Factually! with Adam Conover - Climate Scientist Debunks L.A. Wildfire Myths with Dr. Daniel Swain

Episode Date: January 19, 2025

Southern California has been utterly decimated by wildfires, with the neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades and Altadena being virtually leveled to the ground. In this special episode, released outside of our usual schedule, Adam sits down with UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain to unpack what really happened—both in terms of the environmental factors and the disaster response, and to dispel the misinformation swirling around these devastating fires.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything

Hello, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. This is a special episode that we're releasing outside of our normal schedule because we need to talk about the fires that have devastated Los Angeles over the past few weeks. If you've been watching the news, I'm sure you have. You have a sense of the scale of the devastation. I'll give you the numbers. Nearly 40,000 acres have been burned. 80,000 people are still under evacuation.

Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes, including numerous dear close friends of mine who are now homeless, staying with family, and trying to figure out what the path forward is, as are so many of their neighborhoods. Two entire cities of Los Angeles, the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, have been effectively leveled, burned to the ground. And as I record this, 24 people have been killed, and that number is likely to climb.

The scale of this disaster is frankly almost without parallel in modern American life. You have to go back and look at Hurricane Katrina, maybe Hurricane Sandy, both of which happened over a decade ago to find a similarly sized disaster affecting so many people in a major American city. And as a result, people are angry, they're upset, and they're desperate to know what happened and why, what caused these fires to happen.

And unfortunately, the information environment out there is really fucking bad right now. You have a massive number of rumors floating around about what caused the fires and what may have hampered the response. And a lot of them are just straight up fucking not true. You've got Trump alleging that an endangered fish stopped LA from having enough water to fight the fires,

even though the reservoirs were fuller than they had been in years. And then you have much more mundane rumors about cuts to California's firefighting budget, or alleged planned arsons. People are going nuts out there and no one can agree on what actually happened. In disasters like this, more than at any other time, it is absolutely critical that we cut through that fog of misinformation and get to the truth about what is actually going on.

So on the show today, we have one of the foremost experts on California's climate, its weather patterns, and the causes of fire disasters in this state to explain exactly what happened with this fire and why. His name is Daniel Swain. He is one of the clearest communicators on fire, on disasters, on weather that I have ever encountered in the media.

And I am absolutely thrilled and honored to have him on the show to break down the bare science behind these fires and how we need to respond to them. Now, before we get to the interview, I just wanna remind you super quickly, you can support the show on patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And if you wanna check out my tour dates, Toronto, Omaha, Minneapolis,

a bunch of other cities coming up, head to adamconover.net for tickets. Now, without further ado, let's get to this interview. My guest once again, for what I think is a record, third time on this podcast, is Dr. Daniel Swain. He's a climate scientist at UCLA, and he specializes in how climate change affects disasters exactly like this one.

Let's get to this interview with Dr. Daniel Swain. Daniel, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me back. I always enjoy these conversations. So do I. And I always enjoy hearing from you every time there is a horrible disaster happening in California.

You pop up constantly in the LA Times on television. You do a live stream whenever there are extreme weather events. Tell us a little bit about what you study in your daily life and how that brought you to being one of the most important voices in times of climate disaster. Well, thanks for that, uh, heady introduction. Uh, but you know, I, I, I am, uh, I'm a climate scientist these days, but that means different things for different climate scientists. My own background is actually in meteorology.

So the study of, of weather and how weather processes evolve and the prediction. Of whether, so I had, So my perspective on climate and climate change is kind of through the lens of these episodic extreme events, the extreme storms, floods, droughts, or weather adjacent events, which I think is what we can sort of think about wildfire as being as something that is very intimately tied to weather and climate, but is not itself, of course, an actual weather event.

So, you know, I study all of these things, um, increasingly I, I actually do study wildfire work with fire scientists, people who are, you know, boots on the ground, uh, managing fires and people who study fire weather. So, uh, you know, increasing intersection between these topics, I think, uh, especially these days. Yeah. So tell us about I think, especially these days. Yeah. So tell us about the historic nature of these fires. Like what makes them so remarkable? So I think one of the interesting things to talk about

is first of all, what isn't remarkable about what has transpired. And then of course, what is because many things are. What isn't unusual is that we had strong, dry downslope winds in the Alley Basin in January. This is what's known as offshore wind season. It's when we would see what are often called the Santa Ana winds. These were a little bit different than typical Santa Ana winds. And by these, I mean the ones that were occurring as these catastrophic fires burned through Altadena and Pacific Palisades last week, they were both stronger, more widespread,

especially at lower elevations. So we saw these 80, 90 mile an hour wind gusts in the San Fernando Valley that caused some damage in their own right. And they were also from a slightly different direction. But generally speaking, if we were going to see winds like that, this is the time of year when you would expect to see winds like that, this is the time of year when you would expect to see those. And lesser winds from land to sea are not that unusual. But what was much more unusual, in fact, arguably historically unprecedented, was how dry it has been

going into those winds. So we had big winds during big wind season, but usually those big winds come after rains, not necessarily big rains, but at least something, something to get that the ground meaningfully wet to to allow that vegetation to start to uptake some of that water through the soil through roots and be a little bit less, for lack of a better term, ridiculously dry. but we didn't get that this year. The rainy season still is a no-show in LA and the rest of Southern California.

It hasn't rained once in my area, period. A complete no-show. I mean, there's been like a tenth of an inch of rain since May, and most of that fell months ago. I mean, that's a negligible amount of water. A tenth of an inch, so literally in eight or nine months, a tenth of an inch. Yes, and even by LA standards, where there's usually a multi-month period every year

where it doesn't rain at all during the summer into some portion of the autumn, even in that context, this is now the driest start to the California water year, which for listeners outside of California, it starts in about October because our rainy season is usually October through March or so. And we're in January. We're now in, you know, literally this is the middle of the month of January now.

And it hasn't rained and there's no rain in sight. So that is, is sort of off the charts, unusual to historically unprecedented. And we then before that setting stage a stage even further, had a really warm fall, including if you remember back in September, that record breaking heat wave when there were other destructive fires that broke out right around Labor Day. Right. I always get my holidays confused. I believe Labor Day is the September holiday. But anyway, going back to September, it was really hot and record hot.

And so we had this period of really accelerated, vegetation curing, if you will, back then. And then going back even further to last winter and last spring, now this is where it gets interesting, it was super wet. The last two winters were actually some of the wettest winters on record.

I remember sitting in my house, just torrential downpours, you know, for two years in a row. We had two extremely rainy winters. We had, one of them, there was a hurricane that hit Los Angeles that dumped all this water in. I remember I was thinking about you because, you know, the last time you were talking

in the show, you came on to talk about the arc storm, the possibility of a storm coming and parking over Los Angeles and dumping rain for long periods of time. What a disaster that would be. So that's what we were thinking about a year or two years ago and then this year it's suddenly very dry. Yeah, so we've had this, what we would call a wet to dry hydroclimate whiplash event

where we go from unusually wet conditions to unusually dry ones. And one of the reasons why that matters in the context of these fires, it's a little bit counterintuitive. Why would the unusually wet conditions increase the risk now? But the reality is most of what's burning in Southern California, both now and in general, during the Santa Ana wind driven fires that we've seen throughout LA's history. It is part of the lore and the history of the place. Is grass and brush, these are not primarily forest fires, which is probably obvious to anybody who lives in LA

that most of the vegetation on the urban fringe is not dense trees, but it is chaperone and grass and other shrubs. Yeah. It can be quite dense. They can be overhead high. So it's not like this is, you know, sparse thin vegetation, but it's not trees. It's not forest. The reason why that matters is that this kind of vegetation grass and the

lighter brush is really responsive to growing conditions. And so if you have really wet conditions followed by warm conditions, it's kind of like irrigating your lawn really well and then having a nice sunny week thereafter. It's gonna grow like gangbusters. And that's exactly what happened the last two years in Southern California. Because these are like smaller brushier plants.

