Fighting wildfires in Los Angeles in January 2025.
Snow on the Gulf Coast in January 2025– in Mississippi.
Expose the lies spreading as climate change worsens
Responding to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, one victim declared, “in 100 years from now, people will remember this one." A week later, Hurricane Milton was called “the worst hurricane in a 1000 years.” These innocent hopes, unqualified, harbor a certainty that the past of occasional nasty events will repeat themselves. And if some climate change is acknowledged, it was only short term; the worsening climate damage, with a return to normalcy, is just around the corner. The truth is, the new pattern of disaster is not around the corner, but here. It is an increasing abnormality of ever more disastrous events driven by GHG (greenhouse gases), not just rising, but accelerating.
But there is a deeper, methodical deflection being employed by the fossil fuel industry here: do not tell the truth, but create myths and ingrain them in the public’s mind to distrust climate change and its brutality. What or who is at fault, are instead the incompetent liberal politicians, or a host of immediate factors. Avoid at all cost the mention of fossil fuel emissions, the hot house effects, or climate change. Take the last 18 months in the U.S. in this “divert and deflect blame” game.
In Maui, Hawaii in 2023, the siren system, high winds, the drought, the invasive plants, or in a few infrequent cases, a stumbling confession, climate as something alien and infrequent– were “at fault" for the devastating fire. Then came the driving conspiracies. A ”directed energy weapon” of misinformation emanated from China: the fire concealed an effort to relocate rural residents to cities to be better monitored. The fire was contrived to compel them to isolate indoors or to accept renewables. Climate oil and gas advocate Alex Epstein cutely declared, “The unnecessarily large wildfires in Maui were not caused by the slow warming of climate but by ‘green’ policies’ that prevented proper wildfire management."
In Florida in 2024, questionable narratives ran like these: that hurricanes Helene and Milton were the product of a man-made land grab in North Carolina; hurricanes were government efforts to disrupt voting in Republican districts; there were sound waves and microwave weapons. They were greed-fueled plots to benefit BlackRock investment. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) claimed that Hurricane Milton was a Democratic (D) conspiracy to harm Republicans in the elections. The hardliner Alex Jones claimed that the Pentagon had, through Helene and Milton, engineered the storms. Laura Ingram on Fox News accused the Biden-Harris administration of spinning misinformation to bypass a failed “rescue operation”-- of Kamala's desperate campaign, of Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) incompetence, and for using FEMA money on migrants.(1)
In Los Angeles in 2025, the blame game was directed at the mayor or governor or legislated water shortages. Adept journalists, including from that bastion of climate understanding, the New York Times, identified the cause as Santa Ana winds, dryness, lack of rain, arsonists, without a single token mention of the fossil fuels bringing the initial flood, then the hottest year ever, then a hellscape of powerful, igniting winds and fires, which destroyed 12,300 structures, which left men, women and children crying. More correctly, the blame should go to almost all leading, upper echelon politicians, Democrat or Republican, who hardly comprehend–may we say, are completely ignorant of?--how threatening climate change is.
More contradictions or dimming by blamers have now followed: The Biden administration or politicians could not control the wars in the Ukraine or Middle East, though they could control the weather or the fires at home. Questions arose as to, why was only LA so vulnerable, suggesting a local cause, and not why the US or the planet itself have become so vulnerable. Though his home was incinerated, actor Mel Gibson would suggest a local conspiracy was in play,: "I know they (politicians) were messing with the water, letting reserves go for one reason or another... And then in events like this, you sort of look, well, is it on purpose?” No questions were raised, suppressing the inevitable, when will this happen again or how do we get at the root cause?
These diversions and deflections need to be met head on. In our climate writing and face-to-face meetings, we should tell the hard, direct, and sad truth based on science, sharing our personal stories, and something concrete and tangible and widely understood, fossil fuels. Talking about climate change or high CO2 levels of 425 ppm is still too abstract.
There is no sole cause to climate events like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, landslides, especially recent unprecedented, devastating ones. But these events have attributing factors linking them to fossil fuels and higher greenhouse gas emissions, and ensuing rising global temperatures. Higher local temperatures and drought have shown strong links to higher evaporation rates, greater rainfalls, extreme winds, glacier melt, extreme downpours, earlier snowmelt, and even snow in Mississippi. All these make the entire planet and ultimately society more vulnerable to loss and damage at specific points. We are reaching, or have reached already, climate change tipping points. Some areas are more vulnerable, but no place is immune. The best formulation is that climate science attributes recent extreme weather events to climate change.
There are specific local factors that tie in to this, such as the showering of fiery embers, which can fly miles to ignite new fires. In the case of the California fires, all things became bone dry and vulnerable to a single spark. Linked to science, the fossil emission increases have led to warming, to drought, and then to extreme fire vulnerability. Blaming the fire on local incompetence deflects from the causes going back to higher greenhouse gas emissions.(2) In the case of Milton and Helene, an extremely warm Gulf of Mexico, and a high moisture content in the air brought on by climate change, combined to create deadly hurricanes.
If there was incompetence, it was the failure of politicians to look at the threat of fossil fuel combustion. As evangelist-scientist K. Hayhoe warns, this threat is literally about saving us.
As the ultimate, but not sole, source, combusted fossil fuels heat, destroy, kill, damage, eradicate, annihilate, maim but the companies making fuels make enormous profits. They favor those who produce them, the coal, gas and oil interests. Fossil fuel emissions threaten everywhere our homes, our pocket books, our right to life, our intelligence, our existence, including even the precious holdings of Mel Gibson.
(1) We, the Fridays for Future Newsletter, find it unwise to post links to climate misinformation, so they've not been given.
(2) Negative rain has a more science-based description called high vapor pressure deficit# in California. VPD is defined as the difference between the actual amount of moisture in the air and the amount of moisture that the air could hold if it were saturated. VPD has grown, mainly attributable to climate change. It made for drier air and dryer vegetation.
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