While there are still climate-change deniers, the ongoing tragedy in Los Angeles makes the increasing threat hard to ignore.
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There is no question that the fires that devastated Los Angeles are emerging as one of the most tragic and costly natural catastrophes in American history. What just happened might still be dismissed by climate-change deniers as one of nature’s outliers — a once-in-a-lifetime disaster that is not likely to happen again.
But it is also likely that the Los Angeles fires will mark an evolutionary turning point as far as attitudes toward the climate go. With the possible exception of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, Los Angeles will go down as the first major American city to face large-scale destruction because of global warming. The damage from climate change, in short, may finally be impossible to ignore.
It is ironic that the catastrophic destruction wreaked on Los Angeles took place just before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Trump not only discounts climate change, but he has recently adopted as a slogan the chant “Drill, Baby, Drill!” His election victory is clearly a green light to the fossil fuel industry. Whether that attitude continues in the wake of Los Angeles remains to be seen.
Of course, California has always been prone to wildfires, and access to water in much of the state has long been an existential problem. It might be possible to dismiss the current catastrophe as just another example of California doing its usual thing — only this time a lot worse. One of the features of climate change catastrophes is that they often resemble past disasters, only they tend to be more intense — a lot more intense — and a great deal more frequent.
An Ominous Global Trend
The fact is, however, that Los Angeles is only the latest victim of a trend that has been gathering momentum around the planet for the last several decades. Natural disasters are occurring 10 times more often today than they did in the 1960s. They are so frequent that we often barely notice them.
A month before the fires hit California, the French territory of Mayotte, off the coast of southeast Africa, was virtually annihilated by a “once-in-a-century” cyclone that destroyed most of the island’s habitation and killed a still unknown number of people. France reeled in shock. French President Emanuel Macron flew to the island but appeared to be nonplussed by the dimensions of the disaster, which he clearly felt to be beyond comprehension.
Most of the rest of the world looked at Mayotte’s destruction as terrible, but something that was happening somewhere else to people we had never heard of. Unlike Mayotte, at least for most Americans, the destruction in Los Angeles demands our full attention.
That said, we have been arguing over the reality of climate change for a long time. Back in the 1990s, both climate scientists and insurance companies began noticing that the number of serious natural disasters was increasing each year. Swiss Re, a major reinsurance company that insures other insurance companies, began urging action to control climate change decades ago. Today, insurance companies are preparing to abandon vulnerable states, notably Florida and California, to their fate, which the insurance companies deem likely to be increasingly — and predictably — catastrophic.
Ironically, one of the earliest tip-offs to global warming came from the Pentagon, when it began studying weather patterns so that it could better deal with nuclear fallout patterns. At the time, the US was still heavily involved in above-ground nuclear testing, and it needed to know where the radioactive ash from an explosion would end up.
Fifty Years of Knowing
I first became alerted to the climate change issue in the late 1970s, when I was working as a freelance reporter in France. The effects of global warming had become a hot issue at UNESCO, the Paris-based United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which was responsible for multinational cooperation in ocean research.
In the process of writing a story, I visited a French oceanographic expert at Paris’s Natural History Museum. His office looked like something you would imagine as a movie set dealing with a 19th century expedition to the heart of Africa. The anomaly was a brand-new computer that was clearly visible on the professor’s desk. I asked about it. “A gift from the Americans,” the professor said. “They want to know what we are finding out.”
“We have a grace period of about 50 years to resolve this,” a scientist told me. “After that, all hell will break loose.” That was nearly 50 years ago.
At the time, the weather was still something of an enigma. “We don’t have the computing power to make reliable predictions,” an expert at UNESCO explained. “There are too many variables.”
While predicting future weather conditions remained elusive back then, it was clear that something was happening to the planet. The US had regularly measured ocean temperatures by satellite, but the readings failed to tally with temperature readings made by ships that were actually at sea. The disparity was caused by a layer of dust in the upper atmosphere that had tricked the satellite instruments. The oceans were warming faster than anyone realized.
Suddenly, the phrase “global warming” was on everyone’s lips. The planet was undergoing a major change in climate resulting from human activity, and it looked increasingly as though the future of the human race was in danger. “We have a grace period of about 50 years to resolve this,” a scientist told me. “After that, all hell will break loose.” That was nearly 50 years ago.
By the late 1970s, scientists had conceptualized the world’s climate as an interlinked system that is dramatically affected by the interplay between the oceans and rapidly changing surface air temperatures. Altering any part of this system leads to a chain reaction across the planet.
