Climate change parches Western US, providing fuel for fires

I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,

said Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA

We’ve lost most of the hydrant pressure,

one firefighter said around 2:45 a.m. as he requested help refilling fire engines, ... according to a county dispatch recording

We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems and that is really challenging,

she said

Rest assured…we will absolutely do an evaluation to look at what worked, and what didn’t work, and to correct – or to hold accountable – anybody, department, individual, etcetera,

she said

The last week of weird weather has been alarming,

said Natalie Mahowald, chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University

For the average person, this means the changes you’re experiencing — more extreme weather, rising costs due to climate impacts, threats to food and water security — aren’t anomalies,

said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University

The less warming there is, the less of an increase in hydroclimate whiplash we’re going to see,

Dr. Swain emphasized

The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases.”

Lead author Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, put it bluntly

Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection,

the researchers explained, as flames continue to devastate the affluent Palisades suburb, where 100 mph winds and severe drought conditions combined to create a deadly inferno

We don't need AI 'art.' We don't need AI grocery lists. We don't need AI self-driving cars. We don't need ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or DALL-E or whatever 'revolutionary' technology already exists inside our own human brains. We need the earth,

wrote makeup artist and activist Matt Bernstein in an Instagram post that has gained almost 500,000 likes

One search on ChatGPT uses 10x the amount of energy as a Google search. Training one AI model produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 300 round trip flights between New York and San Francisco and five times the lifetime emissions of a car."

In Bernstein's viral Instagram post, he wrote

The [water] system has never been designed to fight a wildfire that then envelops a community."

Martin Adams, former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power told the Los Angeles Times