Malibu burned as predicted on Radio Ecoshock in 2019 by late American Author Mike Davis. Meanwhile, the mystery of hot 2023 and 24 is solved. NASA scientist George Tselioudis reports shrinking cloud cover as planet warms. Plus: the rate of CO2 change can weaken the Gulf Stream/AMOC that keeps UK and Scandinavia warm. Important new science from Dr. Camille Hankel.
Fire, clouds, and currents this week on Radio Ecoshock. Welcome.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
*** SUPPORT THIS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
Jeff Bezos does not own Radio Ecoshock. Nobody has a say about this content other than the host and you the listeners. For years, this weekly radio show reaches tens of thousands of listeners a week, plus podcasts all over the world. The blog tries to help you learn and get straight to prime sources. It costs money to give all this away, strange as that sounds. There are server costs for large audio files downloaded 24/7, equipment, distribution costs, all sorts of things. If you can help, please make a one-time donation or sign up for a low-cost monthly pledge. I appreciate your help and support in these difficult times.
Alex
****************
RAIN, DROUGHT & WHIPLASH
… set the fire landscape for L.A. burning
Likely you already heard too much about big fires in Los Angeles in week one of 2025. Strong Santa Anna winds are well known, but flash droughts and water whiplash are not. Southern California got lots of rainfall – and snowpack in the mountains, from 2022 until about Spring this year. The Chaparral plants on hills and valleys thrived. Then they dried to tinder by this fall.
The back and forth change from drought to rainfall – an instability in hydrology – is covered in a new paper by Dr. Daniel Swain. I would call for an interview but no chance of that until later this month. Swain runs the very popular “Weather West” blog. His “virtual office hours” for the public on YouTube during these fires were the best, much better than any of the networks. Swain took us to Watch Duty, a fabulous source, then to weather maps, to trail cams to check for fire – it was masterful.
Daniel just started a new job at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources as a climate scientist in the California Institute for Water Resources. Swain looked a little pale on YouTube. He was working through a respiratory infection, and still the best. I hope to catch him later when the fires and illness die down. Find Daniel Swain on BlueSky here.
*********************
FAST FIRES WITH JENNIFER BALCH
Before we get to our scientist guests, I want to point to two Radio Ecoshock sources. Last November I interviewed Associate Professor Jennifer Balch about “The fastest-growing and most destructive fires in the US (2001 to 2020)”. She wanted us all: the importance of a fire is not based on it’s final size, but how fast it grows in the beginning. That determines the damage on human scales, and we sure saw prime examples of “fast fires” roaring through Los Angeles. Check out that 18 minute interview if you missed it.
Listen to or download this 18 minute interview with Jennifer Balch in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
As Brooke Jarvis sums that paper up on BlueSky:
“A study last year found that the most dangerous fires aren’t the biggest, but the FASTEST, the ones that, like those in LA right now, explode into thousands of acres within a day. In California, since the year 2000, such fires have increased by 400%.”
*************************
MIKE DAVIS: MALIBU BURNING
In 1990, California author, scholar and social critic Mike Davis explained why California would burn. He’s the author of well-known works like “The Ecology of Fear” and “Planet of the Slums”. Mike was Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review.
After massive California fires in 2018, I called him up. He recalled fires in Los Angeles and San Diego and zeroed in on Malibu as the prime target. And here we are with Malibu burned. Let’s take a quick listen to Mike Davis on Malibu burning, compared to the Paradise fire that destroyed 15,000 structures and killed almost a 100 people. The news is different for rich and poor.
Listen to or download my 29 minute interview with Mike Davis in CD Quality
Mike Davis is still essential reading to rethink the new war of authority against the masses, or wealth against justice. I put a partial transcript of this 2019 interview, where we talk about fires in California, and Malibu in particular, at the bottom of this blog.
================================
CLOUDS THE WARMING CULPRIT
GEORGE TSELIOUDIS
Satellites show more energy is staying on Earth instead of bouncing back into space. The sun did not change. So why were the last two years significantly hotter than any recorded before? For scientists it became a race to find the cause. Now we have a confident answer – based not on theories or models, but raw observations. Blame the clouds.
George Tselioudis is a Research Physical Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Tselioudis came through physics to meteorology and entered the early days of climate science. Crunching 40 years of satellite records, George recently led a team analyzing cloud cover on Earth. They found the world’s storm-cloud zones are contracting. The land and sea are getting less shade, leading to record heating. This is breaking knowledge.
Listen to or download this 16 minute interview with George Tselioudis in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Tselioudis knows former NASA scientist James Hansen well. George was a co-author with Hansen on the key 2023 paper “Global Warming in the Pipeline”. Hansen and Leon Simons pointed to sulfur reductions in ship emissions as a probable cause of the recent spike in warming and Earth energy imbalance. They found fewer clouds over shipping lanes in the Pacific. Is that enough to explain extra energy, and are these the cloud changes George covers in his two recent papers?
