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An excerpt from David Lipsky’s The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial

Let’s say you’ve shipped out as a denier.
You’re in it for the action, the dollars, the travel, the fun. And you shade your eyes, glance up at a tall number: 97%, the percentage of active-duty climate researchers who accept man-made climate change.
This is what pollster Frank Luntz understood in 2002. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming,” Luntz wrote, in his famous battle memo. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.”
And this is what was also understood by Dr. S Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, two of the graybeard prophets who launched the global-warming skepticism movement in the 1990s, that crucial tipping point in the battle between the warmers and the deniers. A word — a concept, a percentage — was your enemy. And every six years the IPCC, the international climate science body, would stamp along on its five thousand legs and drop down another big dose of consensus. Plant it in the headlines of every newspaper. Here was the spot on the tree to carve your “X.” As you spit in your palms and lifted the axe.
Dr. Singer, an atmospheric physicist who would become one of the world’s most prominent climate deniers, tried twice. The anti-consensus petitions have names: The Leipzig Declaration, the Heidelberg Appeal. They sound like spy movies: lovelorn and crestfallen thrillers starring a tongue-tied Jason Bourne, about the cities where he tried to make his feelings known.
The appeal came first, in 1992. Dr. Singer and an associate helped arrange a conference in Heidelberg, Germany. Scientists were invited to sign a petition.
At first, Dr. Singer called it a “statement.” Time passed, coasts cleared. And he was like a man alone at the breakfast bar, filling his plate. Dr. Singer called it “strongly worded.” Said the appeal “expressed skepticism on the urgency for global action to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions.” That it “urged statesmen to go slow on climate-change policies.”
As it happens, the Heidelberg Appeal never once mentions global warming. It’s very pro-science. It’s just not at all anti-climate science.
But it was a list of science names and got weaponized anyway. When denial Senator James Inhofe quoted the petition in Congress, this is how the message ran. “The Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. They agree it is a hoax.” Two possibilities: Either the senator had never read the appeal, or he hoped you hadn’t.
Dr. Singer took a firmer hand on the next go-round. New and improved — now with global warming.
This was 1995. Earlier that year, Dr. Singer had sent a fossil fuel company his prospectus. For a very reasonable $95,000, the scientist promised to help “stem the tide towards ever more onerous controls on energy use.”
His hook was ozone. The spray cans that had been phased out, Dr. Singer explained, “all on the basis of quite insubstantial science.”
So if funds were provided “without delay,” Dr. Singer could deliver: an event, a panel, and a round number — “a Statement of Support by a hundred or more climate scientists.” With the Singer specialty: “This Statement could then be quoted or reprinted in newspapers.”
I don’t know whether Dr. Singer ever secured his funding. But that November, a panel did convene: in Leipzig, Germany. And one year later, his Statement did appear: the Leipzig Declaration. With the promised one hundred signatures.
The names crinkled brows. (Harvard’s John Holdren, later science advisor to the Obama White House, wrote of them as a mirage or the dream you reconstruct over breakfast: the list “dissolves under scrutiny.”) Sleuths from Danish Broadcasting attempted to track down the 33 European signers. Four could not be located. Twelve denied signing or even knowing about any Leipzig Declaration. Three were offended to hear their names were associated with it. The Statement had also been signed by dentists, lab techs, engineers, and one off-course entomologist who landed briefly on the page.
But the Leipzig Declaration packed its bags and coast-to-coasted anyway — from the Wall Street Journal to the Orange County Register, migrating also to Canada, London, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand. “It is widely cited by conservative voices,” write journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “And is regarded in some circles as the gold standard of scientific expertise on the issue.”
Dr. Singer identifed a hardy, Band of Brothers spirit among his “one hundred climate scientists.” As he explained in the Wall Street Journal, “It takes a certain amount of courage to do this.”
What it didn’t necessarily take was a degree in science. Florida’s Saint Petersburg Times ran their Leipzig story on the front page. Because (a) Florida, sea level. And (b), one signer was a local, the weather guy over at Tampa Bay’s WTVT. Who lacked “a Ph.D. in any scientific field,” the paper noted. “Or, for that matter, a bachelor’s.”
Dr. Singer had met his quota by reaching out to these sportscasters of the air. Twenty-five weathermen signed in, a big klatch from the state of Ohio. This included Richard Groeber, owner and operator of Dick’s Weather Service: you dialed his phone number and he told you the weather.
