Brunswick Beacon, 01.23.25
It’s January and L.A. is burning, with 27 dead and 12,300 structures incinerated. Historically, L.A.’s “fire season” was May-October. Climate change made it a year-round nightmare.
Warmer oceans brought record rainfall from 2022-2024, filling reservoirs but also fueling brush growth. When drought conditions returned, ferocious Santa Ana winds fanned brush fires into firestorms.
Massive swings from drought to deluge and back, called “weather whiplash,” increase as man-made greenhouse gases warm the Earth. That worsens the severity and frequency of flash floods and wildfires, according to a study published January 9 in the journal, Nature.
Trump claims California’s governor refused to sign a “water restoration declaration” and opposed plans to redirect water from northern to southern California. Politifact says Trump is wrong: there never was such a document; farmers, not L.A., would have gotten the redirected water; and southern California’s reservoirs are already at historic highs.
Civil engineers say the problem is unprecedented weather events. We never needed to design and build enormously expensive city water systems to fight massive wildfires across multiple neighborhoods. We do now, because of man-made climate change.
Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, is an oil industry CEO. He said, “burning to death in a fire is pretty grim but that’s not what’s happening like climate zealots would like you to believe.”
Insurers are not climate zealots. Their business is accurately assessing risk, and they take climate change seriously. Some stopped insuring homes in California, Florida and Louisiana.
Nationwide Insurance dropped 10,525 North Carolina households at severe risk from climate change. Brunswick County, which suffered three thousand-year floods from Hurricane Joaquin (2015), Hurricane Florence (2018) and 2024’s September storm, experienced a 67.5% increase in non-renewals since 2018. Last year, insurers sought a rate hike for Brunswick County’s beach communities of 99.4%!
Trump calls climate change a hoax because talk is cheap. Insurers hike rates and cancel policies because climate change is expensive.
Vince Amoroso
Sunset Beach
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