For example: The most commonly recognized climate effect is known as El Niño, a periodic disruption of the normal east-to-west trade winds off the coast of Peru. Under normal conditions, the wind pushes warm water away from the western coast of South America across the Pacific toward Asia; as the warm water moves across the Pacific, cold water “upwells” from the depths of the ocean to replace it.
NASA Earth Observatory illustration by Joshua Stevens, modified by Michala Garrison. Photo credit: NASA Earth Observatory
But when El Niño hits, the prevailing trade winds weaken, and a mass of warm water remains in place off Peru. This diverts the high-altitude winds of the Pacific jet stream to the south, which in turn alters the normal patterns for rainfall and storms. In an opposite weather pattern called La Niña, the trade winds off the west coast of South America become more forceful than normal, and a mass of cold water replaces the warmer water. As a result, the Pacific jet stream is displaced to the north. When a strong El Niño or La Niña develops, the resultant changes produce a dramatic impact on weather patterns in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
A Complex and Fragile Equilibrium
The bottom line in all this is that the “normal” state of the planet’s atmosphere is far more fragile than previously realized. An early NASA study indicated that without just the right amount of global warming, we would probably all freeze to death. Too much, and we risk being boiled alive.
Until now, Earth has been unique among its sister worlds in the solar system in maintaining a temperature that enables human life. Other planets are not so lucky. The average temperature on Venus, for instance, hovers at around 860 degrees Fahrenheit. Wind speeds regularly reach 185 miles per hour near the surface and 250 miles per hour in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Venus has cloud cover, but the clouds contain sulphuric acid. The climate on Venus, in short, is not something that invites human habitation.
Much of the stability of the earth’s temperature is due to its oceans. As one scientist explained, the oceans serve as a kind of thermal battery, absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere and “storing” it. Heat is a form of energy. Once the oceans become oversaturated with heat, something has to give.
One example of the side effects of global warming is that melting permafrost is likely to release huge amounts of both carbon dioxide and methane gas. Both these gases are powerful drivers of the greenhouse effect, in which solar radiation — in the form of light — is converted to heat and then prevented from escaping back into space by the buildup of CO2 and methane.
The result is often modeled through what is called a “hockey stick” graph. Past a certain point, when the imprisoned gases are released from the melting permafrost, levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere spike dramatically. On a graph, the sudden sharp increase resembles the upcurved blade of a hockey stick. And as those heat-trapping gases build up in the atmosphere, temperatures on the Earth rise.
By 1997, NOAA, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, was able to use computer modeling to predict that a particularly strong El Niño event was underway in the Pacific, with potentially far-ranging consequences.
That prediction proved all too accurate. In February 1998, a particularly fierce El Niño sent 6-foot waves crashing across San Francisco’s downtown Embarcadero. Million-dollar homes were destroyed in unprecedented floods and landslides.
The effects were felt worldwide. Farmers across the traditional monsoon regions faced crippling droughts, while in the Horn of Africa, outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever, meningitis, and Rift Valley fever ravaged local populations and closed international borders to badly needed trade. The damage was equivalent to the total damage caused by natural catastrophes over the previous decade. Swiss Re estimated the total cost at nearly $100 billion.
In a similar vein, computer modeling in the early 2000s indicated that New Orleans risked being struck by an intense Category 5 hurricane resulting from rising temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. The information was largely ignored. The US Army Corps of Engineers had been ordered by the US Congress not to increase the city’s dikes and other defenses to a Category 5 level. The increased defense was considered unnecessary and too costly. As the computer modeling predicted, Hurricane Katrina, which struck in late August 2005, promptly turned into a Category 5 hurricane after passing over the unusually warm waters of the Gulf. It leveled the city, killed more than 1,300 citizens, and cost $125 billion. In the wake of this devastation, the city’s defenses against Category 5 hurricanes were belatedly strengthened.
By 1985, scientists had launched TOGA (Tropical Oceans/Global Atmosphere), a project that involved stationing 70 buoys across the Pacific to take ocean temperature readings to a depth of 1,600 feet. The information, including atmospheric conditions, was transmitted to satellites in real time, giving scientists far more accurate information concerning ocean temperatures and their effect on the climate.
In 1992, a United Nations meeting on climate and development held in Rio de Janeiro voted to pick a hundred scientists from 46 countries to engage in full-time studies of the climate. Michael Hall, director of global plans at NOAA, announced that it was time to act, rather than talk. He offered to have the US fund a climate research institute. After intense competition between the Woods Hole Institute and Columbia University, the grant went to Columbia, which established the International Research Institute (IRI) in collaboration with the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and Columbia’s Lamont/Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.