We're not talking about trees that take a long time to grow. These are the kind of plants that have a lot of growth season over season. Right, so trees in a forest, they don, they're not, they don't come and go year to year based on how wet it is. They're there for years and decades and beyond sometimes, but the grass really does come and grow, go, come and grow actually, that's a turn of phrase, but the, you know, the point is that this really wet antecedent period last winter and spring and even the year before that

arguably, in some parts of California, we had twice the usual amount of what's known as herbaceous fuel loading, which really is a fancy way of saying the biomass, the stuff that can burn in fires associated with grass and other herbaceous plants. So some of the brush.

So there was a ton of, essentially, this wet episode created more fuel for the potential fires to come, which is especially relevant in Southern California because that's the main kind of vegetation that's burning in these fires. And now we've got this very warm spell in the fall, now a record dry spell this winter following. It's like the worst possible sequence of events if you want to have the preconditions for a big bad fire, if there's a big wind event, and then that last bit, the conditional, if there's a big wind event, of course, is exactly sort of what the fears that were realized last week, uh,

when both of these disasters unfolded. So we had unprecedented rain causing, uh causing unprecedented growth of these plants, followed by unprecedented dryness, followed by unprecedented winds to some degree, causing these fires, a kind of a perfect storm of factors over the course of a couple years. My question is, how regular can we now expect these kind of unprecedented events to be? Is this the result of climate change and what can we expect to see in the future? Because, you know, sitting here in Southern California,

these sort of, yeah, hey, it didn't rain that much. It also didn't seem that crazily outside the realm of possibility of this happening again in a few years. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's worth sort of breaking it down a little bit, you know, which pieces of this have climate change links, which ones are so unusual and which ones were less so, you know, and as I mentioned, the winds themselves, you know, they were big winds, they were unusually strong

winds, but they're the kind of winds we get in Southern California every five or 10 years. So they're unusual, but far from historically unprecedented in their own right. In fact, back in 2011, there was a similar wind event that caused, you know, trees blew down and power lines blew down and people lost electricity, but there were no big fires because it hadn't been so damn dry leading up to it. So really, you know, what we're focusing on is that piece. We can kind of view the winds as an act of nature, kind of random, not necessarily any links to climate change in itself, but where we really think about the long-term trends are the two other pieces that I mentioned in terms of just how warm and dry

it was immediately leading up to the fire disasters. There it clearly is getting warmer and drier in the months leading up to the Santa Ana wind season, and therefore the likelihood we're seeing an overlap between critically dry vegetation and sort of the random occurrence of these winds when we know they occur in winter. That overlap, that conditional specific situation does appear to be increasing. And then also this wet to dry whiplash sequence where we have a bunch of extra grass and brush that grows, leading to more denser fuels for potential fires in the following months, followed by really hot

and dry conditions. That too looks like it appears to be increasing in a warming world. So it's kind of a question of which of these pieces is most important? And they're all important. And the wind is the part that has the least connection to climate change, but the rest of it is sort of where the interesting and the arguably alarming evidence points towards seeing more events like this moving forward. Yeah, my sort of layman's understanding

is that climate change isn't just about warming it. It also increases the variability of weather and of the climate. And I mean, going from wet to dry, that's what we would expect from that. And it's something that we should expect more. Is that right? Yeah. And we published a review paper with some eerie coincidence, uh, just last

week, a day or two after the fires tore through LA, just sort of taking a look at the state of the science surrounding this hydroclimate whiplash on a warming earth and finding that essentially that there's quite strong evidence that this is a pretty universal experience in a warming world, especially over global land areas, which is where most of people on earth actually live, is on land, except for the seafaring folks, I suppose. And, you know, the consequence of that is not only that we see potential for worse floods and worse droughts, but also the transition risks. As we go from one extreme to another,

from wet to dry or dry to wet, depending on which hazard in which regions we're worried about. One of the things we actually mentioned in this review, which of course we wrote long before the events of the past couple of weeks, was this example of increased fire risk in a place like semi-arid Southern California, where you have a very wet episode that results in all this additional herbaceous vegetation growth, and then you follow it with an unprecedented dry and warm period with a thirstier atmosphere, which is an inevitable consequence of a warmer air. And, you know, that's something that we actually – there's evidence in the paleoclimate records. So people who study tree ring records of dendrochronologists find in fact,

that it is these periods where you cycle or you oscillate increasingly rapidly between wet and dry that results in greater increases in fire activity than just getting warmer and drier. Right. And that might seem counterintuitive, but if you think about the ecology it makes sense if it just gets dry all the time eventually you burn everything there is to burn in the vegetation stops growing back. If you keep replenishing it after the fire active fire periods with more moisture. It does grow back it's not like you have bare soil the grass in the brush comes back. It's not like you have bare soil, the grass and the brush comes back pretty quickly

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and never compromise on comfort again. Public Rec, where comfort rules. Well, I mean, that makes it very clear how climate change is related here. We know what we need to do to fight climate change, so we won't belabor that point here. We've covered it in plenty of other episodes. What though made these fires so hard to fight? There's a huge amount of, you know, I think, speculation and misinformation out there about what actually happened that caused the fires to not just burn in the Santa Monica mountains

or the Angeles national forest, but actually enter the city itself and burn down entire neighborhoods. So when talking about actually fighting the fire, what happened? So I think it's helpful to look quite frankly, at just the dire circumstances that we had on the ground. I'm going to show a brief clip from what was at the time

live news footage, incredibly, during this event. But I think we can discuss it after, because there's some key clues as to why things were as bad as they were. So I'm going to share my screen for a moment and you're going to see, I'm going to play this footage with the sound muted so I can narrate over it a little bit. But this was footage from the local ABC affiliate the night that the fire moved was actively moving through Altadena and this is from one of the reporters on the ground and what you're seeing is essentially just this this

firestorm it really was an urban firestorm and you're seeing this fire engulf whole trees and whole structures but here's what I really want you to focus on look at how windy it is the reporter on the left and look at those hours that are blowing behind her and toward her and from the fire to some other direction Essentially what's going on is there's a blizzard except that instead of snowflakes It's billions and billions of embers that are just igniting you can see that's igniting a new spot fire Just in the irrigated grass, you know, between the sidewalk on the street.

There are firefighters there, they have hose lines down, they have water, they're trying to deal with this. But look now, even just that irrigated grass in the median is sending new embers into people's yards. There's just spot fires, little spot fires everywhere, hundreds, even thousands of individual spot fires all throughout this urban area. And all the while, if you again, look at the left again, you see these winds are gusting at times to levels that make it difficult to stand. Look at the Ember storm and that's what it's called. It really is this ember storm. And so I'll pause it here, but I think you get the idea.