The Petersburg newshound dialed. Was Dick Groeber, he asked, really a scientist?
“I sort of consider myself so,” Groeber replied. “I had two or three years of training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study.”
The reporter brought his concerns to the keeper of the signatures, Dr. Singer. The scientist’s answer is a testament to the virtue of persistence, of keeping an eye fixed always on the prize. What was truly important, Dr. Singer said, was “the fact that we can demonstrate that 100 or so scientists would put their names down.”
And I wonder if it bothered Dr. Singer. If it’s the story of his outranked life. That for the Oregon Petition — the signature list that did go over the top — the push came from the bigger, better honored, more consequential Fred.

I don’t know who took care of the introductions. I do know S. Fred Singer sent Arthur Robinson — a biochemist, five-time Republican nominee for Oregon’s 4th congressional district, and the founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a privately funded lab — material to beef up the research paper that accompanied the Oregon Petition. And I know that the Marshall Institute —— founded by the other Fred, Dr. Seitz, the physicist and tobacco industry consultant Business Week once called the “granddaddy of global-warming skeptics” — dispatched two specialists, climate Sherpas, to lug and guide Arthur along the trickier science crevasses.
One of them was later exposed on the front page of The New York Times. Dr. Willie Soon had been the beneficiary of $1.2 million in fossil fuel largesse. The last of his dinosaur generation to find their way into the tar pits.
“In correspondence with his corporate funders,” the Times reported in 2015, Dr. Soon “described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money.”
And then a beautiful single-sentence short story: capturing the whole project and spirit of denial. “Though often described on conservative news programs as a ‘Harvard astrophysicist,’ Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard.”
Arthur cowrote his paper with the two Dr. Seitz specialists, and a fellow member of the Oregon Institute faculty: his 21-year-old son, Zachary.
This father-son teamwork produced something strange. First, their paper said climate change would not occur. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, it reversed field and explained that the change was already in progress and accomplishing marvels.
Their concluding sentences drop the effort of science entirely. The language pans across streams and meadows — takes in a drowsy summer morning, with the sound of bees. “We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals,” the Robinsons write, a little dreamily, “as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift of the Industrial Revolution.”
Arthur’s paper had never been published or peer-reviewed. It was entirely homeschool.
And here’s where you can appreciate the great, freewheeling advantage of having fun. Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz collaborated on a tremendous prank.
Arthur had his report professionally printed. Now this home-cooked meal, this sloppy Joe, resembled an entrée at the end of a Food Network episode. The National Academy of Sciences produces one of the world’s most distinguished journals. Garnishing with font and layout, Robinson labored until his blessing looked, in the words of the journal Nature, “exactly like a paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Everybody has the one résumé line they lean on. It’s whispered before you sweep over to shake hands; it will lead the obituaries when you step away forever. Frederick Seitz was the former National Academy president — publishers of the Proceedings journal whose format Arthur had copied.
Dr. Seitz wrote the letter that accompanied the Oregon Petition.
The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy. ... This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. ...We urge you to sign and return the petition card.
Dr. Seitz signed with his résumé line: Past President, The National Academy of Sciences.
A cover letter from an Academy president. A paper formatted to look exactly as if it had been published in the Academy magazine. (Plus the plural we urge, the institutional in our opinion — the speaking voice of an organization.) Arthur and Seitz had pulled off the greatest soundalike in denial history.
The package was then sent all across America — as one researcher wrote, to “virtually every scientist in every field.” And how could recipients fail to believe, tearing open their envelopes, that the Academy was reaching out to them, at an hour of scientific need?
In 1996, Nature had written about the “dwindling band of skeptics.” You picture palm fronds and breakers, the shoreline from Lord of the Flies: a rocky atoll among rising seas.
This line vexed deniers. It so bugged S. Fred Singer he ascribed it, for ease of attack, to Al Gore. (The scientist loved to attack the vice president.). So the other aim of the petition: to grow the movement, at least in the eyes of key readerships in the Washington metro area.
It really was their weakness: Demographics. Max Planck once made an ice-eyed observation about scientific change. It doesn’t result from fresh evidence, or the Kevlar argument. Positions get too dug in for that. It steals on gradually, in calendars and gravesides. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” the physicist wrote. “But rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The plain truth was the deniers weren’t getting any younger. Actual science was drawing the young PhDs. (When S. Fred Singer addressed a roomful of such climatologists in the spring of the Oregon Petition, the reception was not hostile. It was charity. His audience “politely pointed to datasets and to scientific research,” wrote science journalist Myanna Lahsen, “none of which Dr. Singer appeared to be familiar with.”) It’s why the great denial work was brought off by Frederick Seitz, 86, and S. Fred Singer, 78; and by Arthur Robinson, aged 56, whose footsteps two-time Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling had long ago banished from institutional hallways.
