Come on Baby, Light My Fire
When the Santa Ana winds pick up, you know it. These are surprisingly hot winds, with gusts of 40 miles per hour or higher. The streets of Los Angeles smell like a Boy Scout fire. The odor one smells is not S’mores cooking but rather Malibu homes ablaze. These fancy homes are located in fire zones. The rest of the country fixates on great television videos of multi-million-dollar Malibu celebrity homes burning down. Local media reports have reported that actors Matthew McConaughey and Minnie Driver were among those forced to evacuate in a recent fire, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bass guitarist Flea’s home was destroyed by the flames. A text message from the rock star said his US$10.5-million mansion had “burnt to a crisp.”
Today, climate modelers are uncertain whether climate change will increase fire risk. On the one hand, Los Angeles is predicted to receive 50 percent less rain than it does now, and the combination of less rain and more summer heat means a drier landscape that is more prone to fires. On the other hand, the frequency of Santa Ana winds is predicted to decline as the eastern deserts warm. Within Los Angeles, there is significant variation in the exposure to fire risk. People in the center city of Los Angeles or even Westwood face little risk from these fires, but in other areas such as Malibu, there could be significant fire risk posed by climate change.
There are several possible coping strategies to protect the city against future fire risk caused by climate change. The simplest would be to reduce new housing construction in fire zone regions by requiring homeowners there to pay significantly more for fire insurance. Alternatively, these households could be offered lower insurance premiums if they build their homes with fire-resistant materials and landscape their property so that their homes are less prone to fire risk. Although I hope that local political leaders would support such “safety first” policies, I am pessimistic that these policies could be adopted. Landowners would complain that these proposals represent a property “taking,” stripping them of their development rights and exposing them to the whims of price gouging insurance companies. They would argue that their 3,000-square-foot houses should have the same home insurance premiums as similar homes built elsewhere in Los Angeles. They would say that they are being discriminated against.
On some level, they are right. Different parcels of land face different risks from climate change’s new blows. Those who own land in areas that we now know are risky (due to climate change) are losers. I am not convinced that society owes them compensation for losing a bet. Similar to the developers of the St. Louis hotels located in a flood plain, these fire zone landowners want to flip a one-sided coin. They want access to cheap insurance that bails them out if a nasty fire occurs, but they also want the right to live there as if the area is not at elevated risk because of climate change. If we are serious about tackling climate change, we need to design credible incentives to push more economic activity (and multimillion- dollar homes) away from geographical areas that are increasingly at risk because of climate change.
Consider fire protection in California communities at the wildland/urban interface. The biggest danger is where suburban communities abut forest lands, in counties such as Marin, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara. In areas such as the Sierra Nevada foothills and the interior areas in Southern California, the scenery is beautiful but at greater risk from fire as climate change raises temperatures and reduces rainfall. When forest fires occur, a large amount of damage to life and property can quickly take place. California budgets $519 million for fighting wildfires, with an emergency $182-million fund. The state fights the fires with prison inmates; 4,400 are trained each year to do the grunt work. Given California’s current large fiscal deficit, the governor has been planning to release prisoners earlier. An unintended consequence of this money-saving plan is a smaller firefighting force.
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17 Comments
Add CommentI really wanted to like this piece, but it relies too much on intellectual shortcuts. The anecdote about the writer's mother-in-law on page 7 is a prime example. The water agency is trying to cut water use by incentivizing saving, but the writer believes this is silly because his MIL got a check for cutting her water usage, when in reality she was overseas and hence her water use fell. Are you really using a single anecdote that relies on an outlying phenomenon (i.e., not everyone can afford to spend a whole month traveling in Italy) to dispute the generally accepted notion that financial incentives can influence human behavior? The same goes for example of how Candy Spelling's giant estate pays less per gallon of water used than the writer does. Is one rich person's anomalous water bill enough to toss out the entire idea of tiered rates? Finally, your view of L.A. is way too westside-centric. You should hang out in some other neighborhoods a bit. The fact that a handful of UCLA students won't venture downtown proves nothing. Oh, and you misspelled the mayor's name.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.notenoughtowaste.org/notenoughtowaste/Headwaters.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome of your facts are not totally correct, we do get 15 inches of rain not 11 and not everybody wastes water, check out more facts about Securing LA water future here. http://www.notenoughtowaste.org/notenoughtowaste
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCurious. So Cal is heading towards the coolest summer on record. July 8 saw the lowest maximum high in 132 years of record keeping in San Diego. Lowest record highs breaking decades old records have occurred continuously this summer on the California coast. Didn't we have record snows this winter back east? And where exactly are the hurricanes the ;ast four years now? Certainly makes on wonder how this stuff is measured.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBTW, everyone talks about how bad LA/OC is but nobody seems to be leaving, apparently even you. That's why the song say's 'We love it!'. After an awesome day today around the pool it should be obvious to the most effete Eastern snob.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndeed, climate is an important factor for attracting people living in LA, but LA has many different characteristics from other region for its charm. It's really interesting that the author discusses the climate issue on an economic view.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs one lucky enough to take my family and escape the cesspool of SoCal, I can't imagine that anyone still believes the false claims that LA is some sort or nirvana or desirable in any way. The traffic alone is reason enough to hate the place. I live 65 miles from the nearest freeway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost of the article is about water. Typical LA attitude that the author thinks that water should be taken from farmers for the lawns of the city. What don't you understand about the fact that WE GROW YOUR FOOD!
