Alongside actual news about the awful wildfires plaguing Los Angeles, the front page of Sunday’s New York Times lead story slot featured more doomsaying environmental religion by the paper’s long-time true-believing environmental reporter David Gelles, along with the equally activist climate desk reporter Austyn Gaffney: “Fires in Los Angeles Area Are Grim Look Into Future – Warming Will Make Disasters Worse, Experts Say.”
(What would be do without “experts”?)
As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement on Friday that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.
With temperatures rising around the globe and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the world has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.
The same "dangerous era" the world has been entering for at least a decade, according to the media.
Around the globe, extreme weather and searing heat killed thousands of people last year and displaced millions, with pilgrims dying as temperatures soared in Saudi Arabia. In Europe, extreme heat contributed to at least 47,000 deaths in 2023. In the United States, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades.
“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”
(Gelles, who brings religious fervor to his crusading reporting, conducted a fawning interview with Gore and his fight against fossil fuels in 2023.)
Although it is not possible to say with certainty as any specific weather event unfolds whether it was caused by global warming, the Los Angeles fires are being driven by a number of conditions that are becoming increasingly common on a hotter planet.
Nothing was said about government incompetence in the famously liberal state. Meanwhile, the same press that has no problem fingering Republican officials for blame for natural disasters (see George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina in 2005) huffed about Republicans doing the same for Democrats.
As the Los Angeles fires consumed some of the most valuable real estate in the world, an unfolding tragedy became fodder for political attacks.
....
....on Thursday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an ally of Mr. Trump, inserted himself into the debate over the role climate change plays in wildfires.
“Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim,” Mr. Musk wrote to his 211 million followers on X, the social media site he owns. He said the loss of homes was primarily the result of “nonsensical overregulation” and “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water.”
Gelles fiercely opposed any idea that distracted from the pursuit of his Great White Whale, “climate change.”
Those claims were rebutted by scientists, who noted that, as humans continue to warm the planet with emissions, extreme weather is becoming more common.
In Los Angeles, residents displaced by the fires watched in exasperation as the unfolding disaster was politicized.
Gelles arrogantly declared a direct correlation between carbon emission rates and rising world temperatures, and confidently claimed Hurricane Helene was "made worse by climate change."
But the world is not getting emissions under control. In fact, last year countries released record amounts of planet warming gases into the atmosphere, even as the consequences of climate change have become painfully clear. U.S. efforts to cut emissions largely stalled last year.
The inevitable result: more heat and more extreme weather.
He ended with environmental doomsaying straight out of Revelation.
Heat waves. Drought. Fires. Superstorms. Floods. Mudslides. These are the growing threats of a rapidly warming world, and scientists say nowhere is entirely protected from the effects of climate change.