“What will happen is clear,” Arthur told supporters, in a sort of pre-invasion essay, as his envelopes mustered at the post office. “The warmers will be deprived of the central pillar that underlies their entire campaign.”
This was that tall, shade-throwing word: consensus. “Remove their facade of scientific consensus, and they will likely lose — if it is removed in time.”
And it worked. In the House and Senate, lawmakers said the petition proved climate change was “bogus” — a non-issue for “the vast majority” of scientists. (They needed something like it to be true. So they went ahead and believed it into truth.) It worked because it’s a big library, and we’re all busy people. And, as the bibliothecary Jorge Luis Borges once observed, “The person does not exist who, outside their own specialty, is not credulous.”
“Happy Earth Day, Al Gore!” Fred Singer wrote in his Washington Times column. “Your much-touted ‘scientific consensus’ on global warming has just been exposed as phony.” They’d finally found a way to bring down the tree.
In 2001, Scientific American went through Arthur Robinson’s signature books. Present on Arthur’s list were names submitted in a spirit of substitute-teacher abuse. (Arthur told the Associated Press that he had “no way of filtering out a fake.”) There was Shirl E. Cook and Richard Cool and Dr. House, and the presumably dependable Knight and the presumably less steady Dr. Red Wine, also the accommodating Betty Will, the in-terrible-distress W. C. Lust. Also someone who gave their name only as Looney. Plus a dash of celebrity like Michael J. Fox and John Grisham and the dramatis personae of the medical series M*A*S*H. Even some businesses, like R. C. Kannan & Associates, and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., had found a way to lift the pen and get involved. Dick Groeber — Dick’s Weather Service — had once again elected to lend the effort the weight of his endorsement. All these names appeared on Arthur’s petition as it was cited in Congress.
Arthur claimed only one false name was ever found to soil his list. (Some jokester had snuck on Dr. Geri Halliwell — Ginger Spice, of the empowerment band Spice Girls.) But post-media, all these names were quietly withdrawn. W. C. Lust and Betty Will and Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc., and Dick’s Weather Service, scrubbed from history.
The names Scientific American examined were real. Barrier to entry was not high. If you claimed a bachelor’s in math, science, or engineering, to Arthur’s way of thinking you were a climate scientist. (Even so, Dick Groeber had no real business being on this list.) Your kid’s math teacher could sign. So could her shop teacher, and the veterinarian.
These names were Styrofoam peanuts, packaging, and brushed aside. Scientific American took “a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science.”
Of the 26 names they could identify through the databases, “11 said they still agreed with the petition.” The magazine went on, “One was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.” The magazine estimated that Arthur had managed about 200 climate researchers — “a small fraction of the climatological community.” Remove number from box, shake off the packaging: What Arthur Robinson and Frederick Seitz had delivered was a sweaty means of confirming the consensus.
And still there were international headlines (“NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON GLOBAL WARMING”). And still Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer could make their use of the data.
Dr. Seitz told reporters the petition represented “the silent majority of the scientific community.” (Which meant at least 51 laconic percent.) And Dr. Singer called it “the largest group of scientists ever,” as if the petition combined a Caltech homecoming weekend with an especially congested Burning Man.
Arthur kept up the petition drive. Yet among supporters, he couldn’t quite bring himself to call the signers colleagues. The tongue values what it values.
“We’ve got now about 17,000 scien—” Arthur caught himself. “People with degrees in science.” As of 2008, he’d nearly doubled his figure.
S. Fred Singer experienced the same performance trouble. In 2012 he was still quoting it. Because it was the only thing — Arthur had given the movement the strongest evidence it ever had. But even the famously reliable Singer tongue went rogue. “There’s hundreds of us — thousands,” he said on PBS. “Look, 31,000 scientists and engineers signed a statement.” Then the scientist went a bit green. “Look, they’re not specialists in climate.”
But in 1998, when the ground was fresh, Dr. Singer told Congress that signers were “specialists in fields related to global warming.” He told readers, while the issue was being contested, they were “experts in the pertinent scientific fields.”
