How Climate Change Has Fueled L.A.’s Devastating Wildfires: ‘We Have Unleashed Forces Beyond Our Control’
variety.comEnvironmental Media Association for 25 years. “We’re still going to have climate change. We’ve had an industrial world since the early 1900s, so this has been going on for 100-plus years into our atmosphere, and we’re dealing with it now.
For some reason, there’s still a blindness when it comes to the questions of how local communities need to deal with it.” Wildfires are a natural and even necessary part of the region’s desert ecosystem.
The pain and suffering for humans is magnified by more than a century of expanded residential development in areas that are prone to fire, mudslides, drought as well as unpredictable amounts of rain and snow.
And all of this is made worse by the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere driving climate change around the globe. “Here’s the paradox: Climate change is humanly induced and is making the fire season far worse,” says Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and founding director of the school’s California Center for Sustainable Communities. “Although we always have had a fire season — these places have burned in the past — the extreme weather has become accelerated.
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