Climate Change Is Supercharging Disasters

The climate change denying Trump regime is about to take over the White House and is likely to seek to undo climate legislation passed by the Biden administration.  Trump and his puppeteer Elon Musk are disseminating lies and attacking Democrats in the midst of the Los Angeles wild fires and offer no real solutions to a growing danger from climate change supercharged fires, hurricanes, sea level rise - something I am very conscious of given that I live on a tidal creek and previously lived in a home that flooded during hurricanes -  and other damaging climate change powered storms. Meanwhile, the scientific community is unanimous in its conclusion that climate change is not only real but that it is making natural disasters far worse.  Sticking one's head in the sand or believing that where one lives will protect you from climate change impacts is delusional, yet is all that Trump and Republicans are offering.  With friends impacted by the hurricanes this past summer in both Florida and Ashville, and now Los Angeles it is far past time that climate change denial end and serious efforts undertaken to slow the increasingly adverse effects of climate change.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the reality of climate change and the Trump/GOP dissemination of lies and falsehoods.  Here are excerpts:

As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement on Friday that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.

With temperatures rising around the globe and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the world has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.

The firestorms ravaging the country’s second-largest city are just the latest spasm of extreme weather that is growing more furious as well as more unpredictable. Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. The same is true for cyclones in Appalachia, where Hurricanes Helene and Milton shocked the country when they tore through mountain communities in October.

Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. Storms are getting bigger and carrying more moisture. And soaring temperatures worldwide are leading to heat waves and drought, which can be devastating on their own and leave communities vulnerable to dangers like mudslides when heavy rains return.

Around the globe, extreme weather and searing heat killed thousands of people last year and displaced millions, with pilgrims dying as temperatures soared in Saudi Arabia. In Europe, extreme heat contributed to at least 47,000 deaths in 2023. In the United States, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades.

“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”

The fires currently raging in greater Los Angeles are already among the most destructive in U.S. history. . . . . As of midday Friday, at least 10 people were dead, and losses could top $100 billion, according to AccuWeather. . . . . the Los Angeles fires are being driven by a number of factors that scientists have linked to fire weather and that are becoming increasingly common on a hotter planet.

Last winter, Southern California got huge amounts of rain that led to extensive vegetation growth. Now, months into what is typically the rainy season, Los Angeles is experiencing a drought. . . . . Temperatures in the region have also been higher than normal. As a result, many of the plants that grew last year are parched, turning trees, grasses and bushes into kindling that was ready to explode.

That combination of heat and dryness, which scientists say is linked to climate change, created the ideal conditions for an urban firestorm.

As the Los Angeles fires consumed some of the most valuable real estate in the world, an unfolding tragedy became fodder for political attacks.

President-elect Donald J. Trump blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for the disaster. Mr. Trump inaccurately claimed that state and federal protections for a threatened fish had hampered firefighting efforts by leading to water shortages.

And on Thursday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an ally of Mr. Trump, inserted himself into the debate over the role climate change plays in wildfires.

“Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim,” Mr. Musk wrote to his 211 million followers on X, the social media site he owns. He said the loss of homes was primarily the result of “nonsensical overregulation” and “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water.”

Those claims were rebutted by scientists, who noted that, as humans continue to warm the planet with emissions, extreme weather is becoming more common.

News that 2024 was the hottest year on record was hardly a surprise. The previous hottest year was 2023. All 10 of the hottest years on record have come in the last decade.

“We sound like a broken record but only because the records keep breaking,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global temperatures. “They will continue to break until we get emissions under control.”

In late September and early October, Hurricane Helene, which scientists said was made worse by climate change, roared across the Southeast, unleashing deadly floods and landslides in several states, including North Carolina.

In May, scientists found the fingerprints of climate change on a crippling heat wave that gripped India, and found that an early heat wave in West Africa last spring was made 10 times more likely by climate change.

Heat waves. Drought. Fires. Superstorms. Floods. Mudslides. These are the growing threats of a rapidly warming world, and scientists say nowhere is entirely protected from the effects of climate change.

“We think sometimes that if we live in a city, we’re not vulnerable to natural forces,” Dr. Schmidt said. “But we are, and it comes as a huge shock to people. There’s no get out of climate change free card.”