The climate crisis has already arrived. Just look to California’s abnormal wildfires
There’s an idea that when the climate crisis begins, we will know it. Movies present it as a moment when the world’s weather suddenly turns apocalyptic: winds howl, sea levels surge, capital cities are decimated. Climate messaging can bolster this notion, implying that we have a certain number of years to save the day before reaching a cataclysmic point of no return.
Living in expectation of a definitive global break can blind us to the fact that gradually, insidiously, the climate crisis has already arrived.
In few places is this as clear as California, where extreme wildfires have become the new abnormal. There is currently a “fire siege” in northern California, with wildfires burning in every one of the nine Bay Area counties except for San Francisco, which is entirely urbanized. Tens of thousands of residents have evacuated and people are choking on smoke.
The circumstances of these blazes are unusual. They began with a tropical storm deteriorating in the Pacific Ocean, spinning off moisture in the direction of California. As it made landfall in the San Francisco region over the weekend, it sparked a remarkable lightning storm, and 10,849 lightning strikes were tallied in three days.
Over millennia California’s landscape has adapted to burn, with some tree species requiring the heat of flames to open their seed cases, and lightning-sparked wildfires are not unusual. But the state has been experiencing unheard-of heat, and just logged what may have been the hottest ever temperature recorded on earth: 129.9F in Death Valley, a few hundred miles southeast of the Bay Area lightning swarm. Vegetation is achingly dry and primed to ignite.
California’s governor announced on Wednesday that there were 367 fires, and conflagrations have grown so rapidly that there are not enough firefighters to tackle them all. Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist, told us in an interview that he was watching the current fires with “incredulity”.
“It seems like every year re-ups the previous year in terms of pushing the envelope, in terms of how much fire we’re seeing in the landscape and how severe that fire is,” he said.
There were also, by the by, several fire tornadoes at the weekend. Witnessing these phenomena, another fire expert remarked that California “is the exemplar for climate change extreme events today”.
In the last decade, amid drought and searing heat, California has entered the “era of megafires”. Our new book, Fire in Paradise, tells the story of a town that was almost entirely wiped out by a fire of unheralded speed in 2018. It killed 85 people, making it the deadliest ever fire in California. Other notable blazes include a 1,000-ft wide fire tornado that churned through the town of Redding a few months before the Paradise catastrophe, and fires in California’s Wine Country that killed 44 people.
All of this is why, as we scan the headlines for the planetary shift that will mark the true arrival of the climate crisis, we risk losing sight of the fact that places like California are already experiencing it.
This is not entirely surprising. According to the ecological theory of “shifting baselines”, we do not notice the degradation of the natural world because little by little we get used to it, like a frog in hot water. We think that it has always been this way.
Once, for example, the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America, perhaps the world. Observers in the 19th century described great flocks so loud that you couldn’t hold a conversation and so large they obscured the sun: “The light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse”.
Yet slowly, as a result of overhunting and habitat destruction, they vanished into extinction, and most of us do not miss them because we have never known anything else. Our expectations of the natural world are simply different.
When it comes to California wildfires, the ground has been moving under our feet for decades, as heat rises, snowpacks shrink, and plants dry out. The baseline has shifted. How long before we forget that it was ever otherwise?
Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are the authors of Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy, available from WW Norton. Read an excerpt here
work from home also allow us to retreat from life. While many millennialheavy gig jobs can’t be done remotely – driving for Uber or picking up groceries for Instacart – they’re also jobs that are often done solo; you might interact with an Uber rider, but a deep connection is unlikely. Most other aspects of life can now be done from the convenience of your bedroom, whether that’s ordering food; scrolling for a romantic connection; exchanging sexy photos or looking at an unlimited supply of porn instead of having sex in person; watching movies and television shows algorithmically selected to appeal to your tastes; or engaging a natural human competitive instinct by playing video games for hours. These things aren’t necessarily innately bad. But they enable an impulse to isolate, especially for millennials who also suffer high levels of anxiety and depression we often cannot afford to treat.
Communicating from behind a screen comes with most of the negatives of in-person communication and relatively few of the positives. Digital interactions decrease empathy, increase narcissism, and magnify the impulse to bully; for the person being tormented, though, the emotional experience isn’t any different from being bullied in person. Human beings are animals, and much of how we communicate and empathize with each other is through subtle physical cues that can’t be translated over a wifi connection.
The Americans lucky enough to still have jobs right now generally fall into two categories: the criminally underpaid and under-supported essential workers risking their health outside, and those of us tethered to a computer day and night, emailing in projects, conversing and conferencing via Zoom, helping a child with schoolwork on the iPad, stretching to YouTube yoga, Googling recipes for dinner, FaceTiming Mom, and settling in with Netflix. All of this is necessary in the immediate term, and thank goodness we have these options. But we must resist this isolated-but-alwaysconnected reality becoming the new normal.
I hope that, post-pandemic, employers will be more flexible about how we work and from where. But that opens employees to even greater encroachments on our lives. Employers have already ramped up surveillance to make sure we’re “really” working when we’re home, using software to track employee keystrokes, monitor social media use and score our productivity. Some companies have also said they may pay employees less, even as they work more: if you don’t have to live in San Francisco to work at a tech company, these companies argue, why should you get paid like you do?
Workers should continue to demand the flexibility they need. But it can’t come in exchange for more work, lower pay and less autonomy. That’s not freedom. Consider what we lose when work is all-encompassing, social support optional, and our lives mediated through screens. Do we really want to live like this for ever?
Modern technology has made for a generation that is more lonely, more depressed, more sedentary, more anxious, and more surveilled than ever before