And maybe I'll even just, okay, so that's the end of the part that I wanted to share here. The reason I think it's important to understand what the reality was on the ground. And there's some even more dramatic footage than that, frankly, where there are even stronger winds and just this continuous blizzard of embers. I mean, this woman is standing in the middle of,

there's embers swirling around her. It doesn't even look like a safe place to be standing. And yeah, it looks like anything would catch on fire that would be in the vicinity. Right, right. And so, it is not a particularly safe place to be at all. And in fact, in that neighborhood is where quite a few people ultimately did not make it out with their lives in this fire.

What I really want to illustrate was it is a true firestorm. This was not a small fire that was moving gradually, nor I think another potential misnomer is that these kinds of fires, either wildland fires, wild urban interface fires, as this one unfortunately became, or even urban fires ultimately as it was in the end, they don't spread contiguously. There's not always a wall of flame that advances steadily across the landscape. Sometimes there is, but in an extreme windstorm like this, and you know, it truly was extreme, you know, there were wind gusts of 70, 80, 90 miles an hour. Keep in mind, 90 miles an hour in some cases.

The fire is not moving linearly, but it's moving highly in this hopscotch manner. So you have not just one contiguous, obvious flaming front to focus on, but thousands of individual fires that are constantly igniting downwind. And each one of those has the potential to themselves ignite dozens of news new fires as these billions and billions of embers, uh, known, known as fire brands.

You know, these fire brands, these, these flaming pieces of debris in a fire, of course, fires are hot and the more intense the fire, the more of an upward wind current that develops. Hot air rises, it's more buoyant than the cool air surrounding it. So you have these footer nose convection columns within the smoke balloon.

And then so these embers, these firebrands, these flaming debris get lofted vertically first where the fire's actually burning. And then in the 70, 80 mile an hour wind gusts get blown sideways, sometimes a mile, two miles. And I can tell you, I've personally seen a fast-spreading wind-driven wildfire jump, six-lane freeway, like there was nothing there. Wow.

And so under these conditions, it's extremely difficult to get ahead of it, even if you have literally hundreds of fire engines and thousands of personnel. And you can't fly the aircraft when it's this windy. So the aircraft, the water dropping helicopters, the retardant dropping planes, they're out of the picture. So you're stuck with what you can get on the ground. And there were thousands of firefighters and other emergency personnel directly in the space doing the best that they could.

But that's one thing is the on the ground reality is the fire weather conditions just were off the charts. It was a 10 out of 10 windstorm plus extreme vegetation dryness. It's just difficult to get worse conditions than that. So that's one reality that I think some folks who didn't personally experience it don't quite understand. You're imagining a slow moving fire, you know, fire breaks and we contained it like we've

seen for many years in Southern California. You're not imagining a large area of the city that is literally there is a storm of fire happening. You have high winds, you have these embers blowing everywhere. Everything in the area is- It's literally a firestorm. Almost catching on fire simultaneously. How would you fight such a thing? Yeah, I mean, it really, I do think it's helpful

to think of it of a blizzard of embers. Literally a blizzard of embers. And so that's one piece is the conditions on the ground were almost unbelievably extreme. literally a blizzard of embers. And so that's one piece is the conditions on the ground were almost unbelievably extreme. And this was also true to a slightly lesser extent on the Palisades fire. It's the same story that wind gusts

were just 10 or 20 mile an hour lower. But really when you're still talking about 60 or 70 mile an hour winds, that's really not much of a relief. And then there's a couple of other hard realities. One is that generally speaking, once a wildfire starts to move into a populated urban area and starts burning structure to structure,

once the first two or three structures ignite, then it's kind of off to the races. This is something that wild and urban firefighters have described. Once you really try and keep it out of the structures, because obviously you don't want structures to burn in the first place, but also because once one or two of them go up, now it's an entirely different type of fire because structures have much denser fuel in them and they tend to burn much longer. So a

tree goes up, it burns quickly and hot, but it might be completely done in a minute or two. And then just smoldering thereafter. But a house or a commercial structure that catches on fire and becomes completely engulfed, it's going to burn for hours and it's going to continuously emit thousands, millions of embers for that entire period that it's burning. And so each of those structures becomes a source for many new potential fires. And you can see how this is a classic sort of exponential growth, self-reinforcing, vicious feedback problem. Once you see five, ten houses on fire, now you have these gigantic columns of millions of embers now blowing downwind. And now the next round of the next block of how to the houses catches.

Now you have twice as many sources and quickly this balloon. So once it gets into the urban interface in this environment, it actually gets more difficult to fight than if it were just a pure vegetation fire. And because now, you know, think of how many fire trucks show up if someone's just one structure is on fire ordinarily. It's not one. It's not two. These days in L.A., you might see five or ten apparatus outside one burning building under normal circumstances. And that's because that's what it takes to effectively and safely extinguish a fire like that.

But you don't have those sorts of resources once you start to have dozens, let alone hundreds, let alone thousands of structures burning. I mean, you would need, I mean, imagine we're talking about the total structural loss here being over 10,000. If you needed 10 fire apparatus, even five, let's just be conservative, five fire apparatus at those, at each structure to, to mitigate it. I mean, are there 50,000 fire engines available? No. I mean, that's just an impossibility. And so you can see how quickly once the conditions are this extreme and once it gets into the urban environment, there is a limit to what can actually be

achieved in terms of firefighting. And in that context, it's opportunistic. You know, you have firefighters that are doing strategic patrols and sometimes doing what's known as fire front following. So they try and follow sort of find where the lead edge of the fire is to the extent that there is one. And in this case, that was challenging because there were just so many spot fires. But they say they drive down the street in the truck and say,

okay, that house is on fire. That's already fully engulfed. Forget it. There's nothing we can do under these circumstances. We're going to move on. That house is not on fire. It looks like it has decent defensible space. They don't have trees overhanging the roof. They have a front yard that doesn't have a bunch of bushes in it. So we're going to make a stand here. We're going to park. We're going to try and protect the structure. Sometimes that's successful. Sometimes it's not. And sometimes it catches despite their best efforts.

And at that point, once these structures catch, they say, okay, we don't have time to really try and extinguish it. So we're moving on. And so this is why people get upset. They're quote unquote, letting the structures burn, but really there isn't practically any choice. They're doing triage. They're doing triage. They're doing triage.

Literally triage. It's, you know, it's a, yeah, it's a triage situation. And sometimes it gets so bad. They don't even do that. They don't even really, there's, there's no effort to protect structures as occurred in some cases during these events, because then the goal, the primary goal of course is to save people's lives and physically remove them from the situation where their life is at risk. And that becomes the priority. If

you can't do both, you can't protect structures and save people's lives, which one of course are you going to choose? You're going to choose to try and get people out. And that's also what happened. And frankly, one of the reasons why the loss of life probably isn't in the triple digits, which it very well could have been in the hundreds, given the extremity. And it's toll is still rising, but it looks like it will likely be in the dozens rather than the hundreds. And that's awful. And it's also much less catastrophic even than it could have been,

which is a truly sobering thought, I think, given how bad the reality on the ground actually is. Yes, and I think it's a real blessing and something that we need to be talking about more, how effective the evacuation was, that Alta Dina, I believe, 20,000 to 40,000 people in Alta Dina, I don't recall how many in the Palisades, but the fact that so far the total deaths are

in the dozens or around there, as opposed to in the hundreds or thousands, that you did not have, I think as you discussed in one of your live streams, you did not have such a choke to exit that people burned alive in their cars, for example, we didn't have that sort of horror. And that has happened before in California

and more recently in other fires, including the catastrophic fire on Maui in Lahaina. It's happened in Southern Europe. It's happened in Australia. So it is a real risk during these events. And it did come pretty close to happening in the early moments of the Palisades fire on Sunset Boulevard, of all places, where there was that traffic jam of several hundred cars. People just stuck in gridlock because people had crashed into each other.