Tselioudis tells us the shipping emissions and cloud changes from that are significant in warming since 2020. But he looked for more. His recent two papers are not about cloud changes in the shipping lanes, but over all the world – although it is easier in satellite observations to map cloud cover over oceans. The Southern Hemisphere is included in Tselioudis’ cloud studies for example.
Clouds form most thickly and readily in three zones of Earth: the Intertropical Convergence Zone or ITCZ hovering around the Equator – and then two bands of storm tracks over the mid-latitudes both south and north. Different changes can be measured in each zone. Paradoxically, some changes in cloud cover are acting to cool the Earth while others allow more warmth. The team has to tally up vast amounts of satellite observations to figure out the grand total effect on global climate.
THE VERDICT IS IN
The verdict is in: cloud cover is decreasing where it matters most, near the Equator. That added solar energy, registering as heat, is stronger than the solar energy reflected by cloud changes further north or south.
The paper Abstract says:
“The results show that the circulation component of the cloud radiative changes, which manifests itself as a contraction of the midlatitude storm zones and the tropical rainy zone, is the dominant term in the solar reflection trend causing decreased sunlight reflection of 0.37 W/m2 per decade. The discovery of this component provides a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of the 21st century increase of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance and points to the large effect that even small atmospheric circulation changes have on the Earth’s warming climate.”
Tselioudis and his team are pretty confident they have found a key “smoking gun” behind the abnormal heat and disruption of 2023 and 2024. There has been so much debate about this, after scientists were caught off guard by the magnitude of recent warming. They weighed in with different theories. But Tselioudis and colleagues are not relying on a theory. They are reporting observations from space. That makes this sound science. I don’t think this breakthrough is getting the attention it deserves.
The paper is: “Contraction of the World’s Storm-cloud Zones the Primary Contributor to the Recent Increase in Cloud Radiative Warming”
I found a Preprint here.
In 2019, NASA’s Tapio Schneider suggested there was a tipping point in cloud formation, especially the tropical stratocumulus decks of low cloud that helped cooled the tropics. The amount of CO2 for the tipping point was unknown, but much higher than today, perhaps above 1200 parts per million CO2. If those tropic clouds do not form, Schneider et al suggest a warming increase of 8 degrees C, on top of whatever else humans have caused. That is hopefully far away, or never. But what if we are dealing not with a tipping point, but a progression, which this new paper brings to light? George agrees, saying most tipping points follow a progressive change.
Do we know if there are new points of stability, or clouds continue to decrease, leading to more warming, leading to fewer clouds – a positive feedback loop? Is this something that could be moderated by creating new clouds – geoengineering with sulfates or other methods?
Find a handy YouTube video about this new cloud paper here.
===================
RECORD CO2 DRIVES AMOC COLLAPSE
…toward big freeze for UK, Scandinavia, N. Europe?
CAMILLE HANKEL
What could force the great ocean current known as the Gulf Stream to stop warming the UK, Scandinavia and Northern Europe? In our 2021 show, Johannes Lohmann explained the rate of ice melt drives further weakening of the ocean current. Technically it is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC. If that weakens – or collapses – the largest single disaster in human history might unfold: a mini-ice age for the North Atlantic countries in the middle of a hotter planet. We need to know when and why.
The title of Lohmann’s paper is: “Risk of tipping the overturning circulation due to increasing rates of ice melt” in PNAS Feb. 22, 2021.
Listen to or download this 26 minute interview with Camille Hankel in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
New science finds another key new factor. It is not just the amount of carbon we emit, but how fast, that affects the AMOC system. Dr. Camille Hankel published the new paper in December 2024 in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Camille is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington specializing in Atmosphere and Geospace Sciences. Her previous four papers (as lead author) are about Arctic sea ice stability and “Abrupt Winter Arctic Sea Ice Loss”. Her new paper is “The effect of CO2 ramping rate on the transient weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”, published in PNAS December 23rd, 2024.
For what it’s worth, if the AMOC does collapse, or is in the process of collapsing now – previous science finds the mighty current eventually returns. Meanwhile agriculture in the UK, Scandinavia, and Northern Europe gets devastated by year after year of smashing cold. In our interview, Hankel explains how a failed AMOC leads to excess salt levels in the Southern Ocean, due to broken transport links. If I understood Camille correctly, this salt imbalance eventually bleeds north and recreates the north Atlantic currents as nature tries to find a balance. AMOC can be reborn – a hundred years later? a thousand?
