By Lara Williams / Bloomberg Opinion
In what’s becoming a somewhat commonplace event, we’ve been inundated with apocalyptic images this week, currently emanating from Los Angeles. Wildfires are tearing through neighborhoods across the region, more than 200,000 people have been ordered to evacuate and at least 10 have died.
Once upon a time, activists and scientists alike thought that once people saw the impacts of climate change firsthand, they’d be moved to believe in the urgency of the crisis and, crucially, to act. But as with hurricanes and other extreme weather events that have come before, the California wildfires are proof that isn’t the case. Rather than baring the truth for all to see, misinformation and new flavors of climate denial are thriving in the chaos.
These blazes have been so hard to control because a rapid switch from a very wet 2023 winter to very dry conditions over the last nine months or so created the perfect fire fuel in southern California; first by encouraging grass and brush to grow, then stripping the vegetation of moisture. With strong Santa Ana winds further dehydrating the land and enabling the fires that catch to spread rapidly, the conditions were perfect for an inferno.
With extreme weather events being the culmination of a range of threats and vulnerabilities, an attribution study is needed to properly assess how much climate change played a role in these conflagrations. But there are things we already know about the link between a heating planet and wildfires.
Multiple studies show that warming is exacerbating the conditions conducive to fires, such as low relative humidity and vapor-pressure deficits (the difference between the amount of water in the air and the maximum amount of water the air can hold). And that whiplash between very wet and very dry conditions is a phenomenon that has already increased globally by 31 percent to 66 percent since the mid-20th century and will continue to accelerate as the planet warms further, according to a paper published in Nature on Thursday.
But these aren’t facts you’re likely to see if you hop onto Elon Musk’s X or check what Donald Trump, the incoming U.S. president, is saying. Instead, you’ll find posts amplified on social media blaming the fires on nearly everything but climate change, including:
• Low reservoir levels;
• Diversity, equality and inclusion efforts by the Los Angeles fire department;
• Efforts to save a tiny endangered fish;
• Donations of firefighting equipment to Ukraine;
• Direct energy weapons, also known as space lasers.
The facts are that most of California’s reservoirs are at above-average levels for this time of year. Firefighters did run out of water, but not due to any water management decisions. The head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power explained at a news conference that although three million gallons of water were available when the fire in the Pacific Palisades started, the demand was four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.” The heat from the fire also damaged water pipes, compounding the problem.
With more than 7,500 firefighters putting their lives on the line, are we really going to believe they’ve been distracted by DEI efforts? Donations to Ukraine, meantime, were made back in 2022 and were of unused surplus equipment.
About 40 percent of L.A.’s water comes from state-controlled projects connected to northern California, where the fish called the Delta smelt lives, and the state has limited the water delivered this year to protect vital ecosystems. Yet there is no water-supply shortage in the southern part of the state right now; so efforts by Trump, who called the smelt “essentially worthless” in a social media post blaming California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the fires, to connect enormous fires to a three-inch fish are pure fantasy.
Speaking of fantasy, evidence for the use of laser beams to start fires on purpose is limited to digitally altered videos, alongside false claims that the color blue protects against such weapons; the same conspiracy theory was widely spread after the Maui wildfires in 2023. I’ll also just leave you with a story from 2024 in which a Canadian man who claimed that the government was purposefully lighting wildfires was found to be purposefully lighting wildfires.
These false claims are very easy to make but take time to debunk. Some claims also rely on a sliver of truth which is then distorted to minimize the impacts of climate change.
Ross Clark, a climate skeptic columnist in British magazine The Spectator, blamed this fire on the U.S. being better at tackling them. Fires are a natural part of California’s ecosystem, he posited; by interrupting the natural cycle, deadwood accumulates and gives subsequent forest more fuel. There’s some truth to this. But when citing Valerie Trouet, professor of dendrology at the University of Arizona, Clark completely ignored the other part of her argument emphasizing how human-induced climate change has made “the hot California summers even hotter, the seasonally dry Californian forests even drier and the long fire season even longer.”
This is the new denialism. Without saying outright that climate change is false, skeptics blow other factors out of proportion and minimize the impacts of global warming; providing the opposite of a nuanced picture.
These tactics aren’t new to the L.A. wildfires, but we are entering a new era. With Trump back in power, Musk using his platform to spread lies and Mark Zuckerberg giving up on fact-checking at Meta Inc., the internet is set to become even more of a wild-west where conspiracy theories and untruths rule the land. Accountability and evidence-based debate are dealt yet another blow.
It’s always worth examining whether fire and water management could have been improved; governments sometimes do create vulnerabilities through neglect or maladaptation. With these lessons we can strive to improve crisis response, while prioritizing efforts to ameliorate the global warming that’s making the threats bigger in the first place.
Sadly, lesson-learning isn’t what Trump and and his fellow deniers are trying to achieve with their online rants. Even as the climate crisis burns down our houses, we can’t rely on that compelling world leaders to act.
Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change.
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