There were a lot of people trying to leave at once. It was a scene out of a Hollywood movie, pretty literally. The flames were coming down the canyon, cars were catching on fire. The fire trucks couldn't get through, of course, because people were using both sides of the street to try and leave. And then they crashed into, I mean, it was just this disaster, but you know, because of the, the, the, the personnel who were there, the fire, the fire and the law enforcement, they were able to tell people like, look, you kind of just got to get out of your car and, and run, run downhill towards the ocean. And people did that.

Uh, and it sounds like almost everybody, if not everyone who was in that traffic jam ultimately survived and the dramatic footage after it was of the LA County fire bulldozers bulldozing their way through the Teslas and the Mercedes and the Bentley's and Pacific Palisades to get people out first and then to send. The, the firefighting vehicles back up to the upper Palisades to get people out first and then to send the firefighting vehicles back up to the upper palisades to try and actually fight the fire. But it's another example of triage, right? You do what you've got to do to save people's lives first and then you deal with the other

problems. But also, it was a near miss. That actually could have been a burn over and it wasn't ultimately. And it's a good thing that it wasn't, but the fire in Alta Dina, the Eaton fire was, was potentially even riskier in that sense. There are more roads to get out. There are more routes of egress on the plus side on very minus side. It was in the middle of the night. It was dark. Yeah. It was not a daytime fire. The power was

already out in most of the area because of the damage from these strong winds. So telecommunications were not always functioning well. A lot of people found out about the fire because they smelled smoke or looked out the window and saw a wall of flames. And yet despite all this, the vast majority of people in the areas that burned did make it out in the end. And so that's, I do think that's a relative success story compared to what could have happened. Ah, it's 2025, a new you and a new year full of new possibilities.

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That's joindeleteeme.com slash Adam, promo code Adam. Well, I'm glad we're talking about the success story because currently in Los Angeles, there's a huge amount of second guessing and questioning what happened. And there's a lot of people with their pet theories. There's a lot of talk of, you know, they hooked the hoses up to the fire hydrants and no water came out. The fire department budget was cut in favor of giving cops and also firefighters pay increases.

That is something that happened where money was moved away from some services in order to increase payroll. Total budget went up, but certain line items were cut. There's, you know, Trump's assertion that water management is bad to save a smelt, to save an endangered fish. And so there's a whole, there's currently, I was just watching the news this morning and there was discussion of, you know, was the fire department and the city properly prepared? Did they have the proper assets in the right places, knowing that the fire weather was coming?

But it kind of sounds like your assertion is that like, look, this is, this event was simply so large, it outstrips any preparation that although, even if all those things had been different, not counting the smelt, because I don't even know what that one is talking about, but the rest of them, even if all, you know, hey, we had a little bit more money

in the fire department budget, you know, we had assets preset, yada, yada, yada. Would any of that have made a difference or is that just, you know, diddling around the margins? It's remarkable. I will say it's remarkable to me, the amount of bandwidth that's being expended to blame the Delta smelt or Karen Bass or any number of other people for personally for these

for the for these disasters, which is not just Transparently ideological I think but it is just patently absurd in the in the factual reality So I do think it's worth addressing some of these things because as you say I think that even folks who are really careful not to get caught up sometimes in some of the more partisan ideological wars are repeating some pretty fundamentally inaccurate stuff about what happened in LA last week. So let's back up a little bit. So we've already described why the conditions on the ground were just truly this extreme and why there is a limit to how even a well-prepared fire response resource can actually completely, you can't completely prevent this. You can try and make the best of a bad situation, but this was truly a dire situation. But in addition to that, there's all these questions about the water supply

for firefighting, right? Right. Well, the Delta SMOT one is the easiest one to address because I think this goes back to the notion that somehow in Northern California didn't send enough water to Southern California. And so therefore, their LA is in dire straits and doesn't have enough water even to fight fires, which is ridiculous because that literally did not happen. And that was not the case. There was no shortage of water in LA, uh, in any large scale sense. In fact, because as we were talking about the last two winters were

wetter than average reservoirs actually had more than the usual amount of water at scale, not every individual reservoirs, but overall there is more water than usual available in Southern California and available to LA. So that's just, you can check that one off the list as just not being correct. So can I ask, you know, these reports of, oh, the hydrants ran dry. What's the reason for that?

So that's a more, that's I think a more important question because it does sound like in many cases on both of these fires that the fire hydrants that the firefighters were plugging their hoses into to supply the pumps on their trucks did in fact run dry in a number of circumstances. But there's some interesting math here. And this too has to do with fluid dynamics

as to so many things in my life, because this has to do with water flowing through pipes. It's the different fluid dynamics. You're like, ah, damn it, fluid dynamics again. But ultimately, municipal water systems are not designed to have hundreds of fire trucks simultaneously trying to maximize flow throughput to put out thousands of buildings

that are burning simultaneously. There is only so much water that can flow through that system per unit time. I mean, imagine trying to force that much water through essentially, you know, one single system of water distribution pipes. That's one half of this. And the other half of it is that to make things much worse, not only was that the case, but once this fire had burned several hundred structures, and especially once it had burned

several thousand structures, each of those it had burned several thousand structures, each of those buildings has water pipes in them. There are kitchens and bathrooms and laundry rooms and every single one of the structures that burned, and those pipes eventually become compromised. They either break or melt depending on whether they're metal or plastic, and all of them start leaking. So you have hundreds of thousands of individual water leaks all at once at the exact moment that you have hundreds of fire vehicles tapping into a system

that is not designed for either of these things. And so, yeah, the hydrants ran dry. I mean, that is just a fundamental physical reality of what happens when there is a finite amount of water and there are an functionally infinite number of places where the water is coming out of the system. I think that's such an important point because it's not that they ran dry because the quantity of water ran out. It's because the demand on the system simultaneously was too large and so it's like we ran out of water pressure. It's like you know you're in an old house

and you're taking a shower and someone turns on like, we ran out of water pressure. It's like, you know, you're in an old house and you're taking a shower and someone turns on the faucet downstairs and your water goes, boop. Like it was- Yeah, imagine if you had 10,000 people downstairs taking showers at the same time. Exactly.

And when I was watching footage on the news and they were showing a burned home in Malibu and there was a pipe exposed, and there was just water shooting out of the pipe, a small pipe, right? It wasn't that much water all at once, but I was like, oh, there it is, right? It's just, here's the water leaping into the air.

You can see it in front of your face. So I love you for giving that explanation because it is such a commonsensical one that almost everyone is missing right now. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's, it's, and it's not, you can't actually design emergency fire flow systems that are designed to greatly scale up your ability to deliver that water.

