Whiplashes to Ashes

“As air warms, its capacity to hold moisture rises, and the increase is not linear but exponential. Higher temperatures thus boost evaporation, with two apparently opposing results—fiercer rains and deeper droughts. Southern California has experienced both extremes in recent years: the past two winters were exceptionally wet; the summer and fall of 2024 were exceptionally dry. During the wet periods, grasses and shrubs on L.A.’s ridges and canyons thrived. In the dry seasons, the brush withered into kindling waiting to ignite. In a paper published earlier this month, a group of researchers led by Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources, dubbed such swings from wet to dry ‘hydroclimate whiplash.’ The phenomenon, the paper demonstrated, is on the rise worldwide. ‘I don’t see this as a failure of firefighting,’ Swain said of the devastation in L.A. ‘I see it as a tragic lesson in the limits of what firefighting can achieve under conditions that are this extreme.'” Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker: Climate Whiplash and Fire Come to L.A.