https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/opinion/la-fires-los-angeles-wildfires.html?unlocked_article_code=1.oE4.7I4e.7-3HdBbXgHmw&smid=url-share
By Peter Kalmus - Jan. 10, 2025 - New York Times
I am utterly devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires, shaking with rage and grief. The Altadena community near Pasadena, where the Eaton fire has damaged or destroyed at least 5,000 structures, was my home for 14 years.
I moved my family away two years ago because, as California's climate kept growing drier, hotter and more fiery, I feared that our neighborhood would burn. But even I didn't think fires of this scale and severity would raze it and other large areas of the city this soon. And yet images of Altadena this week show a hellscape, like a landscape out of Octavia Butler's uncannily prescient climate novel "Parable of the Sower."
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One lesson climate change teaches us again and again is that bad things can happen ahead of schedule. Model predictions for climate impacts have tended to be optimistically biased. But now, unfortunately, the heating is accelerating, outpacing scientists' expectations.
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I started worrying about climate change as a graduate student in 2006. My concerns grew stronger as the planet grew hotter. In 2012, unable to look away, I switched my career from gravitational waves to climate science, taking a job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I also started keeping chickens and bees (like so many of my neighbors), volunteering with local climate groups and bicycling around town to give climate talks.
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Then, in September 2020, I experienced heat exhaustion for the first time during an intense heat wave. The next day the Bobcat fire, a megafire, ignited a few miles from our neighborhood high in the Altadena foothills. In Los Angeles, neighborhoods near mountains and wild areas are in greater danger from wildfire. We prepared to evacuate, but, unlike the fires raging now, the blaze was mostly contained to wilderness areas.
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No place is truly safe anymore. A few months ago, Hurricane Helene pummeled the western part of my new state and the city of Asheville, which many once considered a climate haven. The Pacific Northwest seemed safe until the 2021 heat dome. Hawaii seemed safe until the deadly fires on Maui in 2023.
For those who have lost everything in climate disasters, the apocalypse has already arrived. And as the planet gets hotter, climate disasters will get more frequent and more intense. The cost of these fires will be immense, and they will affect the insurance industry and the housing market.