that the way that I think people would want to.
Jeff: And what also is an impossibility given the scope and the way you describe it is one adequate preparedness, and two, the way even something like insurance companies need to begin to look at these.
Daniel: I think that’s another thing to realize is that a lot of the places that burned here, in Pacific Palisades, that was an area that was known to be very high fire risk almost throughout the entire city. So that unfortunately was to anybody in the business, probably a known hazard. But I think that a lot of the places that burned in Altadena and on the east side of the valley were much further from what most folks would consider the wildland, including insurance companies. Certainly, most people who live there, I think, thought they were fairly well protected.
And I think there’s a couple of lessons here, which is that under particularly extreme conditions, the wildland-urban interface extends miles away from where the brush and the trees become discontinuous or patchy. And the other reality is that we have not built most of our homes and structures in California really to be fire resistant. There are some newer structures that are and indeed a greater fraction of those, it’s already clear to survive these fires, although not all of them. But I think what we’re coming to terms with is that California has always been a very fire-prone place, particularly the places that have burned recently in Southern California. That’s not new.
And that the fire hazard is increasing, both due to a warming climate and other factors as well, but that also we have more people living in these high-risk zones than ever before. So it really is the trifecta of risk, unfortunately, and they all feed off of each other. Yes, climate change is lengthening the fire season and making vegetation more extremely dry, and increasing the likelihood that we see overlap between critically dry vegetation and very strong winds this time of year.
However, the other thing that’s driving a lot of the risk and these huge structure loss events, these really devastating whole neighborhood or whole town gets wiped out type of events that we didn’t use to see, but now we’ve seen, I don’t know how many times in the past 10 or 15 years in California and beyond, is that the number of people living and building structures in these particularly high-risk zones has ballooned. There’s actually been more growth in the high-risk zones than outside of them in recent decades in California.
At the same time that in forested settings, we let this 20th-century policy of suppression of all fires get ahead of us and increase risks in those forested settings because there’s not enough fire to do the beneficial underbrush clearing and to keep the tree density lower like it would be in a more healthy ecosystem. And then obviously, what’s happening in Southern California right now, they aren’t really forest fires per se because they’re mostly burning grass and chaparral, which is essentially large woody shrubs. Here, the situation is a bit different, but we still haven’t really managed the landscape with fire risk in mind at the kind of scale we would need to.
So there’s really three things going on. There’s climate change, there’s the expansion of populated areas into known high-risk zones. So even if nothing else had changed, that would put more people at risk than used to be. And there are these genuine questions of land management that are playing into this as well, and that specific questions vary a little bit based on where you are and what ecosystem you are in, but the general argument I think holds.
And that’s why for me, as somebody who studies these things and has colleagues who are more specialized in each individual aspect of this, I work with them closely, is that a lot of people are talking past each other in the conversations about what’s going on right now with these fires, specifically and more generally about climate change and wildfire, which is to say it certainly is a major reason why things are as bad as they are.
And if we deny that, we’re not fully acknowledging, I think, the scope of the problem at hand. But also, it isn’t the only thing that matters. In fact, in some cases, it may not even be the primary risk factor that has increased. It’s always there lurking in the background. Sometimes, in some cases, it’s actually more in the foreground, but sometimes it is more of a secondary piece relative to the other two realities that I just mentioned.
Jeff: Given that complexity and given this multiplicity of causes, how do we begin to think about solutions to any of this?
Daniel: To get to solutions, as much as a climate scientist, I know that we need to solve the climate crisis, and we need to do so ultimately by essentially bringing our global emissions close to zero as quickly as possible in terms of carbon. That really is the only way to do it. Much easier said than done. And we’re not really on a path to achieve that in a timely fashion still, and I am concerned that we have not made faster progress, although we have made some.
A lot of the things that we can do in the short run, and by short run, I mean as soon as this year to the next 5 or 10 years, and really achieve tangible benefits in terms of fewer people’s homes burning down, fewer people dying, a more stable insurance market. Unfortunately, we’re not going to stop climate change in the next 5 or 10 years. So that part of the risk is going to continue to increase for a while no matter what, and we need to solve that problem.
But from a wildfire perspective, in California, what can be done within the state, at a county level, at a local level, even at the level of individual homeowners or property owners is actually something that you can accomplish whether or not climate change is mitigated quickly or not because a lot of these things have to do with local fire resilience and local adaptations, things like structure hardening. So when we rebuild a lot of the structures that burned in this fire, for example, I sincerely hope that the red tape that we keep hearing is going to be cut, is not fire resilience or fire safety standards.
We need to be building these structures with the foreknowledge that they’re in high-risk zones. We’ve now proven that because they’ve burned in a wildfire. I think that’s pretty strong evidence. We need to be building them so that perhaps the next time there’s a major wind-driven fire under unprecedented drought conditions, you can’t build a fireproof structure unless you make it completely out of concrete or metal with no openings.
And I don’t think most people want to do that, and I don’t think it’s realistic to ask. But we do see that there are ways you can build structures, there are ways you can manage the vegetation in your yard, and the way that cities and counties and states can manage the vegetation surrounding communities by using things like prescribed burning, for example, or in some cases, a targeted mechanical thinning of vegetation where prescribed fire isn’t safe or appropriate for whatever reason. These kinds of things, I think, are going to have huge benefits in the short term, and we don’t have to rely necessarily on the federal government for this.
