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In succeeding as his father, I’ve failed him as a citizen.
My son Conor recently turned 14. When he was younger, I’d felt a low-lying dread about what it would mean to be the father of a teenager. I knew that he’d one day engage in the same rituals that I once had: the eye rolling, the whatever, Dads, the prizing of friends over family. And though all of this is now happening, I recognize it for what it is. None of it offends me, because at his core, he’s the same carefree kid he’s always been.
Of course, much is different, and in some ways worse, for him now than it was when I turned 14.
A wave of studies now show that teenagers are sadder and more anxious than they’ve ever been — even in times of war or Watergate or Limp Bizkit. New technology is the crisis’ obvious driver; as The New York Times recently wrote, the decline in teen mental health has coincided neatly with “the introduction of the iPhone (in 2007) and the rise of selfie culture (around 2012).”
But if smartphones and social media are a leading cause of adolescent stress, the threat of climate change would seem a logical runner-up. As recently noted in National Geographic, over half of respondents to a 2021 Lancet study of children and young adults believed that “humanity is doomed” — and a similar number “said concerns about the state of the planet were interfering with their sleep, their ability to study, to play, and to have fun.”
In Conor’s 14 years of living on America’s East Coast, he’s experienced both Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Ida’s floods — with each in their time described as a once-in-centuries event. And though he’s so far avoided the sadness that social media can bring, I’ve lately been wondering what he makes of our troubled Earth. Has this winter — in which January was nearly 10 degrees above normal — unnerved him as it has me? He’s a pleasantly average kid, a lover of baseball and Fortnite and hanging out with friends. I know what the Greta Thunbergs of the world make of climate change. But what about the kid who I eat dinner with every night? I was embarrassed not to know. So I asked him if we could talk about it, fearing that I’d uncover a well of anxiety.
We sat on a couch in our basement, where he normally plays video games — and where, during the Ida downpour in 2021, my wife and I had frantically plugged holes in the wall to keep water from pouring in. He seemed a little confused as to why I wanted to discuss climate change; this was not a normal part of our evening routine.
“So is climate change something that you ever think about?” I asked as we settled in. “Is it something you’re conscious of?”
“It’s not really something that I think about, like, constantly,” he said. I didn’t know if this meant that he thought about it occasionally — that he had to force it from his mind — so I asked him about the mild winter. When people blamed climate change for something currently happening, did it give him pause? After all, our hotter predicted future has undoubtedly arrived. “I don’t really know,” he said, “because I don’t really remember before it wasn’t like this.”
I found this upsetting — he, like any other child in 2023, can’t properly gauge his worry because the recent past is his only measuring stick. It’s normal for Australia to burn, for California to run dry. It’s normal to wear shorts in January. But he didn’t seem upset. So I asked him the question that I didn’t want to ask: Does he worry about what the future may bring?
“Not really,” he said, shrugging. “Because I feel like I don’t know that much about all of it.” Only a few minutes in, his tone had already drifted toward one of polite detachment. It was becoming clear that he had no particular interest in climate change. “If I asked you … do you ever think about the stock market? Would you give it the same amount of thought?” I asked, a little exasperated. “[Climate change] is just not a thing?” “Pretty much,” he said, almost apologetically.
Conor is intelligent; he gets good grades and is funny and thoughtful. He’s not callous or unfeeling, and, at least in an abstract way, I know that he cares about the Earth. Though he might have joined the 29% of respondents to the Lancet study who said they felt “indifferent” about climate change, I would never use that word to describe him. So as my questions failed to stir him, I realized that, in trying to do right by him as a father, I might be failing him as a citizen. Because climate change is very much “a thing”; it might be the only thing.
For all of his 14 years, I’ve tried to shield him, as much as possible, from terrifying things that are beyond his control: shootings, sickness, governmental collapse. I largely avoid troubling subjects whenever he’s around, and climate change is the most troubling subject of all. So when I do address it, I tend to sand off the edges: I acknowledge that, yes, January was warm because of climate change, but also because of La Niña, a Pacific weather system that both heats the air and allows me to change the subject. It seems natural to me that I haven’t wanted to drop the full weight of climate change upon my child’s mind. I don’t want him to feel that his future might not be as open as his present seems to be. But now that he’s coming of age, that protective approach seems less defensible.
Throughout his childhood, I thought it would be enough to do the right things without articulating their necessity. He’s a vegetarian because my wife and I are vegetarians; he recycles because we recycle. There are solar panels on our roof because, well, we had them put up there. He knows why these things are good for the planet, but he clearly doesn’t understand the urgency behind them. I don’t want him to be anxious, but I also don’t want him to lack awareness. It’s a delicate balance: to be environmentally conscious, yet also mentally strong. As someone who lays awake at night, worrying about our degraded earth, I’m not quite sure how the two things fit together.
“I want you to understand that everyone’s actions have a result, even if it’s a tiny thing like leaving your light on,” I said to Conor in the basement, referring to one of his particularly maddening habits. He nodded, possibly convinced, as I went on. “It’s going to be your world … and I want you to be equipped to go out into that world and make the right choices.” This was all true. And yet I now knew that I had to do more to “equip” him: to find a way to give him the facts of the problem without marring his happiness.