IRI provided much of the advanced weather modeling needed to track climate change, and many of its scientists later joined the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction Office in Geneva (UNDRR), which has become a major force in studying how to mitigate the threats posed by the increase in climate events.
Recognition Is Not Remedy
As Los Angeles is beginning to discover, understanding climate change doesn’t necessarily offer immunity from it. The damage in Los Angeles is likely to cost at least $150 billion. Worldwide, natural catastrophes over the past year could easily exceed $250 billion.
What Los Angeles will soon learn is that while the human death toll from this kind of catastrophe gets the most attention, the peripheral effects can be almost as dire. The fires have not only led to at least temporary homelessness on a massive scale, they have also encouraged looting, lawlessness, and price gouging on the part of landlords in a position to raise the price of rental housing. And that is not to mention the political dissension and name-calling resulting from the disaster, including a new round in President-elect Donald Trump’s running battle with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), whom he regularly refers to as “Newscum.” Probably least of its concerns, Los Angeles had hoped to sponsor the 2028 summer Olympics — a plan that, despite public assurances, might find itself in jeopardy.
Societies under stress can pull together, or they can break apart. California appears to be doing both. While a number of politicians have reacted to the fires by blaming state officials for not taking sufficient action to prevent the fires, Mexico sent a detachment of its own firefighters to help fight the inferno. Many people have opened their homes to take in escapees. Others have tried to profit from the disaster by charging suddenly skyrocketing rents for the suddenly homeless. So far, however, the fires have triggered relatively little discussion of the farther-reaching problem of climate change’s impact on the planet.
In 2005, I signed on for a three-year tour as worldwide information coordinator for a special unit that CARE International had created in Geneva to provide an immediate response to natural disasters. CARE was created in the aftermath of World War II when Europe was still in ruins. The US Army had stockpiled food for the prospective invasion of Imperial Japan, which never happened. CARE purchased the food for roughly $15 million and shipped it to Europe in the form of CARE packages.
Once Europe was on its feet, CARE considered its job done and was contemplating disbanding but, by then, a number of countries in the recently decolonized Third World faced a series of famines. The US had a food surplus and, at the same time, wanted to continue supporting American farmers. The solution was to send the surplus to those parts of the world that desperately needed it.
CARE became one of the leading organizations implementing US aid programs overseas. In the process, it also became a magnet for development talent, eventually establishing operations in more than 70 countries. It had a global staff of more than 14,000 and a budget that approached a billion dollars.
CARE soon recognized that the increasing number of climate disasters were beginning to wipe out decades of development. While development is a slow, arduous process, disasters require immediate response. CARE established a group whose main mission was immediate response to disasters on the ground.
When I joined towards the end of 2005, CARE was dealing with a massive earthquake in the inaccessible border regions of Pakistan and with the Indian Ocean tsunami that had swept away huge chunks of the troubled province of Aceh in western Sumatra. While those disasters had nothing to do with climate change, a number of recurring problems did. CARE mostly focused on Bangladesh and southeast India — which were subject to massive floods from the melting glaciers and snow cap in Tibet and the Himalayas — and on drought in East Africa.
A single flood had inundated southeastern India and displaced 60 million people, the equivalent of nearly the entire population of France. I called New York to talk to the UN’s head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and explain the problem. “Nothing new in that,” I was told. “Happens all the time.”
As long as the disaster was happening somewhere else, the reaction was polite, sincere, and not really interested. On the spot, however, the world had become a frightening place. I traveled up Bangladesh’s Brahmaputra River and talked to villagers who had spent weeks camping on the rooftops of their houses, while flood waters circled around them. People were surviving, but just barely.
East Africa — Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan — proved equally desperate. The region had previously experienced a drought every five years. By the time I got there, it was every two years. “We used to raise cattle,” a woman in Ethiopia told me. “Now, the land won’t support it.”
The desert east of Nairobi, Kenya, had turned into one of Africa’s largest refugee camps, housing several hundred thousand people who had fled fighting in Somalia. The loss of livestock from drought affected the identities of individuals and tribes who increasingly found themselves forced to survive on food from developed countries that had begun to show signs of donor fatigue. Living in parts of Africa had become unsustainable. The result in Somalia was warfare and banditry that made it literally impossible to do anything.
In Mali, the Tuareg economy depended on livestock; that was no longer sustainable, so the young men, with no future, left the country to sign up as mercenaries and fight in Lebanon’s civil war. Armed and equipped with military training, they soon returned home and threatened to overthrow the region’s traditional Tuareg social structure.
For anyone who was listening, the CIA warned that climate change, combined with burgeoning Third World population growth, was rapidly becoming a national security issue.
