Climate scientist: 'No place is safe'

The monster that roared through Los Angeles County last week is still alive, but firefighters appear to have cornered it. People have started returning to their homes or what is left of them. Insurance, if they have it, is a whole different battle.

The focus now shifts from what happened to Why It happens, what happens next? This disaster is as severe as anyone here remembers… but is it really just the new normal?

“Nature is telling us, 'I can't take this anymore. If you keep treating me like this, I can't support you,'” said John Vaillant, author of “Fire Weather: The Front Lines of a Burning World.”

Vaillant said climate change is making disasters such as the Los Angeles wind fires more severe. “We expect fires of this severity, and even greater severity, to occur in the future,” he said. “The types of fires we've seen over the past decade are qualitatively different from the past 100 years.”

“this type Are the types of fire different? I asked. “What happened to the fire?”

“There are many aspects. The most efficient and scariest way to lay people like us is the most obvious, which is to move faster and with greater intensity. When you talk to any firefighter with a sense of history When they talk, they see different situations. “In many cases, the (fire) behavior is impossible to fight. ”

The reason, Vaillant says, is what science has been telling us for decades: Our internal combustion engines continue to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “We don't feel it; we don't smell it; we don't notice it,” he said. “But if you put the car engine that brought me here on the floor and ignited it, we would go deaf and then we would die from its emissions. That's what's under the hood of every internal combustion. So, we Emissions from the trillions of fires created every day contribute to this artificially warm climate.”

As a result, he said, we're going to get more intense fires… stronger hurricanes… and hotter heat waves.

Climate scientist Peter Kalmes has been sounding the same alarm for years — and he feels that when he tries to share the science of climate change with the world, no one is listening.

In 2022, we met him near his home in Altadena, California, as he prepared to move his family to North Carolina.

“So, for a few years I wanted to move to a place that wasn't so hot,” he told us this week. “But I want to be clear, I don't think anywhere is immune to the impacts of climate change.”

Kalmes saw this firsthand last year when North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helene. The California fires were also a disaster for him. His old house in Altadena and the homes of friends burned to the ground. “I hope, if there's a silver lining to this tragedy, it's that the public wakes up and gets angry and says, 'We need to do something about this. Enough is enough,'” he said.

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

For more than five years, Edgar McGregor has been picking up trash every day in Altadena. He is also passionate about meteorology and runs a weather-related Facebook page. He warned Facebook followers of the dangerous situation days before the fire, and posted a video on Jan. 6 telling them to drop everything and leave town.

“I said, 'Get out of here,'” McGregor explained. “I stood in the middle of my street in my house, filming the wildfires burning behind me, and telling people, 'This is serious. Get your Social Security cards. Get your deeds. Get out. Like, this It’s just that I’m not kidding.”

Jenn Siebert, an Altadena mother of two, didn't need to hear it twice. “I think he, well, he absolutely saved my family's life,” she said. “We all listened to him. We said, 'This kid knows what he's talking about!'”

Her own house somehow survived the damage. Her neighbors were not so lucky. “My best friends, they lost everything,” Siebert said. “They're alive because, I think, probably because of Edgar. Everyone in the Beautiful Altadena group is alive now because of Edgar.”

Siebert, who had never met McGregor in person, hugged him when she was introduced to him. “I thank you so much,” she said. “You saved my family and you saved a lot of people. So, thank you.”

Experts say the fires are a larger warning that the Earth will continue to become drier and more unstable if we don't take steps to combat climate change. But of course, warnings are only effective if people listen.

I asked Wei Neng: “Have we pushed nature too far?”

“The good thing about all this is that nature is sternly inviting us to reengage,” he responded. “It's only going to get hotter. So nature is saying, 'Wake up! We're all in this together.'” It's up to all of us to focus on the real cause and understand that this can indeed happen to us, usto you and me, not just people we know, or people on TV. ”

Read the excerpt: “Fire Weather” by John Vaillant

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

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