Arthur’s website gives his patriotic side of the figure. “31,487 American scientists,” he writes. “Including 9,029 Ph.D.s.” You needed a data point, a comparison.
So, for the doctoral number: America is home to half a million science and engineering PhDs. Arthur netted 1.8%. His yield was small. And for the bachelor’s number: We’ve awarded 10 million first degrees in science and engineering. Here Arthur’s petition was an absolute crash: 0.3%.
Arthur again sounded the Academy horn in a press release. “More than 40 signatories are members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.” But Arthur had withheld the comparison. The Academy’s got 2,200 members. His yield was eerily consistent: 1.8%. The generally accepted number for climate scientists and warming is 97% to 3%. Arthur’s fate was to spend 25 years as superintendent of a consensus he loathed.
This article was excerpted and condensed from David Lipsky’s book The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, available now from W. W. Norton & Company ©2023.
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On China’s rare earths, Bill Gates’ nuclear dream, and Texas renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa exploded in intensity over the warm Caribbean waters and has now strengthened into a major storm, potentially slamming into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica as a Category 5 in the coming days • The Northeast is bracing for a potential nor’easter, which will be followed by a plunge in temperatures of as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average • The northern Australian town of Julia Creek saw temperatures soar as high as 106 degrees.
Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California late Friday on the grounds that two landmark new climate laws violate the oil giant’s free speech rights, The New York Times reported. The two laws would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas pollution created by the use of their products, so-called Scope 3 emissions. “The statutes compel Exxon Mobil to trumpet California’s preferred message even though Exxon Mobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided,” Exxon complained through its lawyers. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the statutes “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.” He condemned the lawsuit, calling it “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
China will delay introducing export controls on rare earths, an unnamed U.S. official told the Financial Times following two days of talks in Malaysia. For years, Beijing has been ratcheting up trade restrictions on the global supply of metals its industry dominates. But this month, China slapped the harshest controls yet on rare earths. In response, stocks in rare earth mining and refining companies soared. Despite what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the “paradox of Trump’s critical mineral crusade” to mine even as he reduced demand from electric vehicle factories, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals startups,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote. That — as frequent readers of this newsletter will recall — includes the federal government, which under the Trump administration has been taking equity stakes in major projects as part of deals for federal funding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rewarded Bill Gates’ next-generation reactor company, TerraPower, with its final environment impact statement last week. The next step in the construction permit process is a final safety evaluation that the company expects to receive by the end of this year. If everything goes according to plan, TerraPower could end up winning the race to build the nation’s first commercial reactor to use a coolant other than water, and do so at a former coal-fired plant in the country’s top coal-producing state. “The Natrium plant in Wyoming, Kemmerer Unit 1, is now the first advanced reactor technology to successfully complete an environmental impact statement for the NRC, bringing us another step closer to delivering America’s next nuclear power plant,” said TerraPower president and CEO Chris Levesque.
A judge gave New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration until February 6 to issue rules for its long-delayed cap-and-invest program, the Albany Times-Union reported. The government was supposed to issue the guidelines that would launch the program as early as 2024, but continuously pushed back the release. “Early outlines of New York’s cap and invest program indicate that regulators were considering a relatively low price ceiling on pollution, making it easier for companies to buy their way out of compliance with the cap,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote in January.

The Texas data center boom is being powered primarily with new wind, solar, and batteries, according to new analysis by the Energy Information Administration. Since 2021, electricity demand on the independent statewide grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has soared. Over the past year, wind, solar, and batteries have been supplying that rising demand. Utility-scale solar generated 45 terawatt-hours of electricity in the first nine months of 2025. That’s 50% more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021. Wind generation, meanwhile, totaled 87 terawatt-hours for the first nine months of this year, up 4% from last year and 36% since 2021. “Together,” the analysis stated, “wind and solar generation met 36% of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of 2025.”
The question isn’t whether the flames will come — it’s when, and what it will take to recover.
In the two decades following the turn of the millennium, wildfires came within three miles of an estimated 21.8 million Americans’ homes. That number — which has no doubt grown substantially in the five years since — represents about 6% of the nation’s population, including the survivors of some of the deadliest and most destructive fires in the country’s history. But it also includes millions of stories that never made headlines.