Egypt had agreed to share the waters of the Nile with Ethiopia and Sudan but as long as both Sudan and Ethiopia were embroiled in local conflicts, they had no use for the water. Egypt’s use of the Nile expanded, and it became obvious that there was little incentive to stop the regional conflicts that kept others from using the water.
Turkey launched a massive building program to harness the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with a series of dams, despite claims from Syria and Iraq that they also needed the water. In the end, Syria provided sanctuary to a Kurdish separatist group, the PKK. When Turkey refused to listen to Syria’s claims about water, a café would suddenly be bombed in Istanbul. Politics, water, and eventually, the climate, it turned out, were interlinked.
We see that the disequilibrium driven by climate change somewhat paradoxically takes the form of a two-stage punch. For the moment, melting ice and snow frequently result in too much water, causing devastating floods, but what happens when the frozen water is gone? The Rhine River is already so low that barges on the river are frequently forced to reduce the loads they carry. Switzerland, which once offered excellent skiing, frequently has no snow.
In 2016, the Panama Canal was enlarged to accommodate super-sized container ships, but the water that feeds its locks is taken from a freshwater lake that also provides drinking water to most of Panama’s population. Panamanians are now being told to drink less so that traffic through the canal, the mainstay of the country’s economy, can continue. Climate change stresses resources, and stressed resources inevitably lead to conflict.
Will There Be Cooperation or Just More Desperate Competition?
No one expects the fires in Los Angeles to trigger terrorism, but the side effects can be just as damaging. As after most disasters, widespread looting in the burnt-out areas has been reported. Notably, it will soon be impossible to insure real estate in increasingly vulnerable neighborhoods; statewide, insurers in the many fire-prone areas have been pulling out of the market and/or raising rates by a factor of two, three, or more. Some form of habitation will have to be found for the displaced population.
Politicians are divided as to what to do, and in the meantime, some of the wealthiest people in California have hired their own private firefighters. A wealthy California couple, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, control 500 billion gallons of water through a company they called Wonderful. That’s a tiny fraction of California’s total water supply, but if you have all the water you need and can hire your own protection, why invest in the government or the common welfare?
It is doubtful that a free-market philosophy that sees value only in terms of ever-increasing future profit can save us. What we need is a commitment to civilization itself — in other words, to the common good that nourishes us all.
Eric Hulot — a French adventurer, one-time government minister, now a climate activist — compares the state of the planet to the Titanic: Ultimately, when there is nowhere else to go and the ship sinks, first-class travelers will drown alongside those in steerage.
That is about where we are now. The planet might have been able to sustain many American and Western Europeans engaging in extravagant waste and occasionally owning two or more SUVs, but what happens when more than a billion Chinese and another billion Indians want to join the party? In the 1950s, the world population was roughly 2 billion people. Today, it’s expected to top off at around 10 billion. What happens when they all want to drive a gas-guzzler? Or chow down on steaks from steers raised on ranches wrested from the Amazon rainforest?
Most of these problems can still be resolved through intelligent planning and global cooperation. The key here is cooperation, not competition. It is doubtful that a free-market philosophy that sees value only in terms of ever-increasing future profit can save us. What we need is a commitment to civilization itself — in other words, to the common good that nourishes us all. Investing in society itself may not earn an immediate financial gain, but it can go a long way toward preventing unsustainable costs that, in the end, none of us can really afford.
In the days immediately following World War II, if faced with the incontrovertible evidence of human-driven climate change we’re facing today, the US might have taken the lead in organizing a joint approach to averting the predictably dire effects of global warming. Not anymore. Today, Donald Trump is setting the tone, at least for the moment. He and his MAGA mob are promoting “Make America Great Again” and “Drill Baby, Drill.”
What Trump is pushing is really a vision of a world based on greed and personal aggrandizement, a kind of new Dark Age, fueled by Dark Money. In this vision of a world driven entirely by self-interest, the wealthy can take care of themselves, and the rest will have to make do with the dregs.
From a slightly different perspective, it could also be argued that what Trump is really advocating is a strategy said to be adopted by frightened ostriches — who, when they encounter overwhelming danger, supposedly stick their heads in the sand, on the misguided assumption that if you can’t see the threat, it doesn’t exist. Turns out this avian “defense strategy” has been thoroughly debunked; ostriches are too smart to act as if pretending that a threat doesn’t exist will save you from its consequences.
As for 78-year-old Donald Trump, there is a good chance that he will be dead before the final crisis makes climate change impossible to ignore. But what about the rest of us? And our children? And our grandchildren? Isn’t it time to use our brains to save (all) our skins?
