This article analyzes the significant implications of the L.A. Fires, offering insights into wildfire recovery, emergency response strategies, environmental policy, and the broader climate impact. Discover how communities can rebuild sustainably and prepare for future disasters.
Whether we are ready to admit it or not, climate change has arrived, and it is beginning to hit home…As part of its coverage on climate-related issues, Global Geneva has been closely following the impact of wildfires on places ranging from California to the South of France with a focus on solutions. In this independent comment, our America’s editor, William Dowell, explores lessons from the Los Angeles fires.
This article is also published in Bill Dowell’s personal Substack column: A Different Place.
Independent Analysis: The catastrophe that just took place in Los Angeles might easily be dismissed by some as one of Nature’s outliers—a once-in-a-lifetime disaster not likely to happen again. The more likely truth, however, is that Los Angeles marks an evolutionary turning point — the first major American city, with the possible exception of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, to face near-total physical destruction because of global warming and climate change.
It is ironic that the terrible destruction wreaked on Los Angeles took place just before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Trump not only discounts climate change, but he has adopted as his most recent 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 has always 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 major features of climate change catastrophes is that they often resemble past disasters, only they tend to be more intense—a lot more intense.
The fact is that Los Angeles is only the latest victim of a trend that has been taking place in the rest of the planet for the last several decades. Natural disasters are ten times more frequent today than they were 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 that 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 and consequently demanded only passing attention. Unlike Mayotte, at least for most Americans, the destruction in Los Angeles is impossible to ignore.
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 re-insurance 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 realize is likely to be increasingly 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.
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 that was responsible for multinational cooperation in ocean research. In the process of writing a story, I visited a French oceanographic expert at Paris’ 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.”
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, 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 discrepancy was caused by a layer of dust in the upper atmosphere that had tricked the satellite readings. The oceans were warming faster than anyone realized. Suddenly, global warming was on everyone’s radar screen. The planet might not be in danger, but it looked increasingly as though the future of the human race definitely was. “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 already begun to realize that the world’s climate is an interlinked system that is dramatically affected by the interplay between the oceans and rapidly changing surface air temperatures. Altering any part of the system leads to a chain reaction across the planet.
The most commonly recognized climate effect is El Niño, which results in a disruption of the east-to-west trade winds off the coast of Peru. Under normal conditions, the wind pushes warm water from the 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. When El Niño hits, the trade winds weaken, and a mass of warm water remains in place. That displaces the Pacific jet streams 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 coast of South America are more forceful than normal, and a mass of cold water replaces the warmer water. As a result, the Pacific Jetstream is displaced to the north. A permanent, high-pressure effect in the Atlantic, the Anti-cyclone of the Azores, has a dramatic impact on weather patterns in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
The bottom line in all this is that the planet’s atmosphere is far more fragile than most of us 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 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. Planetary climate, in short, is not something that you want to fool around with.
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 the excess heat that is in the atmosphere. Once the oceans become over-saturated, it promises to be a whole new ball game.
Another aspect of global warming is that melting permafrost in the Arctic is likely to suddenly release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane gas, both powerful drivers of the greenhouse effect. The result is often called the “hockey stick” effect. On a graph, the sudden diffusion of CO2 and methane spikes dramatically upwards, making the line of the graph look like a hockey stick.
In 1982, scientists puzzled for several months before they could identify El Niño as the cause of a major climate disruption. By 1997, NOAA, the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, was able to use computer modeling to predict that an El Niño was underway.
That knowledge did nothing to prevent it from causing spectacular damage. In 1997, 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. 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 damage caused by natural catastrophes over the previous decade. Swiss Re, the Swiss underwriting giant, 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 due to 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 of Mexico. It leveled the city, killed more than 1300 citizens and cost $125 billion. The city’s defenses against category 5 hurricanes were increased, but by then it was too late.
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 1600 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 100 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 U.S. 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.
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 cost $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 costly. The fires have not only led to at least temporary homelessness on a massive scale, they have also encouraged looting, lawlessness, and price gauging on the part of landlords in a position to rent out available housing. That is not to mention the political dissension and name-calling resulting from the disaster, President elect Donald Trump has had a running battle with California governor Gavin Newsom, whom he regularly refers to as “New-scum.” Probably least of its concerns, Los Angeles had hoped to sponsor the World Olympics. It is doubtful that will happen now. Societies under stress can pull together, or they can break apart. California appears to be doing both.
