“Mother Earth is angry,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as wildfires raged across the western edge of the United States. “She’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … the climate crisis is real and has an impact.” The New York Times drove the same point home with a photograph that took up its entire front page: a smudge of blues, reds, oranges and browns that looked like a Rothko painting but was actually an unfiltered image of America’s infernal western sky. Much closer to home, Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest flooded grassland, was ablaze in another climate-related disaster – this one exacerbated by illegal deforestation.
Experts have warned of a cascade effect in California. The former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) resilience programmes told the New York Times the fires were “toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven’t imagined … It’s apocalyptic.” True, but a foreseeable apocalypse, particularly in a state where more than 160 million trees have died from a prolonged drought in the last decade. The scale and the ferocity of the fires are a consequence of these lost trees – essentially, firewood – and a symbol of larger problems that will continue to plague the state in an age of global heating. Beyond their immediate devastation the fires have also spread air pollution across several states and are contaminating water supplies with dangerous chemicals.
In the same week that half of the ten largest wildfires in California’s history were still active, polls indicated that public concern about the climate had fallen dramatically during the pandemic. This lends another twist to the stakes in the election since the Trump administration is set to formally withdraw from the Paris agreement the day after the polls. (Biden has promised to rejoin them, if elected.) That will determine whether other industrial nations will be allowed to ignore evidence that a changing climate is increasing the scope and intensity of natural disasters. It may mean the difference between a manageable future and one replete with lethal heatwaves and superstorms. As the hydroclimatologist and MacArthur Fellow Peter Gleick writes in the Guardian: “The links between human-caused climate change and extreme events are real, dangerous, and worsening …There is no time to waste.”
In the five years since the flawed but important Paris agreement was concluded, the earth has recorded its hottest years. The current natural disasters continue a trend of devastating wildfires in Australia, Brazil and California and intense heat waves in Europe and Asia. Last month the temperature in Death Valley even reached 54.4C – the hottest ever recorded. In the absence of concerted global action, all available evidence points to an even starker future. As climate scientist Philip Duffy wryly told the New York Times: “People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’ I always say no. It’s going to get worse.”
Political will is the main obstacle to progress on this issue. The science is clear and so, to a large extent, are the range of measures that would enable mitigation or management of the current situation. Five years ago the Paris accord built a framework for multilateral action, but Trump’s reelection would make further progress a forlorn hope. If granted a second term, Trump will likely delay global emissions reduction for at least a decade, extinguishing what little hope remains of a coordinated strategy to address the climate crisis. If that happens the current fires in California will be remembered as one of the final warnings that a distracted nation, and an indifferent world, ignored at their peril.