For every Paradise, California, and Lahaina, Hawaii, there were also dozens of uneventful evacuations, in which regular people attempted to navigate the confusing jargon of government notices and warnings. Others lost their homes in fires that were too insignificant to meet the thresholds for federal aid. And there are countless others who have decided, after too many close calls, to move somewhere else.
By any metric, costly, catastrophic, and increasingly urban wildfires are on the rise. Nearly a third of the U.S. population, however, lives in a county with a high or very high risk of wildfire, including over 60% of the counties in the West. But the shape of the recovery from those disasters in the weeks and months that follow is often that of a maze, featuring heart-rending decisions and forced hands. Understanding wildfire recovery is critical, though, for when the next disaster follows — which is why we’ve set out to explore the topic in depth.
The most immediate concerns for many in the weeks following a wildfire are financial. Homeowners are still required to pay the mortgage on homes that are nothing more than piles of ash — one study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that 90-day delinquencies rose 4% and prepayments rose 16% on properties that were damaged by wildfires. Because properties destroyed in fires often receive insurance settlements that are lower than the cost to fully replace their home, “households face strong incentives to apply insurance funds toward the mortgage balance instead of rebuilding, and the observed increase in prepayment represents a symptom of broader frictions in insurance markets that leave households with large financial losses in the aftermath of a natural disaster,” the researchers explain.
Indeed, many people who believed they had adequate insurance only discover after a fire that their coverage limits are lower than 75% of their home’s actual replacement costs, putting them in the category of the underinsured. Homeowners still grappling with the loss of their residence and possessions are also left to navigate reams of required paperwork to get their money, a project one fire victim likened to having a “part-time job.” It’s not uncommon for fire survivors to wait months or even years for payouts, or to find that necessary steps to rebuilding, such as asbestos testing and dead tree removals, aren’t covered. Just last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law requiring insurers to pay at least 60% of a homeowner’s personal property coverage on a total loss without a detailed inventory, up to $350,000. The original proposal called for a 100% payout, but faced intense insurance industry blowback .
Even if your home doesn’t burn to the ground, you might be affected by the aftermath of a nearby fire. In California, a fifth of homes in the highest-risk wildfire areas have lost insurance coverage since 2019, while premiums in those same regions have increased by 42%. Insurers’ jitters have overflowedspilled over into other Western states like Washington, where there are fewer at-risk properties than in California — 16% compared to 41% — but premiums have similarly doubled in some cases due to the perceived hazardrisks.
Some experts argue that people should be priced out of the wildland-urban interface and that managed retreat will help prevent future tragedies. But as I report in my story on fire victims who’ve decided not to rebuild, that’s easier said than done. There are only three states where insured homeowners have the legal right to replace a wildfire-destroyed home by buying a new property instead of rebuilding, meaning many survivors end up shackled to a property that is likely to burn again.
The financial maze, of course, is only one aspect of recovery — the physical and mental health repercussions can also reverberate for years. A study that followed survivors of Australia’s Black Saturday bush fires in 2009, which killed over 170 people, found that five years after the disaster, a fifth of survivors still suffered from “serious mental health challenges” like post-traumatic stress disorder. In Lahaina, two years after the fire, nearly half of the children aged 10 to 17 who survived are suspected of coping with PTSD.
Federal firefighting practices continue to focus on containing fires as quickly as possible, to the detriment of less showy but possibly more effective solutions such as prescribed burns and limits on development in fire-prone areas. Some of this is due to the long history of fire suppression in the West, but it persists due to ongoing political and public pressure. Still, you can find small and promising steps forward for forest management in places like Paradise, where the recreation and park district director has scraped together funds to begin to build a buffer between an ecosystem that is meant to burn and survivors of one of the worst fires in California’s history.
In the four pieces that follow, I’ve attempted to explore the challenges of wildfire recovery in the weeks and months after the disaster itself. In doing so, I’ve spoken to firefighters, victims, researchers, and many others to learn more about what can be done to make future recoveries easier and more effective.
The bottom line, though, is that there is no way to fully prevent wildfires. We have to learn to live alongside them, and that means recovering smarter, too. It’s not the kind of glamorous work that attracts TV cameras and headlines; often, the real work of recovery occurs in the many months after the fire is extinguished. But it also might just make the difference.
Wildfire evacuation notices are notoriously confusing, and the stakes are life or death. But how to make them better is far from obvious.
How many different ways are there to say “go”? In the emergency management world, it can seem at times like there are dozens.