You don’t even necessarily have to rely on the state government. These are things that individual homeowners can do. If you have your own home, adding fire-resistant vents, getting rid of the flammable vegetation right under your home, rethink that wooden fence. All of these things sound small, and they don’t guarantee that your home won’t burn in a wildfire. But here’s the thing, every house that doesn’t burn in a wildfire is one fewer source of thousands to millions of embers in that ember storm.
So each structure that doesn’t catch on fire likely means that several other structures downwind also won’t in any given fire event. And so you can see how each of these incremental things that doesn’t sound like it’s going to produce dramatic benefits at scale, it’s one of those win-win self-reinforcing feedbacks. In science, we talk about positive feedbacks. They’re not necessarily good happy feedbacks, but they’re vicious cycle self-reinforcing processes.
This is what I might call a positive, positive feedback, which is a self-reinforcing cycle that actually would be societally a good thing if we do it because those benefits we’d get from approaching fire resilience from a community scale, from a state scale, or even at an individual property scale, would– Yes, it benefits you, the individual, but then it also benefits your neighbors, and by virtue of benefiting your neighbors, it benefits the whole community downwind.
And so, that’s the way I think about how we might manage the risks of fire. Even given that climate change is making the situation worse, I actually don’t necessarily think that climate change or mitigating it is the clearest path towards rapid improvement in what is arguably a rapidly worsening wildfire crisis in California and beyond, in this moment.
Jeff: And finally, Daniel, do you think that we have learned any part of this lesson from this experience? You’ve talked to people out there, you’ve spent a lot of time looking at this in the past couple of weeks. Is there a lesson here?
Daniel: I think there’s a few, and I think it’s a little premature to know if we’ve actually learned the right lessons, but the lessons that I see emerging that I hope we will collectively learn are the following. One is that all disasters, whether they’re wildfires, or a catastrophic flood or hurricane, or tornado outbreak on the Great Plains, whatever it is, they’re always multifactorial. There’s never just one thing, let alone one person you can blame for them.
And when we do that, when we look for scapegoats, whether that’s an individual, whether that’s the mayor of LA, or the governor of California, or the Chief of LA County Fire, or concepts in a more abstract sense, whether we blame vegetation management, or climate change narrowly as a singular reason why things are the way they are, it’s not only inaccurate, but the reason why I think it’s a problem is that it distracts us from actually addressing the full complexity of the underlying issues because if there is one person you can blame or one process that’s singularly responsible, you might believe that there’s a silver bullet solution, this one cool trick to solve the escalating wildfire crisis.
And the reality is because there isn’t one clear dominant reason why things are as bad as they are if we only attack one angle of the problem, we aren’t going to solve it. And so that is why I think one lesson is embracing complexity, realizing that disasters and wildfire disasters, in particular, are multifactorial, that yes, there’s climate change, yes, there is also the legacy of populations that have greatly expanded into risk zones, and yes, there are different vegetation and land management challenges depending on where you are. And it’s not one of these things, it’s an all-of-the-above situation.
And so the solutions then, if we want to be serious about them, have to involve all of the above. But the other piece too, the other big lesson, I think, is that I think, and perhaps this has always been true but we’re just seeing it more in our very connected social media era, where it’s very easy to amplify fringe views, and conspiracy theories, and misinformation, and even disinformation in some cases. But the fact that when there is a natural or a physical event, a disaster, an extreme storm, a catastrophic wildfire that is so beyond the typical scale of things, that is such a conspicuous mismatch with our expert expectations about how the modern world is supposed to work and how insulated we are supposed to be.
In California, for example, one of the wealthiest technologically advanced places in the world by many metrics, that does not fully insulate you when the natural world wants to throw something really big and bad at you. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s anyone’s fault or that there are any obvious grossly negligent failures that led to this, it’s just that sometimes the natural world wins. It really is that powerful. And sometimes all we can do is to try our best to get out of the way. And there are other things we can do to mitigate our vulnerabilities and manage those risks.
But ultimately, there are going to be some events and climate change does up the ante on precisely at the upper end of the distribution kind of events that are the scariest that we can’t fully mitigate the risks of. And what that means is that what we want is a society that can both A, acknowledge that reality without devolving into conspiracy theories and finger-pointing, and B, thinking about how we can manage our warming world and our complexifying world, if you will, in a manner that accommodates that. Not by preventing every bad thing that might happen, but by responding appropriately to it.
Helping people get back on their feet. Making bad things less bad I think is a very simple way of describing, I think certainly my philosophy, preventing as many bad things as possible and then the things you can’t prevent, mitigating the outcomes as much as you possibly can. And as we saw in cases like this, sometimes even those mitigated outcomes are still terrible. And that is a difficult reality to face. But if we don’t just want this to be the way things are moving forward, we will have to do things differently, and part of that is acknowledging that there will be extreme events beyond which we can fully prepare for or fully mitigate.
And so the question is, what kind of world do we want in that reality and how can we build a world where we’re better able to support each other and recover from those sorts of catastrophes when they do occur?
Jeff: Daniel Swain, I thank you so very much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Daniel: Thank you again.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate
