The LA Fires Are A Climate Disaster. Louder For Those In Back: LA Fires Are A CLIMATE DISASTER.
Say it again, louder, and more often.
As we noted in our first story on the catastrophic wildfires that continue to burn large parts of the Los Angeles area, climate change is a — sorry, the — primary reason these fires have been so extreme and burned so goddamn much.
It’s a heck of a cycle: The available fuel for the fires — scrub brush in the hills and canyons — grew rapidly due to heavy rains in the two prior years, which helped to relieve a long period of drought. The rains filled many depleted California reservoirs and led to a brief break from the drought, yay! But when this winter arrived and was once again hot and rainless, all that new growth dried up and became tinder for wildfires, oh no!
Global warming made the entire cycle more dangerous. A hotter climate makes droughts longer and drier, which is why wildfires in the last decade have been so bad in the West. And in the last couple years, the “atmospheric rivers” that brought all that precipitation to California were made more intense by climate change as well, because a warming atmosphere can hold more water.
It’s climate all the way down, in other words. And when this year’s remarkably dry winter was followed by exceptionally strong Santa Ana winds, you got the firestorms in Los Angeles this week. This video essay on the fires by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last night vividly explains why the fires were so intense: They were driven by winds that were like a “hurricane without rain.” He quotes Joan Didion, but still: Not a single mention of “climate change”? What’s that about?
Here’s the thing: We absolutely need to include the facts about climate change in coverage of extreme weather events like the fires or last fall’s twin hurricanes, Helene and Milton, because without good information on the role that climate plays, liars who refuse to even acknowledge it are left dominating the discussion.
The “climate angle” of the firestorms has been part of the coverage, although it’s less an angle than the core. But it’s very hit-or-miss, in part because the immediacy of covering the latest developments (and yes, the dramatic OMG visuals of an apocalyptic disaster) tends to take up a lot of airtime. But the coverage can’t be limited to a Mother Jones explainer here, a New York Times op-ed by a climate scientist who got out of LA when the getting was good (gift link) there, even though they’re all excellent reads.
The problem is that anyone who’s looking for reliable climate information can readily find it. But most Americans are getting their news from social media, not news bulletins from the Columbia Climate School. As we discussed earlier, the low-information Right thrives on social media, and to counter it, it’ll take more than nerds like you and me (yes, you are too a nerd, you’re reading Wonkette right now) sharing those good explainers on our own Bluesky nerdfeeds to other nerds. Not that we shouldn’t be sharing — just that it’s not enough in itself.
And Crom knows the rightwing disinformation machine has rushed to flood the information zone with shit, as Breitbart propagandist turned Trump propagandist Steve Bannon put it. With headlines like “Bad leaders — not climate change — are the reason the LA fires are burning California” (a completely garbage story from the New York Post, written by a flack for fossil fuel and utility interests), the disinformation spreads like … hmm, what’s a a quick-moving natural disaster?
And the liars don’t simply lie once and leave it at that. The liars are constantly lying, whatever the topic. When Elon Musk decided he wanted the House Republicans to shut down the government, he tweeted more than100 times about it in a few hours. Twitter this week has been a sewer of repeated rightwing bullshit about the fires, primarily racist rants about DEI and dangerous lefties refusing to manage forests, with occasional diversions into blaming climate activists for arson all over Los Angeles, because you know how The Left wants to destroy America and pretend climate change is real. (How the green terrorists caused the droughts and the hurricane-force winds is never explained.)
The repetition is integral to the lies, as this excellent analysis by Denny Carter explains.
Far-right influencers and politicians and activists have spent most of the Biden years convincing the public that everything bad that happens is because a black or brown person was put in charge. And it has been widely accepted by mainstream media outlets as a part of the American political discourse even though Christopher Rufo has said the right uses DEI attacks in bad faith. […]
It’s all very deliberate, a constant stream of dishonest claims, endlessly repeated, as Rufo readily admitted back in 2021 when he got the crusade against “critical race theory” rolling:
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
That’s why explaining that critical race theory is “actually” a fairly narrow academic discipline never worked: The phrase was stripped of its meaning and “recodified” by rightwingers. Might be the most successful practical application of postmodern theory in political history.
Rather than simply arguing with or debunking rightwing lies about the fires (like tweeting explainers, it’s necessary but not sufficient), Carter urges opponents of fascism to learn something from the Right — not lying, but repetition of basic points.
In the US, that means Democrats and their surrogates must be more disciplined in hammering home messaging that will alter the public consciousness.
In a deeply perverse way, the California wildfires present a good example of how effective repetition can be. Following four years of right-wing media telling its consumers that every bad event is caused by humble efforts to include people of color in the fabric of the nation, we have untold millions of Americans seeing a city burn and saying this is the fault of some faceless black or brown person. […] If this sounds insane to you, that's because it is.
Anything can be instilled in the popular mind. It's a useful lesson, if a depressing one.
As law-talker guy Max Kennerly suggested the other day, this is a power that can be used for good instead of evil:
Do what the GOP does: the message is all about blame and repeated ad nauseum.
E.g., “these fires are worse and more frequent because of global warming, which Republicans want to make worse while cutting billionaire's taxes so we can't pay for firefighters or rebuilding.”
Then say it over and over.
Same goes for other messages, like pointing out that the cost of getting off fossil fuels is a fraction of what destruction and rebuilding from extreme weather will be. Plus we’ll all have better health!
Or hell, while we’re at it, we can also point out that EVs are a fuckton of fun to drive.
The key is to keep the messaging simple, constant, and truthful, which I suppose may limit some options since we have our silly scruples about not lying flagrantly.
[Mother Jones / Salon / NYT (gift link) / Columbia Climate School / Times of San Diego / Bad Faith Times]
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I have noticed that all the red state governors who sent “help” to BORDER CRISIS! are sitting on their hands while California burns.
If there is a hell…
At least Mel Gibson’s house burned down while he was busy bitching to Joe Rogan about the fires.
Karma is real, and she’s cruel. Don’t test her.