Does a “level 2” alert during a wildfire, for example, mean it’s time to get out? How about a “level II” alert? Most people understand that an “evacuation order” means “you better leave now,” but how is an “evacuation warning” any different? And does a text warning that “these zones should EVACUATE NOW: SIS-5111, SIS-5108, SIS-5117…” even apply to you?
As someone who covers wildfires, I’ve been baffled not only by how difficult evacuation notices can be to parse, but also by the extent to which they vary in form and content across the United States. There is no centralized place to look up evacuation information, and even trying to follow how a single fire develops can require hopping among jargon-filled fire management websites, regional Facebook pages, and emergency department X accounts — with some anxious looking-out-the-window-at-the-approaching-pillar-of-smoke mixed in.
Google and Apple Maps don’t incorporate evacuation zone data. Third-party emergency alert programs have low subscriber rates, and official government-issued Wireless Emergency Alerts, or WEAs — messages that trigger a loud tone and vibration to all enabled phones in a specific geographic region — are often delayed, faulty, or contain bad information, none of which is ideal in a scenario where people are making life-or-death decisions. The difficulty in accessing reliable information during fast-moving disasters like wildfires is especially aggravating when you consider that nearly everyone in America owns a smartphone, i.e. a portal to all the information in the world.
So why is it still so hard to learn when and where specific evacuation notices are in place, or if they even apply to you? The answer comes down to the decentralized nature of emergency management in the United States.
A downed power line sparks a fire on a day with a Red Flag Warning. A family driving nearby notices the column of smoke and calls to report it to 911. The first responders on the scene realize that the winds are fanning the flames toward a neighborhood, and the sheriff decides to issue a wildfire warning, communicating to the residents that they should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She radios her office — which is now fielding multiple calls asking for information about the smoke column — and asks for the one person in the office that day with training on the alert system to compose the message.
Scenarios like these are all too common. “The people who are put in the position of issuing the messages are doing 20 other things at the same time,” Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the University at Albany’s Emergency and Risk Communication Message Testing Lab, told me. “They might have limited training and may not have had the opportunity to think about what the messages might contain — and then they’re told by an incident commander, Send this, and they’re like, Oh my God, what do I do?”
The primary way of issuing wildfire alerts is through WEAs, with 78,000 messages sent since 2012. Although partnerships between local emergency management officials, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and cellular and internet providers facilitate the technology, it’s local departments that determine the actual content of the message. Messaging limits force some departments to condense the details of complicated and evolving fire events into 90 characters or fewer. Typos, confusing wording, and jargon inevitably abound.
Emergency management teams often prefer to err on the side of sending too few messages rather than too many for fear of inducing information overload. “We’re so attached to our devices, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or text messages, that it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak — to make sure that we are getting the right information out there,” John Rabin, the vice president of disaster management at the consulting firm ICF International and a former assistant administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told me. “One of the challenges for local and state governments is how to bring [pertinent information] up and out, so that when they send those really important notifications for evacuations, they really resonate.”
But while writing an emergency alert is a bit of an art, active prose alone doesn’t ensure an effective evacuation message.
California’s Cal Fire has found success with the “Ready, Set, Go” program, designed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, which uses an intuitive traffic light framework — “ready” is the prep work of putting together a go-bag and waiting for more news if a fire is in the vicinity, escalating to the “go” of the actual evacuation order. Parts of Washington and Oregon use similar three-tiered systems of evacuation “levels” ranging from 1 to 3. Other places, like Montana, rely on two-step “evacuation warnings” and “evacuation orders.”
Watch Duty, a website and app that surged in popularity during the Los Angeles fires earlier this year, doesn’t worry about oversharing. Most information on Watch Duty comes from volunteers, who monitor radio scanners, check wildfire cameras, and review official law enforcement announcements, then funnel the information to the organization’s small staff, who vet it before posting. Though WatchDuty volunteers and staff — many of whom are former emergency managers or fire personnel themselves — actively review and curate the information on the app, the organization still publishes far more frequent and iterative updates than most people are used to seeing and interpreting. As a result, some users and emergency managers have criticized Watch Duty for having too much information available, as a result.
The fact that Watch Duty was downloaded more than 2 million times during the L.A. fires, though, would seem to testify to the fact that people really are hungry for information in one easy-to-locate place. The app is now available in 22 states, with more than 250 volunteers working around the clock to keep wildfire information on the app up to date. John Clarke Mills, the app’s CEO and co-founder, has said he created the app out of “spite” over the fact that the government doesn’t have a better system in place for keeping people informed on wildfires.
