The Reality Hollywood Can't Change
We recall the catastrophic fires in Maui almost two years ago, then the horde of unusually violent hurricanes trashing Florida's west coast. To the surprise of many, those storms unleashed cataclysmic flooding in western North Carolina, up there in the mountains. All these extreme weather events were tied in part to warming temperatures. As for wiping out large parts of an entire civilization, though, nothing can match the wildfires torching community after community in and around Los Angeles.
But in the case of Los Angeles, the problem isn't just climate change. It's the climate itself.
Hollywood could build outdoor sets resembling New Guinea's tropical rainforests. But that didn't change the reality that California, as much of the West, is arid and has always been. Warming temperatures make it more arid.
Los Angeles is drier than Beirut. Sacramento is as dry as the Sahel, an African region bordering the Sahara Desert. Even San Francisco gets only a bit more rain than Chihuahua. Across the border in Reno, annual precipitation is seven inches. Florida and Louisiana can see that much rainfall in a day. Climate change threatens them, too, but with flooding.
These grim statistics were laid out almost 40 years ago by Marc Reisner in his masterpiece, "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water." He describes the parched reality of our West and the extreme measures -- all those dams and irrigation projects -- taken to hide that fact.
In 1878, the explorer John Wesley Powell drew a line down the North American midsection, from Manitoba down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and into Mexico. It was the "Hundredth Meridian" -- the 100th line of longitude west, dividing the humid East from the drier West.
Americans moving west tried to recreate the world of green lawns and golf courses left behind in Kentucky and Wisconsin. Deserts have their own beauty, but many didn't see it. For a long time, Reno banned water metering.
There was not a tree growing in what's now San Francisco when Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed into the bay in 1775. "Today," Reisner wrote, "Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel." The same kind of water system supplies the ravaged neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
And so the new inhabitants started off with an uphill climb to stave off and hide the West's natural dryness. But climate change is most certainly defeating many of these efforts as it makes dry areas dryer.
And climate scientists now fear that many places are getting hotter than their earlier models predicted. That seems to be especially the case in locations where large numbers of people live.
President-elect Donald Trump vows to undo President Joe Biden's ambitious agenda to address climate change and move the country -- and world -- away from planet-warming fossil fuels. Trump has shown himself useless in addressing this existential threat, denying it even exists.
California is obviously no stranger to calamitous fires. The 2018 Camp Fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills leveled the town of Paradise, destroying more than 18,000 structures and killing 85 people.
The Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other currently ravaged areas are densely populated. Their firefighting infrastructure was created to put out house fires, not massive conflagrations whipped by the Santa Ana winds.
Many burned-out residents valiantly vow to rebuild. Can they adjust to living in increasingly arid conditions? They will have to.
America, meanwhile, faces a new leadership in Washington pathologically hostile to confronting climate change. But even after the Trump era passes into bizarre memory, the American West will be arid. God made it that way.
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Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.
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