Inevitably, and depressingly, the wildfires in southern California have been heavily politicised even while the terrified residents are seeking refuge and the firefighters are trying to bring the situation under control.
Never missing an opportunity to turn some human tragedy to partisan advantage, president-elect Donald Trump has attacked the governor of California, Democrat Gavin Newsom for allegedly failing to protect water supplies for fire hydrants and prioritising the endangered smelt fish over the inhabitants of Los Angeles. Irrespective of its ecological function, Mr Trump blames the effort to save what he calls “an essentially worthless fish” for this vast natural disaster.
Specifically, Mr Trump claims governor Newsom failed to sign a “water restoration directive”. The governor’s office counterclaim that there is “no such document”, and that it is “pure fiction”. Some have even blamed the fire service’s record of zero per cent containment on “DEI”, as if HR guidance on diversity, equity and inclusion was a principal driver of the catastrophe. Meanwhile, California burns…
The science of climate change can never be precise enough to be able to attribute any particular freak weather event to anthropogenic global warming. What it can be very clear about is that the frequency and sometimes unprecedented nature of such events are the outward and obvious consequences of anthropogenic climate change.
The experts point, for example, to the failures of the seasonal rains in the hills around Los Angeles as a crucial factor in allowing the wildfires to take hold and spread as devastatingly as they have (whether the fires were started as an act of arson or not). California has suffered increasingly lengthy droughts, followed by correspondingly heavier but late rainfall. In recent months, the very dry weather created ideal conditions for the conflagration that has engulfed the homes of thousands of people.
The same sort of climatic factors may be said to be behind the violent Hurricane Helene that hit the southwestern United States in September, as well as the deadly floods in Valencia and, most deadly of all, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. More water, exacerbated by melting glaciers, in a warning atmosphere inevitably fuels hurricanes across the Tropics.
The year 2024 was one of terrifying episodes that once again showed that mankind has no defence against nature when the climate becomes as destabilised as it has. The thousands of acres ablaze in California were never going to be defeated by hosepipes and fire tenders. It seems grimly appropriate, in this context, that the Cop29 summit in Baku was so sparsely attended by world leaders and so inconclusive.
So it comes as no great shock to learn that 2024 was the hottest ever recorded – the warmest in at least 100,000 years, and with levels of greenhouse gases at an 800,000-year high. More ominously still, the European Union’s Copernicus programme says that it is also the first where the global air temperature was more than 1.5C above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels. As has been well noted, that is widely regarded as the safe limit, beyond which the risk of unpredictable, uncontrollable and irreversible climate starts to climb.
It would be some tiny compensation for the miseries endured by the people of California if the high-profile fires in LA were to prompt a moment of reflection – a realisation that man-made climate change is flirting with the extinction of life on Earth. All the signs are that no such Damascene conversion is about to be witnessed – and least of all in the mind of Mr Trump.
He has already appointed a frightening range of climate sceptics with links to the fossil fuel industry to sensitive roles in the incoming administration. His new energy secretary, for example, Chris Wright, a fracking tycoon, boldly declares that “there is no climate crisis”. With Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg now onside, we may also expect social media platforms to spread climate denial propaganda, supportive of Mr Trump’s avowed aim to “drill, baby, drill”.
Withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement will swiftly follow Mr Trump’s inauguration, just as it did in 2021. Even if Mar-a-Lago itself was to be swept into the sea by some mighty typhoon, Mr Trump wouldn’t change his settled opinion that climate change is some sort of Chinese hoax.
In such circumstances, the only option is for those nations and organisations that do believe in science to carry on the struggle, phase out CO2 emissions, and press the arguments as strongly as ever. Certainly, governments should step up efforts to mitigate the worst effects of flooding, fires and droughts at home; and aid the world’s endangered coastal and small island states. But, short of following Mr Musk on his (highly uncertain) Martian odyssey, there’s no alternative to life on Earth.
The fight goes on.
