Whiplash

Like many people, I've been watching the news, photographs, and video footage coming in from the fires in the Los Angeles region with feelings of absolute horror.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Toastt21, PalisadesFire fromDowntown, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As of the time of this writing, ten people have died, 34,000 acres have burned, and 200,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders.  At least ten thousand structures -- homes and businesses -- have burned to the ground.  And while the high winds that have been driving the spread of the wildfires and making fighting them difficult to impossible are supposed to moderate this weekend, meteorologists have predicted them to increase again early next week.

Because there's no human tragedy so heartwrenching that Donald Trump won't use it to score political points, he's gone on Truth Social repeatedly in the last couple of days to say the whole thing is Governor Gavin "Newscum"'s fault, presumably for not raking the forests or going up to Canada to turn on the "very large faucet" that is holding back all the water from the western half of the United States.  Not a word of empathy for the people who've had their homes and their livelihoods destroyed, not a mention of the scale of this catastrophe.

It's what we've come to expect from leaders who have zero compassion and no benchmarks for conduct except for profit, cronyism, and revenge.

Note, too, that there's been no mention that the ultimate cause of this disaster is anthropogenic climate change.  No, gotta find a way that the Democrats are to blame, even though we've been the ones who have been warning about this for years.  In fact, just this week a study was published in the journal National Review of the Earth and the Environment that directly attributes the risk of devastating fire outbreaks to climate change -- more specifically, to a phenomenon called hydroclimate whiplash.

One of the results of global warming that is hard to get people to understand is that it isn't uniform.  The entire world isn't going to gradually slide into becoming a tropical rain forest.  The polar vortex phenomenon we've seen here in the northeastern United States over the last few years is actually one of the predictions of climate change models; the overall warming of the Earth causes a weakening of the polar jet stream, causing it to meander like a river crossing a flat plain.  Loops of the jet stream are pushed south, and those meanders allow icy polar air to move much farther south than normal.  So these deep cold snaps are actually caused by anthropogenic climate change; they're not an argument against it.

Likewise, rainfall and snowfall patterns aren't going to move uniformly in one direction, they're expected to fluctuate wildly.  This is hydroclimate whiplash, and is at the root of the Los Angeles fires.  The rainy season in early 2024 in southern California was abnormally wet (in fact, there were multiple damaging mudslides caused by what are called "atmospheric rivers" dumping huge quantities of rain and snow).  This triggered explosive growth in fast-growing plants like grasses and annual and perennial weeds.  The summer that followed was abnormally dry, and the winter 2024-2025 rainy season basically hasn't happened yet.  So you had what amounted to a tinder box of dried-up plants, just waiting for a spark to start the conflagration.

"The global consequences of hydroclimate whiplash include not only floods and droughts, but the heightened danger of whipsawing between the two, including the bloom-and-burn cycle of overwatered then overdried brush, and landslides on oversaturated hillsides where recent fires removed plants with roots to knit the soil and slurp up rainfall," said Daniel Swain, climatologist with UCLA, who co-authored the study.  "Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions."

You won't hear a word of this from Donald Trump and his cronies, of course.  Not while they have Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom to blame, and certainly not as long as the GOP is in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry.  Trump's pronouncements on the wildfires have contained, to quote CNN's Daniel Dale, a "staggering amount of wrongness," but I guess now we're back to living in the "alternative facts" world we were in from 2016 to 2020.

Since we've now lost our opportunity here in the United States to put the brakes on fossil fuel use, at least for the next four years, look for more extremes to come.  We can expect bigger storms, more heat waves and polar vortexes, more atmospheric rivers and catastrophic droughts.  We tried to warn people; hell, I've been writing about this topic here for fifteen years, and was discussing it in my classes three decades ago.

Not that the people in charge were listening.  As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

So there's nothing we can do now but to put pressure on legislators -- frustrating though that's likely to be in the current political climate -- and prepare our own selves for weathering the storms, literal and figurative.  Find places to donate to help those displaced by the fires, some of whom have lost everything.  (Here's just one of many options.)  

Most importantly to the bigger picture: keep speaking up against the lies coming from Trump and his allies.  We can't let misinformation shout more loudly than the truth.

****************************************

NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

****************************************