That term is a misnomer that disempowers humanity, evoking the planet’s wrath in the face of which we are powerless. Exposure and vulnerability are in fact the result of human choices.
19 January 2025 — As luck would have it, I was in London last week to attend, among other things, a course/tutorial at Imperial College in conjunction with the London Science Museum on the uses of a suite of Earth satellites and airborne instruments to monitor global climate change.
Included was a discussion of how this suite of technology helps us better understand fires and aides in fire management and mitigation. By looking at multiple images and types of data from these instruments, scientists compare what a region looked like before, during, and after a fire, as well as how long the area takes to recover. While the fire is burning, scientists watch its behavior from an aerial perspective to get a big-picture view of the fire itself and the air pollution it is generating in the form of smoke filled with carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
But as one of our instructors noted, the current Los Angeles fires are on a very different level, and they are “a chronicle of a fire so foretold, so predictable”.
The instructors veered off the agenda for a bit, and steered us to some collateral sources for further study. And one instructor left us with the admonition “The Los Angeles fires are not natural disasters. They are man-made disasters”.
And he is right. All the man-made ingredients were in place for these unprecedented fires in Los Angeles.
Over the weekend I read some of the preliminary reports on the causes of these fires, plus a draft of a long-in-progress attribution study underway (10 years in progress, as a matter of fact) that helps to explain the precise link between global warming and man-made errors specific to California fires.
Audrey Garric, a French journalist who covers climate change and has been in Los Angeles, had a great comment in a weekend piece in Science magazine:
It’s impossible to dream of a better scenario for a sequel to “Don’t Look Up”. In that 2021 film, director Adam McKay portrayed a society incapable of reacting to a major emergency: the arrival of a meteorite that would destroy the Earth, in a metaphor for the climate crisis. Today, monstrous wildfires devastate Los Angeles as 2024 was declared the hottest year on record, exceeding for the first time the 1.5°C global warming threshold, the most ambitious limit set by the Paris Agreement at the end of 2015.
Yet the United States will be led from January 20th by Donald Trump, who calls climate disruption a “hoax.” He wants to extract ever more oil and gas, fossil fuels that heat up the climate, fueling the severity of said fires.
Current events offer yet another – literal – illustration of the fact that “our house is burning down and we are looking elsewhere,” as French President Jacques Chirac said in 2002. To back up his words, Chirac had referred to the “natural disasters” striking Europe. Twenty-three years later, we continue to use this term for every calamity: in Los Angeles, as in Mayotte, as in Valencia, as in Florida. The term is wrong.
And she is correct. These are not natural disasters. That term is a misnomer that removes humanity’s sense of responsibility, evoking the planet’s wrath in the face of which we are powerless to act.
Of course, natural hazards do exist, but it’s the choices we make in terms of urbanization, land-use planning and public policy, as well as the socio-economic context, that transform them into disasters. Exposure and vulnerability are the result of human decisions.
Due to demographic pressure, Los Angeles authorities built massively in fire-prone areas, with houses assembled on the edge of the forest and often using timber frame construction. Water management has always been a complex issue in this arid zone. It is story of natural impossibility – and political corruption (which is beyond the remit of this post).
More and more backtracking
Added to this first problem is the fact that, with the exception of earthquakes, the overwhelming majority of disasters are now fueled or caused by man-made global warming. Heatwaves, floods, droughts, fires and hurricanes are made more intense and/or more frequent by rising global temperatures. This surge is caused by the ever-increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Scientists have been hammering home these facts for 30 years. Yet the latest disasters demonstrate, once again, that governments are failing to respond to the climate emergency and protect their populations.
Even in California, a wealthy state with a long history of wildfires and which claims to be at the forefront of the fight to protect the planet, firefighters are overwhelmed and have to be helped by Canada and Mexico. Insufficient water pressure in some hydrants has encouraged the fires to spread.
While adaptation must be stepped up, it will never be enough without urgent action to tackle the source of the problem: greenhouse gas emissions.
Worryingly, there is more and more backtracking. U.S. emissions stalled in 2024, with a near-stagnation (-0.2%). The goals of the world’s second-largest emitter will be derailed further after the inauguration of Trump, who wants to pull his country out of the Paris Agreement once again and deregulate environmental standards. The real estate magnate has already appointed climate skeptics with ties to the fossil fuel industry to his new administration.
Blowing on the embers
Anticipating these developments, all U.S. banks have left the United Nations-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance. A similar program for asset managers has just suspended its activities following the departure of the financial giant BlackRock.
On a global scale, investment in oil and gas could pick up again this year, with gigantic hydrocarbon projects expected to emerge from both land and sea.
In order to protect these polluting energies, whose producers massively financed Trump’s campaign. Trump, Elon Musk and the entire MAGA sphere prefer to blow on the embers and convey disinformation, conspiracy theories and climate skepticism – just as they did during hurricanes Helene and Milton. They attacked the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of California, both Democrats. They blamed, in no particular order, the diversity policy within the firefighting department, donations of firefighting equipment to Ukraine, the alleged protection of fish or frogs to the detriment of people and the supposed detour of federal disaster relief funds to migrants.
These lies not only cause political and democratic damage, further polarizing society. They also waste vital time in the fight against the climate crisis.
It bears repeating: climate inaction kills. It also leads to a loss in gross domestic product and worsens food insecurity, disease, conflict and migration.
Despite the scenes of chaos in Los Angeles, the realization, by all leaders and the entire population, that the human-induced climate crisis threatens the very conditions of life on Earth does not seem to be on the agenda.
Yes, it is urgently needed.
But I am a pessimist (realist?) and I know adaptation to global warming has been rendered impossible. Everyone will lose, but the main losers will be the most vulnerable, who are also the least responsible. There can be no happy ending.
