What the wildfires portend

The wildfires raging in California’s Los Angeles serve, again, as reminders of the dangers posed by climate change to lives and the way they are lived on earth. The areas destroyed by the fires include some of the richest and glitziest in the world. They have been reduced to rubble and ashes in a matter of hours or days. Thousands of acres have gone up in flames and some of the richest persons and celebrities have been forced to abandon their mansions. Many lives have been lost and plants and trees have been destroyed. Fire forces of the world’s top nation have been unable to bring the conflagration under control. This is not the first time that wildfires have damaged California. It has been prone to these fires because of its climate, geography and other features. Other places on earth with different features, meanwhile, remain vulnerable to other forms of climate disaster – these incidents are growing in scale and intensity.

The fires are extreme climate events like cyclones, typhoons, floods, droughts and other natural disasters that have hit the world more frequently in recent years, causing loss of lives and displacement of people. Sea levels have risen, icebergs and glaciers have melted, and seasons and known natural phenomena to which all living things are used are changing. The world has gone beyond the 1.5°C limit set for temperature rise by the Paris climate meet. There is wide agreement that this is because of the warming of the earth, caused by the increased burning of fossil fuels and emission of greenhouse gases. This increase has accelerated over the years, in spite of attempts to control it.

America is witnessing an extreme climate event when an extreme denier of climate change, Donald Trump, is set to take office as President. He has maintained that the idea of climate change is a Chinese conspiracy against America. He is likely to undo whatever meagre measures have been taken in America to reduce the emissions. It has been estimated that Trump’s actions and non-actions can add four billion tonnes of carbon emissions to the atmosphere by 2030. But beyond Trump, the world is guilty of failing to do the minimum needed to slow down the warming and the climate change. A climate scientist has said that he shifted, two years ago, from Pasadena in Los Angeles – which has been ravaged by fire – to a safer location because he knew it was coming. However, the intensity and frequency of these extreme events show that soon, we could be running out of our safe-location options.