In fact, interestingly, the city of San Francisco has one of these, a redundant emergency firefighting water supply. and that is a result of the legacy, the hard-learned lessons from the 1906 earthquake and fire when essentially the whole city burned down. It wasn't a wildfire, but it was an urban fire after an earthquake and all the water pipes were broken. Today, there is a system that taps that allows fire boats and fire engines to start pumping water from San Francisco Bay into a separate dedicated set of pipes that could be used to fight large fires should they develop following, especially following

a major earthquake. That's the main reason it's designed. But San Francisco is a bit unique because it has that history. It has that understanding. It's also surrounded on three sides. It's also a relatively compact city, surrounded on three sides by abundant saltwater. So the situation there is different, but it is an investment that's been made there. You could design these systems, but they would be extremely expensive

and also very logistically difficult to design in areas that aren't immediately adjacent to huge bodies of water. So- Altadena was what, 30 miles from the ocean? Something like that? difficult to design in areas that aren't immediately adjacent to huge bodies of water. So. Altadena was what, 30 miles from the ocean? Something like that? Yeah, and they aren't cheap. And you know, people are always complaining about taxes

and how much it costs to run cities. And this is a trade off, right? I mean, if you want to spend five times as much on your water bill, you could probably do this. You could have in your city or in your suburb a redundant emergency firefighting water supply. But it's not my place to decide whether that's an appropriate use of money or not, but it is a choice that we collectively make. There is a certain limit to preparedness at a certain level of expenditure.

It's expensive to be prepared for the worst possible plausible events and this was pretty much a worst case scenario. Let's talk about the firefighting force of Los Angeles and California. Again, there's been a lot of talk about, you know, the budget of the LAFD. There's been a spat between the commissioner of the LAFD and Karen Bass, the commissioner said,

oh, or the fire chief, I forget the exact title, the head of the LAFD has said, oh, you know, our budget was caught in this harmed preparedness. But you described on your live stream, I'd love you to recap for us, exactly how large the force that was fighting this fire was. And put that into perspective for us. Yeah, so wildland firefighting,

so essentially fighting fires burning primarily in vegetation is a different discipline, if you will, than urban firefighting. There's some overlap. You know, you still have firefighters trained in putting out flames and there are still fire trucks, but they're even not even the same kind of fire truck. They're physically different vehicles.

They carry different equipment. They have different aims and there are different tactics in fighting wildland versus urban fires. So of course, all major cities and most smaller cities and towns on earth have some form of a formal firefighting capacity in the form of people who are trained in putting out fires and in and have the equipment to do so. But what's different about wildland firefighting is that not everywhere on Earth has the specialized ability to do that at scale. This is actually a problem, a big problem in some places when such fires break out,

is there is less know-how, knowledge, and equipment available to fight wildland fires, especially when they threaten urban areas. But in California, a place, you know, famous or probably, I guess we could say infamous for wildfire, it's a famously fire-prone part of the world, there has been focus on wildland firefighting for really a century, if not a bit longer than that. And so within California, there's an agency known as CAL FIRE, formerly the California Department of Forestry.

But essentially it's this increasingly large over the years state specific agency that's effectively a firefighting army. It is literally the size of the military of some small nations and it does include thousands of personnel, hundreds of vehicles and other apparatus and a number of specialized firefighting aircraft. This is essentially something that is paid for by taxpayers within the state of California and primarily benefits the state of California.

And their main mandate is wildland firefighting. In some areas they do other things as well, because it's sort of like a state level fire department, but primarily it's a wildland firefighting agency and they're very specialized in this in a way that generally doesn't exist elsewhere at that scale. But within LA County specifically, there are additional areas.

There's LA County Fire. And LA County is of course huge. Yeah. It's as large again as some small nations, has a population greater than many US states. So it makes sense that this exists as a large agency at county level. But LA County Fire, for a regional-level fire department, also has an unusually high degree of specialization in wildland firefighting as well as urban firefighting, because there's of course big cities and a lot of wildland out there, a lot of open spaces with flammable vegetation and a lot of intermix between these two things. So this agency also has bulldozers and wild and fire engines

and their own firefighting aircraft, which is again, unusual for a department at regional scale, a county level fire department. Then within the city of LA, or really the cities within broader LA more accurately, there are local fire departments that are primarily urban fire departments, but there too also have some enhanced wildland firefighting capacity in most cases more than would usually

be the case. And then on top of that, there is the mutual aid component. There are, there is the US Forest Service, of course, a federal agency. There's plenty of federal land and national forests in LA County, they too have a wildland firefighting capacity that comes into play during events like this. And then so to do the wildland firefighting capabilities of adjacent states once the emergency develops and mutual aid is called in and people from other states

start arriving as well. So that really, I know I'm going on and on, but it's really just to illustrate that there is at least three or four different layers of wildland firefighting capacity in Los Angeles. It isn't just the LA County fire. It's also Cal Fire and really other mutual aid agencies that are relevant to this. And there are very few other places on earth that could say that they have that much wild and firefighting capacity. So we can argue about whether it's maybe still not enough.

You could make that argument. But I think the argument that, you know, that LA is woefully underprepared for this, especially given that a number of these resources were pre-positioned before the fires broke out in known high risk areas, I think argues against that. Now, I'm not privy to the internal memos

and the details of a lot of these developing, you know, news stories and investigations. Could certain things have been done better? I mean, given how many people were involved in the response, like it's literally in the tens of thousands of people, I'm sure in retrospect there will be things that could have been done better and hopefully we'll

learn those lessons. But to a first order at scale, was this a miserable failure of preparedness and firefighting? I don't really think that's the case. I think given the reality of the situation on the ground, this was a case of things just being so extreme that there was a limit to how much the destruction could be prevented. Yeah, I mean, you're describing California and Southern California specifically as having the largest firefighting capacity

of maybe any region in the world. Like maybe we could find someone somewhere. Maybe we could find some somewhere. But you're talking about city, county, state. Most states don't have something like Cal Fire. And most states are not as wealthy as California are able to fund such a thing. And then all the other agencies from elsewhere.

And I know that the budget of Cal Fire has gone massively up over the last couple years. Like this is something that the state has put a lot of money into. It's hard to imagine having a much larger firefighting force that would be able to stop, as you say, a blizzard of embers, right? Like if we're saying, okay, well, we just need more,

more, more firefighting capacity, how big could it possibly be? Like could one even conceive of when we already have the largest force probably on the planet? Is there a firefighting force on earth that could stop such an event or is there one that's conceivable? I mean, I think that really gets at a deeper

and uncomfortable truth in all of this is that not just with respect to wildfire, but with respect to a lot of natural hazards and potential disasters, especially as a lot of these things get worse in a warming climate, we can't necessarily adapt and innovate and fight our way out of all the bad things that can and sometimes do happen. That is, I mean, a word that comes to mind is hubris. We assume that we have the ability to sort of conquer nature in some comprehensive and systematic way. And I think, you know, we do to a point, but there are sufficiently extreme conditions under which

that really isn't true anymore. I mean, it it's sort of the analogy could you build a hundred foot see wall on every you know global coastline and prevent you know flooding of coastal cities even if the sea bros a hundred feet i mean i guess i mean not really practically but you know there's no. Physical impossibility to add the impossibility is otherwise. Yeah. Uh, could you have a firefighting force of 10 million people in LA? I mean, I guess if it was, you know, if you want to make work, uh, environment, I mean, I, you know, everybody in LA could be a firefighter and maybe, maybe you'd be able to, you know, but even then, I mean, the question is, you know, it's, it's always a question of costs and benefits. I mean, these question is, you know, it's always a question of costs and benefits. I mean, these agencies have huge budgets.