We have other related science on tipping points in AMOC: the analysis of ice cores led by NOAA’s Ben Riddell-Young (new science, interview pending) showing relatively rapid shifts can happen in tens to hundreds of years due to ice water inputs from melting glaciers (like Greenland).
And don’t forget this important paper from Rene M. van Westen et al in Science Advances: “Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course”.
MORE SEA ICE OR LESS?
From Lohmann and others we heard how glacier melt can speed up collapse of this key ocean current in the North Atlantic. This paper by Hankel is my first time encountering a direct connection between carbon dioxide emissions and weakening AMOC. The new paper suggests a scenario where a slowing AMOC gets weaker through a feed-back effect involving expanding sea ice. Actually the chain of events is more complex, but let’s talk about sea ice. Most science, and your previous four papers, forecast the opposite: continued sea ice loss as warming arrives. But there is a scenario where sea ice could increase.
Figure 2 in Hankel’s paper shows a “bifurcation” – two pathways for sea ice during AMOC weakening. With a rapid CO2 increase, sea ice could re-grow because the high latitude ocean, at least on the Atlantic side, would cool as the warm currents fail. At a slower CO2 increase, there is minimal interruption of ocean heat transfer, and sea ice steadily retreats. It might still go either way.
ABRUPT WINTER SEA ICE LOSS
Camille led the 2023 paper “An approach for projecting the timing of abrupt winter Arctic sea ice loss”, and two papers before that on Arctic sea ice.
Most guests talk about an ice-free Arctic in the summer, probably at a peak in September and then back to freezing in winter. That could come in the next ten years some suggest. We do not hear much about a year-round open Arctic Ocean, with very little winter sea ice. Hankel has studied this. On our current course of warming, an open Arctic Ocean in winter hovers between “possible” and “likely” – but we don’t yet know when. The National Snow and Ice Data Center only says: “Under a high-emission scenario, sea ice may disappear from the Arctic in all months before the year 2100.”
For more on winter sea ice loss (an ice-free Arctic) and whether such a tipping or bifurcation point exists, see this 2023 paper led by Hankel and Eli Tziperman: “An approach for projecting the timing of abrupt winter Arctic sea ice loss”.
In the interview, Camille cites:
Geophysical Research Letters – Research Letter Open Access
Impacts and State-Dependence of AMOC Weakening in a Warming Climate
Katinka Bellomo, Oliver Mehling 13 May 2024.
ON ABRUPT WINTER LOSS see also this 2020 paper led by Hankel, written when she was at Harvard: “The Role of Atmospheric Feedbacks in Abrupt Winter Arctic Sea Ice Loss in Future Warming Scenarios”.
=================
ONWARD AND UPWARD
This year has already been a little too exciting. Deep below the drumbeat of disaster news and social fear, Radio Ecoshock will continue to search the science that explains the present and maybe the real future.
If you made it this far into the endless weekly blog, I know you are a true companion on the road. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
=========
For more on Mike Davis check out this excerpt from 1998 book “Ecology of Fear”: “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”
MIKE DAVIS RADIO ECOSHOCK INTERVIEW: MALIBU FIRES 2019 TRANSCRIPT
Here is a transcript of an excerpt from my 2019 interview with Mike Davis, more true than ever as Los Angles tries to emerge from the flames.
This is Radio Ecoshock with your host, Alex Smith. When California burned in 2018, I thought of Mike Davis. In the early 19 nineties, Davis wrote books explaining why all this was inevitable. Davis grew up in Southern California, where he became a powerful leftist voice and a celebrated author. From “The Ecology of Fear” to “Planet of Slums”, everyone has felt ripples from his work.
Mike Davis is a distinguished professor in creative writing at the University of California Riverside and an editor of The New Left Review. Mike Davis, welcome to Radio EcoShock.
[Mike Davis] A nice to be on.
[Alex Smith] In your 1992 book, “The Ecology of Fear” you wrote a lot about human incursion into fire areas and the inevitable blowback of wildfires into suburbs and monster homes in Malibu. How does that feel after the terrible fires hit both Southern and Northern California in late 2018?
[MD] I often write about things that personally terrify me, and I’ve seen Los Angeles burn and San Diego, where I now live, burn too many times not to be frightened by the phenomena. So I take no pleasure of indication in what’s happened. But these fires and it’s, you know, in a terrible but persistent way, underlying the inequalities that govern California today. Any inequalities in terms of housing of income and of access to the wild areas of of the state. And, I recently wrote something called a tale of 2 fires contrasting the Paradise Fire, which destroyed 15,000 structures and killed almost a 100 people, with the Malibu Fire, which destroyed 1500 structures and killed 3 or 4 people.
[AS] Yes. I know that in Paradise, California, I was talking to some folks there, and they said that it was mainly a low income community and few had fire insurance. And now, incidentally, Donald Trump wants to cut off FEMA aid to California fire victims. My question, are the poor set up for a big fall as climate driven disasters roll through these unsustainable lifestyles?
[MD] Well, on a global scale, I think we can speak of a kind of, triage and advance that’s occurred that basically contemporary debates on climate change, the huge resistance not only to reducing carbon footprints, but to providing the kind of 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars of aid that are necessary to adapt the most vulnerable and expose communities to inevitable rising sea levels and droughts and to the loss of agricultural land, absolutely, it’s first and above all a question of the earth’s poor.
*********
In California, with the wildfires which undoubtedly have a component of that anthropogenic climate change in their causality. You see 2 forms of inequality in paradise, the case that people who were unable to find housing priced out of the housing market, even in the Central Valley, the coast has become so unaffordable that Californians have moved into the Central Valley and other inland areas in the search of affordable housing. Many of the people in Paradise can afford even to live in the Valley floor. So paradise became a kind of attractive refuge for people on fixed incomes, for people with large families, and so on. But like Malibu, it shares the distinction of being a fire corridor, which time and time again has experienced catastrophic fires.
In this case, community of, 25,000 people built on a bridge overlooking the gorge of the Feather River and backed by a notorious wind gap in the Sierras where annually winds will come at 40, 50, even 70, 80 miles an hour. In Malibu, a similar situation and that Malibu is part of its Western Santa Monica mountain topography. The canyons perfectly aligned to the direction of the seasonal Santa Ana winds. And in Malibu, you’ve had areas that have been burnt 5, 6 times in the last century. Basically, Malibu burns whenever the brush that goes Salt Sage and Chaparral, mature enough to burn, which is why I raised the question of why should society subsidize wealthy homeowners in Malibu who have almost unlimited guarantee of fire prevention and and firefighting resources in a landscape that simply wants to burn and will burn.
There have been 7 or 8 major Malibu fires in my lifetime. But you can contrast the 2 situations in Paradise, people with low incomes unable to really live anywhere else and in Malibu people with extraordinary high incomes but most of all with formidable political clout able to afford to rebuild time and time again and with the guarantee that government will put all the firefighting resources it can on the line to defend their homes. It’s a very different situation from Paradise where all of this was circumscribed by a county budget deficit and fiscal crisis, which, for instance, prevented the widening or the building of, other escape routes from this community, which had grown so rapidly in the last 20 years.
[AS] So if we want to educate ourselves about your work, should we begin with something like City of Quartz Excavating the Future of Los Angeles? And what is the relationship between that book and the Ecology of Fear book 2 years later?
[MD] Well, one of the principal themes of city courts is the consequences of unregulated speculative real estate markets on the form, the quality of life, and the democracy of Los Angeles. I engaged these issues principally in a chapter on power in Los Angeles, another chapter on the biggest social movement in Los Angeles during the 19 eighties and early 19 nineties, which were homeowners associations attempting to control growth in their communities and to protect or expand their home equity.
********
And ’Ecology’ is here at the subsequent book kind of second installment in my LA writing, I face the issue directly and show that in virtually every generation, Southern California had profits and visionaries who truly saw the problems that existed at the nexus between urbanization and Southern California’s wild environment and who advocated a different model of urbanization based on greater quality of of housing, but also on controlled growth that would preserve agricultural areas and ban development in the mountains. And this fire chapter talks on one hand about Malibu and their almost limitless entitlements and on the other hand by fire syndrome that seems now finally to been eliminated in the city. But Los Angeles has a terrible history of tournament fires often producing death tolls in in double figures.
And again, as in the case of Paradise, the fire protection available was dictated solely by city budgets and investment in fire services without the kind of federal and state entitlements that wealthy communities on the coast possess. So it’s been a kind of persistent theme. I’ve also dwelled at great length, and in fact, this explains the title of Ecology is here, on the systematic confusion between the social and the natural in Southern California. And I wrote it at a time when people were referring to mountain lions in the hills, comparing them to gang members, and talking about wilding gangs and predatory youth as if they were dangerous animals in in the city.
And so much of the confusion and the identity and practices of Southern California are rooted in basic misunderstandings of the nature of environmental processes and our particular, you know, Mediterranean climate where environmental change doesn’t come seasonally in small amounts in the kind of uniformitarian way that’s characteristic of, say, New England or Great Britain, but occurs in occasional births, which all the kind of energy of climate and erosion and, you know, an earthquake concentrated into moments which strike people as being catastrophes when in fact they’re simply the normal metabolism well familiar to anyone else who lives in a Mediterranean environment in Southern Europe, Cape area, and South Africa, Western Australia, Chile, and so on.
END TRANSCRIPT, MIKE DAVIS ON RADIO ECOSHOCK 2019