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On Hurricanes and Hoaxes: A Case for Finding Common Ground
Conspiracy theories offer an easy, emotionally satisfying answer to a complicated problem. Instead of facing the reality of climate change, or reckoning with their own complicity, people can choose a different story: that climate disasters are manipulated, that scientists are corrupt, and that the crisis is exaggerated for political gain.
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Trump’s Cuts to Federal Wildfire Crews Could Have “Scary” Consequences
President Donald Trump’s moves to slash the federal workforce have gutted the ranks of wildland firefighters and support personnel, fire professionals warn, leaving communities to face deadly consequences when big blazes arrive this summer. States, tribes and fire chiefs are preparing for a fire season with minimal federal support.
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Trump Says He’s Sending Water to LA. It’s Actually Going to Megafarms.
The president’s executive orders on California water will help irrigate Central Valley farms. They won’t do anything to fight wildfires.
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What It Takes to Regrow a Community After Wildfire
As it recovers, Altadena finds inspiration in other wildfire-devastated communities that have replanted lawns, gardens, and green spaces with fire-resistant native species.
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Can Voice-to-Text AI Help Scientists Predict Earthquakes?
By using automatic speech recognition designed to encode waveforms for translation, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory were able to modify this voice-to-text AI to correctly predict the timing of a slip during a repeating collapse sequence producing approximately magnitude-5 earthquakes at the Kīlauea volcano on Hawai’i.
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Perfect Storm: Megafires Set the Stage for Debris Flows
Storms now pounding Southern California are raising the specter of more danger for residents — debris flows in areas already reeling from devastating fires. Flows pose bigger threat than typical mudslides.
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Trump Wants States to Handle Disasters without FEMA. They Say They Can’t.
Trump has called the FEMA a “disaster” and suggested it might “go away.” He said states would best take care of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires on their own, with the federal government reimbursing some of the costs. But emergency managers say the federal agency’s role is irreplaceable.
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Huge Areas May Face Possibly Fatal Heat Waves if Warming Continues
A new assessment warns that if Earth’s average temperature reaches 2 degrees C over the preindustrial average, widespread areas may become too hot during extreme heat events for many people to survive without artificial cooling.
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Climate Change Primed LA to Burn — Catastrophically
A new analysis finds that human-caused warming helped dry out the vegetation that turned Los Angeles into a firestorm.
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How Emotions Influence How People Deal with Natural Disasters
Researchers led by a University of Montrel architecture professor look at how fear, anger and pride combine to shape responses to climate risks in four Latin American communities.
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In Times of Crisis, States Have Few Tools to Fight Misinformation
While officials in Southern California fought fire and falsehoods, Meta —the parent company of Facebook and Instagram —announced it would eliminate its fact-checking program in the name of free expression. As social media companies are pushing back against efforts to crack down on falsehoods, questions are asked about what, if anything, state governments can do to stop the spread of harmful lies and rumors that proliferate on social media.
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The L.A. Fires Show a Need to Rethink Our Wildland Firefighting Systems
As bad as the fires in the Los Angeles area have been—more than 12,000 structures burned, about 180,000 people evacuated, more than 35,000 acres scorched, and at least 25 deaths—they could have been even worse, but in some ways Angelenos got lucky. Asystem built on luck, however, is not a durable system. It is already strained, and it risks breaking down in a world of greater and more frequent wildfires.
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Climate Misinformation Is Rife on Social Media – and Poised to Get Worse
The decision by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to end its fact-checking program and otherwise reduce content moderation would open the floodgates to more climate misinformation on Meta’s apps, including misleading or out-of-context claims during disasters. Crowd-sourced debunking is no match for organized disinformation campaigns in the midst of information vacuums during a crisis. The conditions for the rapid and unchecked spread of misleading, and outright false, content could get worse with Meta’s content moderation policy and algorithmic changes.
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How America Courted Increasingly Destructive Wildfires − and What That Means for Protecting Homes Today
Over a century of fire suppression efforts have conditioned Americans to expect wildland firefighters to snuff out fires quickly, even as people build homes deeper into landscapes that regularly burn. Over time, extensive fire suppression, home construction in high fire-risk areas and climate change have set the stage for the increasingly destructive wildfires we see today.
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What Mercenaries Can Teach Us About Climate-Fueled Disaster Responses
The devastating fires in Southern California, many of which are still burning out of control, have exposed a controversial and increasingly attractive disaster response alternative that engages the private sector.
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The long view
Trump Aims to Shut Down State Climate Policies
President Donald Trump has launched an all-out legal attack on states’ authority to set climate change policy. Climate-focused state leaders say his administration has no legal basis to unravel their efforts.