And I don't necessarily think they're, you know, people say they're bloated or whatever. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. I don't necessarily think it's disproportionate to the level of risk there is, but are we willing to spend twice as much, three times as much, 10? Like what, you know, it is ultimately a question of resources, limited resources, and this notion that there are diminishing returns beyond a certain level because there are some extreme events, natural hazards, and then subsequent disasters that are just so bad that we can't fully mitigate them and we have to come to terms with that,

I think is, it's a tough reality. And I think what we're seeing in LA is the cognitive dissonance of people trying to grapple with that. You're seeing people and some of them very wealthy saying, hold on a second, how is it possible that all of my money and all the money I pay in taxes is not protecting me from this?

And they're looking for someone to blame and they're blaming, you know, Karen Bass or who, you know, Governor Newsom or whoever else. And, you know, those people, I have plenty of criticism for both of them, including how they handled the fire. But those people, you know, Bass and Newsom are also in the position of kind of saying, like, look, this event outstripped the ability of not just government, but humanity to stop on a, you know, moment to moment basis.

And that is like a hard thing for humans to accept. It is hard for us to accept as a society that some problems of our own creation are too big for us to solve once, you know, you know, we, we've been sowing for years and now that we're reaping, we're like, hold on a second, how come we're getting fucked here? And there actually is not an answer. The problem is, you know, where we built our cities and climate change and all the rest of it.

And that's, that's a difficult thing for us to grapple with societally and we're finally starting to, you know, it's time to pay the piper. Yeah, I mean, people are lashing out and looking for people to blame. And look, as you say, I'm not personally defending any individual in this.

And I am certain that there will be, turn out to have been things, mistakes that were made in things that could have been done better. But I think exactly as you've just highlighted, the places where I really think we need to be focusing our energy, if the goal is to make this less likely in the future, is less blaming individual people for perceived failures, some of which are just factually impossible and in denial of basic physics. But to really think about, okay, what can we do differently?

And a lot of what we can do differently is, as you say, thinking about what can we do to make individual structures and communities, in this case, more fire resilient. And this is where, you know, one line that's come out that I'm a little bit worried about is we're going to remove all the red tape for people rebuilding. Yeah. I'm all for red tape removal. I mean, I wonder often why so much exists in the first place. However, if some of the red tape that we're removing are things like fire resilient building standards or not forcing people to comply with stricter policies for vegetation clearance

in their yards or the materials we make these structures out of, that will be a tremendous mistake and missed opportunity. And so I hope that's not the red tape that we're going to be cutting in this context, because it is actually one of the most important things we can do to change the on the ground realities the next time there's a fire like this. And there will be a next time. The next time could be as soon as next week's frankly, because it still hasn't rained, hopefully not. But you see my point here.

Yeah, when it comes to rebuilding, how much should we be rethinking where we have built in Southern California? Because if you look at say say, the Malibu coast that burned down, these houses along the beach, right, in this narrow strip between the PCH Highway and the ocean, I mean, this is a place where fire is endemic. It happens at least every couple years

there's a fire in that area. Or both the Palisades and Altadena, these are areas that back up, these are areas that back up, these are suburbs that back up against national forests in one case, I believe a state park in the other case. This is the wildlife urban interface and the rallying cry is to rebuild. Are these places that we should be rebuilding?

Do we need to rethink where we are living in this part of the state? And I think the same question applies to a lot of places in the country that might be similarly vulnerable. I mean, I think this is a big and growing question, as you say, not just in California with respect to wildfire, but elsewhere with respect to other hazards.

Why do we keep rebuilding houses that keep getting washed out to the ocean in Florida from hurricanes, for example? A similar question. And I don't think there are any easy answers because first of all, I don't really believe it's my place as a climate scientist to tell people where they should and shouldn't live for a variety of reasons. I think that's kind of problematic.

However, I do think the question changes a little bit in the case where our community has been essentially just wiped off the map or you're essentially restarting from scratch, whether you like it or not, you have to make an affirmative choice to rebuild and move back where you were. So at a minimum, we need to be rethinking how we rebuild. That much I think is without question, as I mentioned,

it would be a huge mistake to not learn some of the very hard learned lessons, I think. Hopefully they'll be hard learned and not hard forgotten in the aftermath. But we've seen in California a mix of outcomes actually, because now unfortunately we have a meaningful sample size of communities largely are totally destroyed by fire in the last 15 years, which gives us long enough to see how some of them have rebuilt. Paradise, largely destroyed by the campfire in 2018.

A number of structures have now been rebuilt, although the population is much lower than it once was, probably about half. So half of the people did not return. And some of the structures have been built in a more fire-resilient way. But others have been rebuilt almost exactly as they were before.

Now there's just a bunch of abandoned lots full of dense brush in between these structures that were rebuilt in a way that the community, I think, is at high risk of fire once again already. Santa Rosa, the Tubbs fire, the eastern suburbs of Santa Rosa. Again, a bit of a mix. Some of these individual structures are, I was up there, you know, this fall, and some of them are clearly built differently with fire resilience in mind. But then you look just at their neighbors and they got

a wooden fence and newly planted juniper bushes right up against the wooden knees of the house. So will we learn that lesson? It's not totally clear that we have in a systematic way so far. So I hope this time is different. And then we get to the question of, should we be rebuilding in these places at all? Yeah. And that I don't think is really my place to answer for individual people,

but I do think it's a question that we should be asking and grappling with. Should the city or the state or the county buy out some of these parcels, some of this land? Because we know, as you say, it will burn again at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later. That's not true everywhere. And people say, why do people live in these high risk zones for a while? Well, you and several million other Californians, I mean, it's not just at the margins as we've seen. Should we not

repopulate downtown Altadena? I don't think the answer is yes. I think people will and probably reasonably will end up back there. But are there some places where the risk is just unacceptably high of this happening again? I think the answer is probably yes also. But that's a question I don't know that we're fully prepared to be having because it involves things other than the physical science that, you know, and it involves value judgments and it also involves sort of your balance of risk assessment about the future and it's those are all very difficult conversations to have especially in the immediate wake of a

disaster and yet that's exactly when we need to be having it if we aren't going to make the same mistakes we've made historically. Yeah I think it's a great way of putting it. It's less a matter of telling individuals, hey, you should or shouldn't live here. People can make their own decisions, especially with a parcel of land that they still own. They can decide whether to sell it or et cetera.

But I do think there's a policy question of, should our state government or the federal government be subsidizing people to rebuild in these particular areas? And should the public be taking on the risk by subsidizing those things? And we might reach a point where that subsidy is just impossible, where private insurance will no longer offer fire insurance in these areas,

or that will finally receive political pushback towards rebuilding in those areas. I mean, we're pretty much getting there with insurance at this point. In fact, we were getting there before this, these dual disasters, which will probably end up being the single most expensive wildfire disaster ever given the scope and the property values involved together.

And I don't know what the future holds in California, you know, with respect to residential insurance, because when the insurer pulls out of a market somewhere, what is that really telling you? Yeah. It's telling you that there is essentially no premium that they can charge realistically that is going to convince them that they won't lose money.

And what that means is that this has gone from being a financial product that was sort of a you probably will never use it kind of product to being one where you probably will need to use it. And that's a whole different, that's, it's actually meaning that home insurance is becoming more like health insurance, something that you do actually expect to use. And it's a whole different ballgame. Yeah, and they're also saying that this is a money loser. They're saying that if you have a house here, it is so likely to burn down

that we cannot insure it at any price because we expect its value to drop to zero because it will burn down in the next few years. And that means you as a homeowner are taking an unacceptable risk. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like going to the casino and put it and, you know, playing roulette. It's like, if you play roulette long enough

you're losing all your money. It doesn't matter because the odds are just against you. And that is what they are saying. It means to own a home in that area. If they are to pull out, which they have not done yet, but is a constant sort of threat at this point, are insurers gonna cover these places at all? And we have this expectation in America,

oh, we can live wherever we want, there'll always be someone to insure it and we'll always be covered. And we might need to change that idea as a society that we can simply build a home out in the woods, you know, right in the middle of a fire zone. I can get someone to insure it and the government will protect me.

