As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles
As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles
After the Bobcat fire, the area no longer felt safe.
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So they moved to North Carolina lol. The text acknowledges this but I feel climate refuges are somewhat of a myth.
Also, there are many neighborhoods in LA that are much safer from wildfires. You have to evaluate your risk in a more granular way.
It might also be possible to construct our houses to make them much more fire resilient. I haven’t seen the details but I’ve heard that Australia made some big changes to their design standards in recent years but California has not.
My favorite is "cellulose insulation" used in attics. It's basically literally shredded magazines. So you have this fire-starting material chilling in your attic waiting to turn your roof into the Statue of Liberty's torch. Attics has soffit vents to let the fire motes in, and Bob's your uncle. Foam stuff isn't much better. Fire resistant material like fiberglass should be mandatory.
Cellulose insulation is usually treated to be fire resistant, meaning it will not spread the flame.
Unfortunately I don't think this is a mandatory treatment.
The issue is that in times of climate instability arid areas swing wildly into heat, drought and cold (not to mention catastrophic flashfloods and fires) because there is no water in the regional climate system to moderate those swings.
Don't take my word for it, look at vanished civilization after vanished civilization especially in central and north america...
This isn't going to get better, this isn't the time in human history to live in an arid area, it is dangerous as fuck. Leave if you can, you have no idea how bad it is going to get because frankly not even the scientists do.
I keep giving this warning to people in the US but unfortunately I think we are headed for a mass heat death event (5000-10000 dead) in Phoenix Arizona or a similar city from widespread power outages during a brutal sustained heatwave.
Leave the desert now, I implore you, this is the wrong moment in history to be a desert dweller and ESPECIALLY get any loved ones with precarious health or that are elderly out NOW.
I wish this was hyperbole but it really isn't..
Well first of all most of California is not a desert. It’s a Mediterranean climate. This is part of what makes fire so common. We normally have warm dry summers and cool wet winters. The winters allow vegetation to grow and the summers allow it to burn. At least that used to be the case, but regardless, it’s likely we’ll continue to have periods of healthy vegetation growth interspersed with extreme fire weather.
Desert climates are actually among the safest environments from a wildfire perspective because there is little vegetation to burn.
On the flip side, they are very vulnerable to extreme heat, as you allude to. But Mediterranean climates tend to be very mild in terms of heat—in fact many people in California do not even have air conditioning because there is no need for it where they live. Now, that doesn’t mean California won’t have issues with extreme heat—indeed, the lack of historical heat means we don’t have strong protections against it. But heat issues here are far less serious compared to Phoenix, the Deep South, and many other parts of the world. California is not projected to be among the areas where lethal heat is a regular occurrence.
So you are combining multiple catastrophes that don’t coexist in California to paint a worse picture than actually exists. And you are ignoring that extreme heat is actually more dangerous in humid climates, as are hurricanes and other catastrophic storms.
Climate change is a global phenomenon that will cause disruption and disaster everywhere. It is up to each community to act decisively to develop social structures and infrastructure to evaluate and adapt to the coming challenges. In fact, I think mass migration is more likely to make this more challenging by cutting social ties and loss of local knowledge.
To be clear, some migration will likely be necessary and part of this adaptation will be accommodating this. But these narratives that everyone needs to flee to somewhere safe do more harm than good. There is nowhere safe except those places that we render safe.
I hate to be the messenger here but while there is certainly truth to what you are saying, California is pretty much just as fucked, the only difference I see is there will be a greater variety of climate disasters than in the true deserts of the US.
https://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/
None of these links support what you’re saying. Yes, heat is increasing, as it is virtually everywhere. Precipitation changes are small as outline in the graphic. And the heavily inhabited parts of California are along the coast where the modeled changes in GDP are negligible.
Now I personally suspect it may be worse than this but it certainly does not support the idea that California is somehow a dramatically worse place to be than anywhere else in the country. I know there has been some speculation that the upper Midwest and northeast might constitute some kind of climate refuge but I doubt this. These areas are generally humid and not well prepared for heat, and we’ve already seen huge wildfires and increased flash flooding in many northern areas. Not to mention extreme pest outbreaks and forest dieback, increases in mosquito-born illnesses, and even arctic air outbreaks and blizzards. Part of what makes these places less harmed by warming is the fact that they are already so cold. But people there are used to this cold. They are not used to the challenges to come.
The issue with climate change is primarily the change. We can adapt to these new conditions given enough time but their rapid and global nature makes this difficult.
These areas are generally humid and not well prepared for heat
I don't think you understand, it is precisely the humidity, i.e. the consistent flux of water through a regional climate that serves as a moderator of deadly, extreme and permanently damaging weather events.
Think about how much energy it takes to boil a pot of water, water absorbs and softens chaotic swings in energy in regional climate systems because of that capacity for water to hold heat energy.
There have been numerous studies about this from first street and others that show semi-arid places like California getting hit brutally hard not so much by a massively changing baseline of average environmental conditions but rather from the rapidity and violence with which energy passes through semi-arid regional climates when there isn't a consistent background flux of water that can divert and dilute the impact of natural disasters and weather events.
I understand the concept you’re describing but you aren’t applying or understanding it correctly. In fact, California’s climate is dominated by this effect because prevailing winds bring cool oceanic air to the state which is why coastal areas do not get extremely hot or cool. As this air warms across land the humidity drops, so this climate is a bit unique in the way it works but there is typically no extreme heat combined with humidity.
In contrast, the eastern US receives most of its air from dry inland areas, which is why the climate is so seasonally variable. It’s true that the more humid climate does reduce the diurnal temperature swing, and this means absolute maximum temperatures can be lower in many humid climates compared to their arid counterparts. But this ignores that the human body can tolerate dry heat much more effectively than humid heat. So the relationship between aridity and extreme heat mortality is more complicated than it first appears. The most vulnerable places are those that are both hot and humid like the gulf coast, parts of the Middle East, and India. There’s absolutely no reason to think California will be rendered uninhabitable by extreme heat in the foreseeable future.
Look at these figures, you are horendously off the mark with your conclusions here, California is going to continue to be a place where climate change brutalizes people and it sucks :(
Also my argument is explicitly not that baseline environmental conditions are going to wreck havoc on people's lives in California and rather that in places like California it is the increasingly wild swings in weather that is going to kill and displace people in mass amounts.
I don't think you are grasping my fundamental point. Most of the time these places will still have nice weather, it is the exceptions and the speed of them that will inveitably cause mass migration out of these areas.
Think of it as living at the bottom of a long slot canyon along a river in the desert but the entire regional climate system is the slot canyon. Most of the time it is a wonderful place to live but the bad days are really bad and the trouble is they come with little to no warning.
Compressed sand houses with metal rooves are pretty fire resistant. A large firebreak around your house requires that you own a bunch of land around your house but these are rich people in some of these areas so they can afford it.