After a while, I understood that I’d squeezed as much on the topic from him as I was likely to get. He simply didn’t know enough about climate change to have a real dialogue, and for that the fault was mine. “I guess I’m a little surprised that it’s not something that you give any thought to,” I said, “when it’s 60 degrees in February.”
“It’s nice football weather,” he said, smiling the smile I was so determined to preserve. About this, he was right. It was nice football weather. But it was also a harbinger. As I’m learning with Conor — who’s so neatly poised between childhood and maturity — it’s possible for two things to be true at once.
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Almost no city in the country is destroyed more often than Los Angeles. America’s second-biggest city has been flattened, shaken, invaded, subsumed by lava, and calved off into the sea dozens of times on screen over the years; as the filmmaker and critic Thom Andersen has said, “Hollywood destroys Los Angeles because it’s there.”
But, understandably, when this destruction leaps from Netflix to a newscast, it’s an entirely different horror to behold. The L.A. County fires have now collectively burned an area more than twice the size of Manhattan; more than 10,000 businesses and homes that were standing last weekend are now ash. Officially, 10 people have died, but emergency managers have warned the public to brace for more. “It looks like an atomic bomb dropped in these areas. I don’t expect good news, and we’re not looking forward to those numbers,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said in a late Thursday press conference.
The mind gropes for an explanation for this horror — and lands in bizarre places. Much has been made in the past few days of the rampant proliferation of conspiracy theories and rumors about the fires, ranging from the believable to the totally absurd. Alex Jones has claimed the fires are part of a “globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the U.S.” (a theory incoming government official Elon Musk endorsed as “true”). Libs of TikTok and others have said that the Los Angeles Fire Department’s hiring practices emphasizing diversity have left it strapped for personnel to fight the wildfires (Musk endorsed this one, too). President-elect Donald Trump has blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the well-publicized occurrence of dry fire hydrants, citing a “water declaration resolution” that supposedly limited firefighters’ access to water, even though such a thing doesn’t exist. Still others have taken to TikTok to spread claims that the fires were intentionally started to burn rapper and producer Sean “Diddy” Combs’ property and hide criminal evidence that could be used to support sex trafficking and racketeering charges against him (another lie). Mel Gibson even used the disaster as an opportunity to share his thoughts about climate change on The Joe Rogan Podcast (spoiler alert: he doesn’t think it’s real), even as his house in Malibu burned to the ground.
“We need some kind of explanation psychologically, especially if you’re not accustomed to that kind of thing happening,” Margaret Orr Hoeflich, a misinformation scholar, told me of how conspiracy theories spring up during disasters. She added that much of the rhetoric she’s seen — like that some cabal set the fires intentionally — has been used to “explain” other similar disasters, including the wildfire in Lahaina in 2023. (“The Diddy one is really unique,” she allowed.)
It’s convenient to call this the coping mechanism of loons, bad actors, the far right, or people who want to promote a political agenda disingenuously, but left-leaning thinkers aren’t exempt. Posts blaming ChatGPT make important points about AI technologies’ energy and water use, but the fires aren’t “because” of ChatGPT.
I’ve also seen the fires blamed on “forest management,” although the landscape around L.A. isn’t trees; it’s shrubland. “This kind of environment isn’t typically exposed to low intensity, deep, frequent fires creeping through the understory, like many dry forests of the Sierra Nevadas or even Eastern Oregon and Washington,” where the U.S. Forest Service’s history of fire has created the conditions for the high-intensity megafires of today, Max Moritz, a cooperative extension wildfire specialist at U.C. Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, told me earlier this week. The shrublands around L.A., rather, “naturally have long-interval, high-intensity, stand-replacing fires” — that is, fires that level almost all vegetation in an area before new growth begins.
The fires in L.A. are extreme not so much because the landscape hasn’t been managed properly (not to mention that prescribed burns in the steep hillsides and suburbs are challenging and huge liabilities), but rather because we’ve built neighborhoods into a wildland that has burned before and will burn again. But unless your algorithm is tuned to the frequency of climate and weather models, you won’t necessarily find this more complicated narrative on social media.
We should also be precise in how we talk about climate change in relation to the fires. It’s true the fires have an excess of dry vegetative fuels after a wet winter and spring, which germinated lots of new green shoots, followed by a hot, dry summer and delayed start to the rainy season, which burned them to a crisp — classic “see-sawing” between extremes that you can expect to see as the planet warms. But droughts don’t always have a strong climate change signal, and wildfires can be tricky to attribute to global warming definitively. Were the Los Angeles fires exacerbated by our decades of burning fossil fuels? It is pretty safe to say so! But right-wing narratives aren’t the only ones that benefit from an exaggerated posture of certainty.
To state what is hopefully obvious: Being overly confident in attributing a disaster to climate change is not equivalent to denying the reality of climate change, the latter being very much more wrong and destructive than the former. But it’s also true overall that humans, as a species, don’t like ambiguity. Though the careful work of uncovering causes and attributing them can take years, it’s natural to look for simple answers that confirm our worldviews or give us people to blame — especially in the face of a disaster that is so unbelievably awful and doesn’t have a clear end. If there’s a role for the creative mind during all of this, it’s not in jumping to logical extremes; it’s in looking forward, ambitiously and aggressively, to how we can rebuild and live better.