Might not be the case anymore. Yeah, it is probably worth noting. This is yet another example of, you know, the accentuation of wealth disparities. I mean, if you can afford to self-insure, it's less of a problem that, you know, these, these commercial insurers won't cover your home. If you know, if you have a hundred million dollars to spare, then no, it's not,

it's not nice when anyone's home burns down. But if you have that kind of capital, you can essentially self-insure. You can also rebuild your house to be very fire resistant. And you know, you have all the tools available to you. But for everybody else, this becomes a bit of a crisis. It's not good for anybody when insurers start doubling their rates, even if that is the rational response to the actual observed increase in risk, or they pull out of markets because that is to a large extent, with the exception of some recent emergency regulations,

that is ultimately, they are private entities with a prerogative to do so. If they don't think they're going to make money, that's really bad news for most people who own homes or who rent from people who own those buildings, which is the rest of us. This plays into all these other societal issues and it just points out why, you know, and it's not to say that these, you know, the reason why the disaster is as bad as it was

is due to climate change. It's one of multiple major contributing factors, but it just illustrates that all of these things are kind of connected. You can't really escape any of them by sort of living in any particular place. Obviously, the wildfire risk in Miami is like zero, but it's not that you're risk free. It's just that you have other things to worry about. It's the same story there,

but with hurricanes. In the central US, again, it's just a different kind of hazard, but it's the same kind of story that's unfolding in so many places. And so I think that's, for me, as a climate scientist and somebody who works with people and walks people increasingly through these episodic disasters as they unfold in real time, which is not a great feeling, by the way, there's no joy in, I told you so. It's actually just progressively more horrifying each time these predictions come to pass. It really makes me wonder, you know, whether we're sufficiently grappling

with the bigger problems at scale. Yeah, so let's talk about those bigger problems because let's return the subject to climate change because when these fires happened and I saw the scale of devastation, to me my first thought was this seems like the first chapter in a near future science fiction novel or film about climate change. Literally the Kim Stanley Robinson book,

Ministry for the Future, I interviewed Kim about that book on this show, is a science fiction novel about the next 100 years of fighting climate change. And it begins with events happening around the world that are unignorable, that finally wake up the world to this threat. In his book, it's a heat wave in India that kills hundreds of thousands of people,

which is a thing that could happen, right? It's not the kind of science fiction where you're imagining something impossible and futuristic. It's the kind of science fiction where you're imagining something plausible and seeing what the results would be. And, you know, I've been interviewing climate scientists like yourself for years who said one of the risks

of climate change is we're gonna have increased wildfires throughout the American West, and that is going to have, you know, grave social consequences that will be unignorable. Another example of that is flooding and hurricanes in Florida. So I'm looking at these events going, here they fucking are. Like it's happened, right?

This is the thing people have been telling me is gonna happen for 10 years. Now it has, we've got, you know, tens of thousands of people displaced in Southern California. Do you think that we are finally seeing the first steps of the climate change playing out in a way that will become politically unignorable

and that will create some kind of realignment? If you have private insurers pulling out of large parts of Southern California, that creates a huge financial impact that will force a change in behavior. Are we starting to roll down that hill, perhaps? Maybe. Maybe not.

Big question for you, I know. Honestly, it's hard for me to tell because I really would have thought we would have we would have taken it more, you know There are any number of other events I guess is what I'm saying that we could have pointed to in the last 10 or 15 years that were you know They weren't as visually dramatic and they didn't affect Hollywood Celebrities to the same extent which I do think is part of why this has received as much attention as it as it has

Just keep in mind that the Camp Fire burned as many structures, if not more than both of these fires combined in a single day, wiping a California town completely off the map in 2018 and killing considerably more people than this one did. But I think, like, I don't know. And there have been similarly catastrophic events that are, some of them are fire related, some of them are otherwise related, but still related to climate change, you know, and there have been similarly catastrophic events that are some of them are fire related. Some of them are other, you know, otherwise related, but still related to climate change, you know, in Europe and Australia and other wealthy parts of the world over the last five or 10 years.

And I really, you know, recording this conversation the week before the presidential inauguration in the U.S. We know how the election went. We're on track to have at least another four years where we don't address these problems meaningfully at national scale. And we will probably backslide some. To be clear, we were not doing nearly enough

as of the end of 2024. So I still have plenty of criticism for everybody involved, but it's likely that we'll do even less if not actively try to reverse some of the progress that's been made. And by that, I mean, progress on reducing and zeroing out emissions, which is the underlying problem of climate change, but even things like trying to stabilize the insurance market or ensuring

more equitable disaster relief and preparedness, all of these things. I mean, there's even questions about whether the viability of NOAA and the National Weather Service going into this new presidential administration, this agency that literally predicted in all caps the days before these fires unfolded, extremely dangerous and life-threatening wind and fire weather conditions, please consider preemptive action. And that resulted in this pre-positioning of resources. I mean, I'm reasonably optimistic that won't completely go away. But one of the things I

found scariest in reading, I didn't read the entirety of the project 2024 documents by the Heritage Foundation, which I think at this point we have every reason to believe will be a guiding document for the incoming administration. I'm a strong believer of taking people at their word when they say they're going to do something explicitly and repeatedly despite winking when they do so. But one of the things I found in the section that discusses climate change and weather prediction and NOAA and other federal agencies involved in it, I was less surprised, still concerned, but less surprised to hear that climate change is a hoax

and all these agencies are exaggerating the threat to receive funding. Like, okay, we've had that argument since like 1994. So that's nothing new. But the scariest part to me was a passage that reflects on the futility of preparing for the future, of trying to predict what's going to happen and trying to prevent bad outcomes. Wow. That is a terrifying philosophy that completely flies in the face. I think

of most of the human progress that we've achieved in civilization. Most of the good things that have happened have happened because we're looking forward, we're looking to the past to learn lessons, extrapolating to the future to look and see where bad things could happen and then actively doing stuff to provide and either prevent those bad things from happening or make them less bad than they would have been. That's the guiding principle that I have in my role in my job. I feel that it is a good guiding principle for the good things that can come from humanity. And yet there's this explicit statement that that is both undesirable and anyway, in any case, impossible.

Yeah. So for me, that's, I do wonder what's next. And I do wonder if perhaps part of the reason why we haven't made more progress is because maybe that is not as universal a guiding principle as I guess, maybe naively assumed that it was. I mean, I think it's still a guiding principle of I guess maybe naively assumed that it was. I mean, I think it's still a guiding principle of human society. I think that it's what most people want to do in their daily lives. And it's something that government has historically done quite effectively.

Um, or the United States government has done quite effectively. You know, we have a problem. We have trouble moving goods around. Let's build an interstate highway system. It's just like basic shit, you know, of, a problem, we have trouble moving goods around, let's build an interstate highway system. It's just like basic shit, you know, of, ah, we're gonna look ahead, we have expertise, we have science, we will find a solution and we will build it.