But that’s just the cycle, isn’t it? Every civilization ends – but not the world. It’s an historical constant. All civilizations reach a tipping point and collapse in, onto themselves. Whether that’s by external influences (invasions, mass migration, disease, climate, etc.) or internally (revolution, civil war, civil unrest), every historical civilization has fallen, eventually.
It would be the height of conceit to imagine our civilization could be different.
Although to end this post on a more *positive* note this fine, sunny Sunday morning (where I am, at least), herein a few notes from the MIT “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report”:
• Human extinction is not really the main worry. There are going to be some really, really bad global regional and local consequences. Consider island nations of the world — the type of warming that we’re heading toward, with the expected sea level rise that could force them in many places to retreat or possibly abandon their homeland, is an existential threat to them.
• For many people, asking if climate change is the “end of the world” is really asking if it’s “the end of my world”. Yes, there will be widespread breakdowns in infrastructure and public services and the food supply. But it really depends upon where you live. We would give a very different answer if you were living in the United States as opposed to an island nation or the coastal plains of Bangladesh or in the middle of the Sahel. But given the poor basic infrastructure across the United States, much of it will suffer.
• In part, this is due to unequal climate impacts: low-lying coastal areas facing two or three feet of sea level rise will suffer greatly whether they’re wealthy Miami or impoverished Kiribati. But there is also a basic injustice at work. Wealthier countries and regions have the most resources to prepare for, soften and recover from climate impacts. This means they’re more able to bounce back after a disaster strikes. And this goes beyond billionaires building survival bunkers for their family and friends.
• The most vulnerable populations are the poorest populations. If we do nothing about climate change adaptaion, conditions are going to get worse for people who are poor and don’t have the means to cope with it. They are lost.
• Over the past hundred years, the world has made enormous progress in reducing extreme poverty. But not factoring in climate change adaptation means it will halt or reverse those gains in many regions. But at this point, what do we do? Reduce crop yields and force low-income countries to channel ever more of their limited wealth into withstanding extreme weather? If they’re going to spend more and more of their resources to adapt to an ever-changing climate, then those resources that they could have used for recreation, welfare, livelihoods, won’t be there. It is Hobson’s Choice.
• These people will be robbed, those who have done the least to contribute to climate change. Human civilization will carry on in some form, but not for them.
• If we had to rank climate change as an existential risk to humanity, it would be below a lot of the other threats that are heavy on people’s minds. Nuclear war and global pandemics are an existential risks that are far greater than climate change.
• We need to accept that human civilization will not be wiped out but recognize that there be a massive disruption coming to our way of life, and a potentially existential disruption to the way of life of many people around the world who have very little control over future climate change.
And what about the long, long, long, long term?
Well, eventually, the fuel of the sun – hydrogen – will run out. In fact the sun “dies” a little bit every year (measured in Earth years). When it reaches its apogee, the sun will completely die out.
After the hydrogen runs out, there will be a period of 2-3 billion years whereby the sun will go through the phases of star death. Once the hydrogen runs out, our yellow dwarf star will begin to swell. It will swell to a size that will cause it to swallow Mercury, Venus, and Earth. It may even grow to overtake more of the planets. When the sun increases in size it will become a “red giant”.
All told, we are talking about 5 billion years.
So my point is: if you mess up your plastic or paper or egg shell bin disposal, don’t sweat it.
There is a very good book coming out in a few months by Jordan Thomas, a cultural anthropologist and former wild-land firefighter entitled When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World which offers essential context for understanding these latest Los Angeles fires. I received a review copy via my publisher’s consortium. I will review the book in a subsequent “Porthole” post so for now just a few comments.
Thomas fought fires for three years. One of those years he was on the Los Padres, California “hotshot crew” – hotshots are like the Navy Seals of firefighters – while simultaneously doing anthropological research at UC Santa Barbara to better understand the cultural forces that drive wildfire behavior.
In the years since, be became an active prescribed burner, doing what people call “trying to get on the good side of fire” – using the skills you learn suppressing fires to try to put more fire on the land in ways that benefit it.
Many people are wondering what’s behind these current fires in Los Angeles – the Palisades and Eaton fires, and the smaller ones popping up around them – and who should be held accountable for them. How unprecedented are these fires, and what conditions made them possible? How much should be chalked up to climate change, or overdevelopment, or cuts to funding, or forest mismanagement, to list just a few potential culprits being named?
Thomas explains that while they are unprecedented, they are not unexpected. These are the sorts of wildfires that climate scientists have been predicting for quite a long time.
But it is an instance of the most terrible possible conditions occurring at the most terrible possible time – and in Los Angeles, instead of out in a National Forest where wild-land firefighters like him and his colleagues fight them.
Wildfires are shaped by the choices people in our society make. They are very political, so it’s valid to be searching for accountability. What makes it difficult is that there’s always a lot of variables, which means people can easily see what they want to see. Bad faith actors – as you’re seeing with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a lot of the right wing – exploit that multivariate confusion to make it seem like it’s hard to attribute these wildfires to anything in a solid way.
But you can bring it down to a couple underlying causes. It’s a bit of a false choice to frame it as “Is this climate change or —?”
A more productive way to think about it is, “This is climate change and also — .” It’s important to focus on climate change first, because you can’t understand any fires nowadays without understanding how climate change has altered our vegetation patterns over broad scales and changed acute real-time weather conditions.
So Thomas would say it’s the product of climate change and land management and the housing crisis.
And he goes into long detail on California land (mis)management and water (mis)management.
I shall leave it there. Enjoy the remainder of your weekend as we gird our loins for the coming adventure.