“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going around, and I would just try to emphasize that this is a really complex problem,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me this week. “We have lots of different responsible parties. To me, what has happened requires more of a rethink than a blame game.”
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 35,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
Editor’s note: This story was last update on Friday, January 10, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
On rising global temperatures, LA’s fire disaster, and solar stations in space
Current conditions: A sinkhole threatens to swallow up Ecuador’s large hydroelectric power plant • Air quality is poor in Delhi where dense smog has caused travel chaos • Nearly 40,000 customers are already without power in Texas as a winter storm rolls in.
At least 10 people are known to have died in the Los Angeles fires, and some 10,000 structures are believed to have been destroyed. Five blazes continue to burn. The Palisades fire, the largest in the city’s history at 20,000 acres, remains just 6% contained. The Eaton fire has consumed 13,700 acres and is 0% contained. While lower wind speeds have helped firefighters make some progress over the last 24 hours, the Santa Ana gusts were expected to peak at 75 mph last night. “We are absolutely not out of this extreme weather event,” Los Angeles fire chief Kristin M. Crowley said in a news conference.
Charred homes in Pacific Palisades. Mario Tama/Getty Images
President Biden sent more than 30 government helicopters and planes to fight the flames, and said federal funding would cover the costs of the fire response for 180 days. (An early estimate from AccuWeather puts the cost of the disaster at more than $50 billion.) Biden also connected the emergency to climate change. “All has changed in the weather,” he said. “Climate change is real. We’ve got to adjust to it, and we can, it’s within our power to do it. But we’ve got to acknowledge it.”
Some of the world’s leading weather research organizations are releasing data today showing that 2024 was the hottest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization, the European Copernicus Climate Change Service, the UK Met Office, Berkeley Earth, NOAA, NASA, and others “have made a concerted effort to coordinate the release of their data, highlighting the exceptional conditions experienced during 2024,” Copernicus said. The service is one of the first to roll out its findings, showing that the global average temperature last year was 59.18 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15.10 degrees Celsius. This is 1.60 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average, making last year the first full calendar year during which the 1.5C warming threshold has been breached.
Copernicus
Oceans also were exceptionally warm, with sea surface temperatures reaching new record highs. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions also increased. “These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapour levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heatwaves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
BlackRock yesterday announced its departure from the UN Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. The decision is “a remarkable U-turn for a company that was once a poster child of the environmental, social, and governance investing movement,” saidThe Wall Street Journal. Asset managers participating in the initiative pledge to support the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. BlackRock’s departure is significant because it’s the largest asset manager in the world, but so far it “has not prompted others to follow,” Reutersreported. More than 325 signatories managing more than $57 trillion are still signed on to NZAMI. BlackRock is currently being sued by 11 Republican-led states over ESG investing practices.
“Climate change poses one of the greatest risks to our global economy and the long-term investments BlackRock’s clients rely on,” said Ben Cushing, campaign director for the Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign. “Membership in voluntary alliances sets an important baseline, but to truly fulfill its fiduciary duty to long-term investors, BlackRock must support real-world decarbonization through stronger shareholder voting and by directing capital toward industries that mitigate systemic climate risks. If BlackRock won’t do that, its clients should find a different asset manager that will.”
Coming later today (probably): President Biden will release short-term guidance on clean fuel tax credits, two sources toldReuters. But the final rules will be left to the incoming Trump administration, meaning “biofuel companies and their legislative backers will have to wait to see if Trump will back the plan on the highly anticipated guidelines on new clean fuel production tax credits aimed at the airline and biofuel industries.” The tax credits were supposed to come into effect on January 1 to help spur on production of sustainable aviation fuels.
China is reportedly planning to build a massive solar power station in space to harness the sun’s energy and beam it back to Earth. A Chinese scientist told the South China Morning Post that super-heavy rockets will be launched to build the station, which will be “another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth.” Space-based solar power is a “tantalizing” way to generate clean energy from the sun around the clock, and many countries are investing in R&D on the idea. The European Space Agency estimates sunlight is 10 times more intense at the top of the atmosphere than on Earth’s surface, but “in order to generate optimal, economically-viable levels of solar power, the required structures need to be very large, both on Earth and in space.” NASA noted that researchers would need to figure out how to build these large structures in orbit, then make sure they can operate autonomously. Plus, manufacturing costs would be extremely high. “Moving all that mass into orbit would require many sustained missions to carry infrastructure into space,” NASA said. China’s electricity demand rose by 6.4% in 2023, and the country is leading in clean energy investments. According to the International Energy Agency, China commissioned as much solar power in 2023 as the entire world did in 2022.
“While it would take an act of God far stronger than a fire to keep people from building homes on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains or off the Pacific Coast, the city that rebuilds may be smaller, more heavily fortified, and more expensive than the one that existed at the end of last year. And that’s just before the next big fire.” –Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the economic devastation of the LA fires