And climate change at one point was one of those problems with the solution that we were building towards as recently as what, the 80s, the first Bush administration, I believe, famously had a plan to tackle climate change and acid rain was a similar, a climate problem that was- The problem that we identified and then largely fixed by the way,

because we decided to fix it. Exactly. And that is the type of problem that climate change is. And yet we have had a small group of people who it is not in their self interest to have those solutions made. And so they have promoted, you know, an entire campaign of denying the problem,

sowing doubt about it and politicized it to the degree that when you you said that just now Hey, I I thought a whole I thought part of the human experience the human project was predicting the future and mitigating it I was like, oh, yeah, I forgot that this wasn't a political issue I forgot that this is just like a basic engineering problem the thing that humans have been doing since you know It's why we go look at the pyramids, right? It's why we look at, I don't know, the irrigation systems of, you know, ancient civilizations

and say, wow, look, and look what we've built since. That's the type of problem that climate change is, just a basic human problem, it's not a political problem. And yet I had so thoroughly forgotten that because I've been living in the American political culture for the past few decades, as have all of us. This is, this actually is, it's a big, hard collective action problem,

but that's the type of problem we've tackled before in the past and we know what the solution is, et cetera. I'm repeating something commentators like myself have repeated for decades now. It's mind boggling that we are not addressing it as we should be, and we are seeing the results today. This is the result. Tens of thousands of people homeless,

tens of thousands of structures burned down, dozens of people dead, and a surety that it's gonna happen again in the near future, and doubt that we are actually gonna do anything about it. That is the world that we live in. Well, on the irony, and maybe a bit of silver lining actually in the specific context of California

wildfire disasters is that even though climate change is making the problem worse, I actually don't think that addressing climate change is the number one thing we need to do to prevent the next wildfire disaster. It's actually everything else, which is both daunting but also maybe a little bit more tractable because it is something that can be tackled at a state level, at a county level, at a city level, at a neighborhood level, even at an individual structure level. People can do things to reduce their own individual risk. Communities can collectively do things to reduce their risk.

States can mandate different building codes. People can add ember-resistant vents and clear the brush away from their houses. I mean, there are things that can be done. So it's not to say all of this is hopeless. In fact, those are probably much lower hanging fruit as much as I hate to say it, versus actually solving the piece of this

that's related to climate change anytime soon. Those are things you could start tomorrow and be done by the next fire season in some places. And so in some ways, that's a very constructive, positive way to look at this. But we do have, we have both the big structural problems and then these other things that intersect with it that are maybe a lot more tractable and less daunting locally. And so I do often encourage people to focus on those things, even in this moment, where there might be, frankly, backsliding on global climate progress in the next few

years, at the exact moment when you really desperately needed that not to happen. It doesn't mean there has to be backsliding on all of these other things related to resilience and improving our communities as they are now at local level. And so that's why I think it's so important to cut through the bullshit, frankly, that we're hearing about these LA fires and to really get down to brass tacks about what the actual structural problems are that are addressable. There certainly are many, it just isn't what people have focused on. And that's why I think it's so important

to redirect that conversation toward where we can actually make improvements. Right. And I think the one feeds into the other. Planning for the future is planning for the future. If we are arguing about, you know, a couple million dollars here or there in the budget, who's to blame, you know, smelt and bullshit, about a couple million dollars here or there in the budget,

who's to blame, smelt and bullshit, we're not planning for the future. If we are talking about resiliency, how do we rebuild in a way that is resilient? How do we fireproof Los Angeles? How do we improve Los Angeles' density and pattern of development to be more fire safe? Then we're planning for the future.

And that is the same thing we need to do for climate change. We're exercising the same muscle. Societally, we are refusing to bicker and get bogged down in conspiracy theories. And instead we're looking at the facts and doing what needs to be done. And that's the same thing we need to do to fight climate change more broadly. So I think we can exercise that muscle, if the federal picture is not good. There is a lot that we could be doing better in California. And by the way, for those of you who are listening in your state as well, if you don't live in California, your state could also be taking its own disaster

preparedness, its own pattern of development, its own battle to fight climate change more seriously, regardless of what's happening on a federal level. And I think the last thing I'll say about this is maybe that can chart us towards a better politics. My friend, Hamilton Nolan, who's an incredible writer, wrote a really great piece on the fires for his newsletter, which you can find on Substack, look for Hamilton Nolan, Substack.

He writes about how this change in disaster prone, the disaster prone nature of so many different states, California and Florida, and the change in how insurers might treat them could be a realignment in our politics. Local politicians doing what they have to do to protect their people and knowing they'll be thrown out on their ass if they don't,

could lead to, you know, states that are disaster prone being in coalition against states that, you know, don't want to suspend the money on that, et cetera. And so we, by preparing for disaster in this way, we might be able to take a step towards a politics that will fight climate change more effectively, at least that's the hope.

Yeah, I think that's all essentially, that's correct. I think it's a good encapsulation of some of the more disparate threads I've been trying to weave here. And I think that that is, I think, maybe the most realistically optimistic spin, I think, that we can put on all of this that's transpiring in this moment especially as we head

into the inauguration next week and thinking about what's going to come in the next several years you know i think the the confluence of disasters is is shocking and it's also not surprising from a physical perspective from a human geography, we know that there are more people living in harm's way than ever before. The expanding bullseye effect, as it's called. We know that there's climate change is making a lot of these underlying hazards worse. You know, there's widening socioeconomic inequality. All these things play into making disasters as they actually unfold on the ground worse. And, you know, each one of them is important,

but also each of these can be tackled, each of these contributing factors somewhat independently and at different scales of political aggregation. And so I think that's an important thing to remember. Well, Daniel, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show and for your work explaining what has happened to so many people. You're one of the most important communicators

on this in my view. You're so clear and knowledgeable and you cut to the heart of the story in a way that so few people in the media do. So I can't thank you enough for spending the time. If people wanna follow you and follow your work, where can they find you, especially your live streams, which I think are, you know,

have been really essential viewing during this time. Well, thanks for that, Adam. You can find me, as you mentioned, on YouTube, where I have both scheduled and emergency live sessions. My handle is at Weather West. I've also hosted the Weather West blog at weatherwest.com for over 15 years now, as hard as that is to to believe that's a fairly old website on the internet these days. I'm also all over social media and I'm really scaling up on blue sky these days at weatherwest but I've been on Twitter or X as it now is forever at weather underscore West so I'm

So I'm frankly pretty easy to find on the internet for better or for worse. Okay. Well, I hope folks go and give you a follow because your commentary has been beyond essential. Uh, and yeah, I can't thank you enough for being here. Thank you so much, Daniel. Thanks again for having me. I really, I think these conversations, uh, are, are, are very important. Thank you so much for being here.

Well, thank you once again to Dr. Swain for coming on the show. If you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you, head to Thank you so much to join them. If you want to come see me on the road, I want to remind you January 23rd through 25th, I'll be in Toronto, Ontario. February 12th, I'll be in Omaha, Nebraska. February 13th, I'll be in Minneapolis, Minnesota. February 21st, I'll be in Chicago, Illinois. February 23rd, Boston, and after that, Burlington, Vermont, London, Amsterdam, Providence, Rhode Island, a bunch of other great cities as well, head to adamconovert.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I wanna thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at Headgum for making the show possible.

Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time on Factually. I don't know. Hey! That was a HeadGum Podcast. Hey, it's Nicole Byer here. Let me ask you something. Are you tired of endless swiping on dating apps? Fed up with awkward first dates and disappointing hookups?

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