Now that LA is just Tijuana Norte, I'm very happy that I don't live in Mexifornia anymore.
What is the reasonable/fair method of calculating the appropriate use of energy/resources by nation states on planet earth??? Should it be based on the resources used per person or per square mile???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow may we support you? Your invention is desperately needed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Climate change cant alter the blue skies or access to the beach and mountains, but it will pose four tangible threats: The summers will grow hotter, the air will be smoggier, there will be more fires, and there will be much less water."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk, is it just me or how bi-polar is this statement? sure, whatever we do here won't affect the fact that there are stars overhead either.... WTF? worry, but, don't worry? at some point, this "writer" needs to take a stand and quit taking the middle road. its not all about profit. at some point, you have to take a stand - that is, if you believe in something.
the author is talking like a fool, you should pay more attention at how to exist in the earth longer, if you are all gone with the bad climate economy is zero, all things are 000000000
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI take issue with a couple points. One is on the subway where you say it will have 200,000 riders a year. The current subway has 150,000 riders per day not per year, so basically you calculation is off by a factor of 365. That $1,000 taxi ride just went to $3.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, you claim that the skies will become smoggier. As you correctly stated, air pollution has dropped dramatically in the last 30-40 years and continues to drop. With the advent of electric cars and more technological improvements this will likely continue, but you suddenly give a more doomsday scenario because of warmer weather. Also, warm weather is not necessarily a producer of smog. Los Angeles suffers from an inversion layer of cooler air below warmer air. If the cool air does not come in from the coast this inversion does not happen so warmer days are not necessarily the most smoggy. This is often true today as the warmest days are generally not the smoggiest inland necessarily.
Hard to get past the first page of name-dropping and tourist advertising. Kahn and his wife must be up for the next Real Housewives of L.A. Who the hell would read his stupid bool?This guy is just putting lipstick on a pig and calling it beautiful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real issue is...where do these giant metro areas like L.A. and Vegas get their water? The reality is that they steal it from others. By doing so they desire to create a serfdom where the lowly rural inhabitants only exist to serve their city-dwelling masters. The most valuable commodity is fresh water.
The only way to stop the madness is to abandon the growth economy model and concentrate on a sustainable future. Mexifornia (nice one, notslic) is the present model for a failed state, with its $20 billion deficit and plan to again start handing out IOU's for the services it purchases. When it goes down the toilet, it will only end up where all the rest of its sewage does...3 miles out to sea.
"The summers will grow hotter, the air will be smoggier, there will be more fires, and there will be much less water", Matthew Kahn is talking Global Warming. The evidence for GW has evaporated. LA has bigger problems than climate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I arrived in SoCal 1972 from the NorthEast, I watched heat-infused sunsets, drank margueritas, ate chile rellenos, and thought I was in heaven (and picked up a BSEE). Having been to all 50 states and many countries, I still think SoCal is heaven. Please consider Shakespeare by the beach or opera at the Dorothy Chandler, cocktails at the Biltmore or dinner at the old train station. Take in the LA Marathon or volunteer at a soup kitchen. What's a little humidity? It's a very elastic and accepting social environment. And, very adaptable. Being rich is not how much you have but how little you need.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Almost everyone in Los Angeles was not born here."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHint...the vast majority of the Hispanic kids are NOT ousiders. They were born in greater LA. As were Vietnamese. Chinese, etc.
There are also outright twisted facts about precipitation, recent tremperatures, etc.
Are there no editors at Scientific American to weed out fluffy nonsense articles full of errors?
To me, it's clear that LA is not going to "adapt" so much as how the rest of the world is going to need to change. Different technologies and the use of completely clean power generation (say fusion in the future) could in fact make it very viable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe'll see
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