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, Switzerland, 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 eventual 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 considering 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 U.S. Aid programs. 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.
The problem that CARE soon recognized was 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, which had swept away huge chunks of the troubled province of Aceh in western Sumatra. While those disasters had nothing to do with climate change, the most constantly recurring problems did. They were mostly focused on Bangladesh and southeast India, which were subject to massive floods from the melting ice cap in Tibet and the Himalayas, and 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 Bangla Desh’s Brahma Putra 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 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 due to drought affected the identities of individuals and tribes who increasingly found themselves forced to survive on food from developed countries that increasingly showed signs of donor fatigue. Parts of Africa had literally 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, but that was no longer sustainable, so the young men, recognizing that they had 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 and threatened to overthrow the region’s traditional Tuareg social structure.
For anyone who was listening, the CIA warned that climate change, combined with rapidly expanding 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 weather, it turned out, were interlinked.
Climate change inevitably involves a two-stage punch. For the moment, melting ice caps and glaciers frequently result in too much water, but what happens when the ice is gone? The grater danger is that once the ice is gone, the source of water that much of the world depends on will begin to dry up. The Rhine River is already so low that barge traffic that used to rely on the river is frequently being forced to reduce the load it carries. Switzerland, which once offered excellent skiing, frequently has no snow.
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 citizens. As a result of the enlargement of the canal’s system, there have been public protests that there is no longer enough fresh water for ordinary ordinary people. Climate change stresses resources, and stressed resources inevitably lead to conflict.
No one expects the fires in Los Angeles to sponsor terrorism, but the side effects can be just as damaging. Notably, it will soon be impossible to insure real estate in increasingly vulnerable areas. 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? Nicolas Hulot, a French adventurer, one-time government minister, and climate activist, compares the state of the planet to the Titanic. When there is nowhere else to go, and the ship sinks, he points out, first-class will drown right along with 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 sports utility vehicles, 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 two billion people. Today, it’s expected to top off at around 10 billion. What happens when they all want to drive a gas guzzler?
Most of these problems can still be resolved through intelligent planning and global cooperation. The key here is cooperation, not competition. The fact is that it is doubtful that a free-market philosophy that sees value only in terms of future profit can save us. What we need is a commitment to civilization itself, in other words, the common good. Investing in society itself may not earn enormous profits, but it will go a long way to preventing unsustainable costs that, in the end, none of us can really afford.
In the 1980s, the Shell oil company researched the effects of global warming and identified a number of dangers. It also concluded that international cooperation was unlikely to stop climate change, and much of the company’s negative research data was subsequently suppressed. Likewise, Exxon was accused by descendants of the Rockefeller family of hiding negative research data concerning climate change from the company’s investors. In the absence of international cooperation, the bleak alternative is a world in which everyone has to fight for survival, a new Dark Age.
In the days immediately following World War II, the US would have taken the lead in showing the way. 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,” which might just as easily stand for “Make America Small Again.”
What Trump is pushing is really a vision of a world based on greed and personal self-interest, a kind of new Dark Age fueled by Dark Money. In this vision of a world driven by self-interest, the wealthy can take care of themselves, and the rest will simply be forgotten. Except that it rarely works that way. As Prince Philip cautioned a young Queen Elizabeth in the TV series The Queen, “Get it wrong, and it’s off with your head.”
From a slightly different perspective, it could also be argued that what Trump is really advocating is a strategy legendarily adopted by frightened ostriches. When the ostrich encounters overwhelming danger, it simply sticks its head in the sand and pretends that there is nothing there. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. Of course, it is always possible to feel safe by ignoring reality until finally it isn’t. If you are 78 years old like Donald Trump, there is a good chance that you will be dead before the final crisis makes climate change impossible to ignore. That may actually work for Trump. As for the rest of us? I am not so sure.
Veteran foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Insights Magazine’s America’s editor based in Philadelphia where he writes his regular Tom’s Paine column. He is also a contributing editor to Who,What,Why. Dowell has worked for ABC News and other news organizations, including TIME Magazine in Hong Kong, Cairo, and Paris. He has reported from five continents – most notably the War in Vietnam, The Revolution in Iran, the Civil War in Beirut, Operation Desert Storm, and Afghanistan. He also taught Literature of Journalism at New York University.
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