“I’ve not known too many situations where not having information makes it better,” Katlyn Cummings, the community manager at Watch Duty, told me. But while the app’s philosophy is “rooted in transparency and trust with our users,” Cummings stressed to me that the app’s volunteers only use official and public sources of information for their updates and never include hearsay, separating it from other crowd-sourced community apps that have proved to be less than reliable.
Still, it takes an army of a dozen full-time staff and over 200 part-time volunteers, plus an obsessively orchestrated Slack channel to centralize the wildfire and evacuation updates — which might suggest why a more official version doesn’t exist yet, either from the government or a major tech company. Google Maps currently uses AI to visualize the boundaries of wildfires, but stops short of showing users the borders of local evacuation zones (though it will route you around known road closures). A spokesperson for Google also pointed me toward a feature in Maps that shares news articles, information from local authorities, and emergency numbers when users are in “the immediate vicinity” of an actively unfolding natural disaster — a kind of do-it-yourself Watch Duty. The company declined to comment on the record about why Maps specifically excludes evacuation zones. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
There is, of course, a major caveat to the usefulness of Watch Duty.
Users of the app tend to be a self-selecting group of hyper-plugged-in digital natives who are savvy enough to download it or otherwise know to visit the website during an unfolding emergency. As Rabin, the former FEMA official, pointed out, Watch Duty users aren’t the population that first responders are most concerned about — they’re like “Boy Scouts,” he said, because they’re “always prepared.” They’re the ones who already know what’s going on. “It’s reaching the folks that aren’t paying attention that is the big challenge,” he told me.
The older adult population is the most vulnerable in cases of wildfire. Death tolls often skew disproportionately toward the elderly; of the 30 people who died in the Los Angeles fires in January, for example, all but two were over 60 or disabled, with the average age of the deceased 77, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Part of that is because adults 65 and older are more likely to have physical impairments that make quick or unplanned evacuations challenging. Social and technological isolation are also factors — yes, almost everyone in America has a smartphone, but that includes just 80% of those 65 and older, and only 26% of the older adult population feels “very confident” using computers or smartphones. According to an extensive 2024 report on how extreme weather impacts older adults by CNA, an independent, nonprofit research organization, “Evacuation information, including orders, is not uniformly communicated in ways and via media that are accessible to older adults or those with access and functional needs.”
Sutton, the emergency warning researcher, also cautioned that more information isn’t always better. Similar to the way scary medical test results might appear in a health portal before a doctor has a chance to review them with you (and calm you down), wildfire information shared without context or interpretation from emergency management officials means the public is “making assumptions based upon what they see on Watch Duty without actually having those official messages coming from the public officials who are responsible for issuing those messages,” she said. One role of emergency managers is to translate the raw, on-the-ground information into actionable guidance. Absent that filter, panic is probable, which could lead to uncontrollable evacuation traffic or exacerbate alert fatigue. Alternatively, people might choose to opt out of future alerts or stop checking for updates.
Sutton, though she’s a strong advocate of creating standardized language for emergency alerts — “It would be wonderful if we had consistent language that was agreed upon” between departments, she told me — was ultimately skeptical of centralizing the emergency alert system under a large agency like FEMA. “The movement of wildfires is so fast, and it requires knowledge of the local communities and the local terrain as well as meteorological knowledge,” she said. “Alerts and warnings really should be local.”
The greater emphasis, Sutton stressed, should be on providing emergency managers with the training they need to communicate quickly, concisely, and effectively with the tools they already have.
The high wire act of emergency communications, though, is that while clear and regionally informed messages are critical during life-or-death situations, it also falls on residents in fire-risk areas to be ready to receive them. California first adopted the “Ready, Set, Go” framework in 2009, and it has spent an undisclosed amount of money over the years on a sustained messaging blitz to the public. (Cal Fire’s “land use planning and public education budget is estimated at $16 million, and funds things like the updated ad spots it released as recently as this August.) Still, there is evidence that even that has not been enough — and Cal Fire is the best-resourced firefighting agency in the country, setting the gold standard for an evacuation messaging campaign.
Drills and test messages are one way to bring residents up to speed, but participation is typically very low. Many communities and residents living in wildfire-risk areas continue to treat the threat with low urgency — something to get around to one day. But whether they’re coming from your local emergency management department or the White House itself, emergency notices are only as effective as the public is willing and able to heed them.