After LA Fires, Climate Experts Say There Is ‘No Safe Place in the US’

(Bloomberg) — Climate scientists are acutely aware of the devastation that a warming world can wreak on communities. But when disaster shows up at their doorstep, it hits in a completely different way.  

“This event, for me, has destroyed any boundary between my work as a climate scientist and the rest of my life, my family, my friends,” Benjamin Hamlington, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, wrote in a LinkedIn post after his home in Altadena burned in the Los Angeles fires. 

He’s not alone: More than 200 staff at JPL lost their homes in the blazes that razed swaths of LA. It was the second time in less than six months that climate experts were displaced by a weather disaster worsened by human-caused warming.In September,  Hurricane Helene-induced floods that ravaged Asheville, North Carolina, uprooted researchers who work for a federal climate data hub based in the city.  Even before these disasters, initiatives designed to help scientists impacted by war or civil unrest had begun turning their attention to extreme weather disasters. 

The losses underscore how the effects of climate change can reach anyone, anywhere, no matter how educated they are on the topic. Scientists are now finding themselves in the exact positions that they have researched and warned about. Nowhere is safe, they say.

The fires cast a pall over the proceedings at an annual American Meteorological Society meeting this month in New Orleans, where more than 7,000 people gathered.

Several JPL scientists had planned to attend the conference, but stayed behind in California to deal with the aftermath of the blazes. The flames narrowly missed the home of Duane Waliser, the chief scientist of JPL’s Earth Science and Technology Directorate. 

Waliser seemed exhausted as he stepped to the podium on Jan. 13 to deliver a scheduled lecture on how NASA’s data and climate science expertise could be used to mitigate climate risks — not just at its laboratories, but in the communities where its employees lived and worked, including Los Angeles. Waliser walked the audience through efforts to build a detailed climate adaptation plan for JPL to prepare for hazards such as landslides triggered by heavy rains from atmospheric rivers. After his talk, he pulled up a photo that showed flames pushing perilously close to his neighborhood in a canyon near the lab. At one point, embers from the Eaton fire reached his neighbor’s property. Waliser said he and a few other locals grabbed hoses to help keep the flames at bay until a fire crew arrived. “It was just horrendous,” he said.

Gale Sinatra, professor of psychology and education at the USC Rossier School of Education writes about the origins of doubt, denial and resistance toward climate science. A 2022 article called on psychologists to prepare for the coming rise in the number of people forced to move away from their homes because of climate change.Sinatra’s work sadly came to her doorstep this month. On Jan 7. she was playing card games and checking her phone for news about the Palisades fire, which at the time was 40 miles away. She felt safe. That was until a neighbor began banging on Sinatra’s front door saying he saw fire from his second-story window and urged her to evacuate. She grabbed an overnight bag and fled, but would never return home. It was engulfed by the Eaton fire. “I’ve written about climate refugees, and that this is going to happen,” she said. “And now I am one.”

It’s not only fires. Jared Rennie and his family endured nearly two months without drinkable  water through their taps after Hurricane Helene flooded Asheville, North Carolina, where he works as a meteorologist with the US National Centers for Environmental Information.

Before the floods, the city was considered a haven from climate change, nestled away from the reach of extreme weather that plagues other parts of the country. “I think it’s important to talk about it, to have people understand that this could happen to them,” Rennie said. “There’s no safe place in the US.” 

Scientists have expressed an ever-growing frustration that such catastrophes could have been avoided if governments, corporations and the public had heeded their decades of warnings that such disasters were possible if emissions weren’t curbed.

For years, Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who works for JPL, has tried to convey that the fossil fuel industry’s “disinformation” campaigns have long powered public climate denial and inaction. He moved from Altadena to Chapel Hill, North Carolina two years ago — in part because he was concerned about the possibility of a fire in his former community. 

“I certainly don’t think that the public has a clear sense that this is going to get worse,” he said. “It’s going to get worse as long as we burn fossil fuels.”

For others, experiencing a disaster first-hand has provided alarming insight into how the country has lagged on crucial technologies that could help limit weather-related damage in a warming world. 

Brianna Pagán, a PhD remote sensing expert, who works at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center, says communities need better real-time tools to help them navigate emergencies. (Both Pagán and Kalmus specified that they are speaking on their own behalf, and not on behalf of the federal agency where they work.)

Quickly and accurately transferring satellite data showing the location of fast-moving weather systems and fires to mobile phones is crucial to giving storm and fire evacuees real-time information that can save their lives, she says. “We’re trying to improve the pipelines getting satellite data into the hands of people that can really use it.” 

NASA makes its data publicly available, but doesn’t typically design apps that could move it to end users.  Watch Duty, the volunteer- and user-operated fire-alert app, uses some NOAA and NASA data. There is also NASA FIRMS, a global fire-monitoring tool.“We actually don’t have the access to the information in the US, where a lot of this tech is being developed,” she said. “When you become the humanitarian application, it’s a totally different perspective. Like, ‘Wow. This needs to be a public service.’”

After her home burned in the Palisades fire, Pagán ponders something that is on the minds of an ever-growing number of the population. “I love this place,” she said. “I love these mountains. But they might not be safe anymore. And absolutely climate change is part of that.”

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