Sunday Morning
By
January 19, 2025 / 9:58 AM EST
/ CBS News
Climate scientist: “There’s no place that’s safe”
The monster that roared through L.A. County last week is still alive – but firefighters seem to have it cornered. People have started returning to their homes, or what’s left of them. Insurance, if they had it, is a whole other battle.The focus now is turning from what happened to why it happened, and what in the world is next? This disaster is as bad as just about anybody here can remember … but is it really just the new normal?An aerial view of homes destroyed by the Palisades Fire, in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025.
Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
John Vaillant, author of “Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World,” said, “Nature is telling us, ‘I can’t take this anymore. I cannot support you if you keep treating me this way.'”Vaillant says climate change is making disasters like the wind-driven L.A. fires even fiercer. “We can expect fires of this intensity, and worse, in the future,” he said. “The types of fires we’ve seen over the past ten years are qualitatively different from the previous hundred years.””The types of fires are different?” I asked. “How has fire changed?”
Vintage
“In a number of ways. The most potent and frightening way, the most obvious to the layperson, people like us, is it moves faster and with greater intensity. When you talk to any firefighter with any sense of history, they are seeing different [fire] behavior that is, in many cases, un-fightable.” And Vaillant says the cause is something science has been telling us for decades: the CO2 that our combustion engines keep pumping into the atmosphere. “We don’t feel it; we don’t smell it; we don’t notice it,” he said. “But if you were to take the car engine that brought me here and set it up on the floor here and fired it up, we would go deaf, and then we would die from its emissions. And that’s under the hood of every internal combustion engine car. And there are hundreds of millions of them. So, the emissions from fire, these trillions of fires that we make every day, has created this artificially warm climate.”And so, he says, we get more intense fires … stronger hurricanes … and hotter heatwaves. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus has been sounding much the same alarm for years – and feels like, while he’s trying to share the science of climate change to the world, no one is listening. We met him in 2022 near his home in Altadena, California, just as he was about to move his family to North Carolina.”So, for a few years I wanted to move to some place a little bit less fiery,” he told us this week. “Bu