Leaving LA: A Climate Scientist’s Story

Peter Kalmus is our national conscience on climate. Met him in San Francisco about 5 years ago. Walks the talk.

Peter Kalmus in New York Times:

I am utterly devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires, shaking with rage and grief. The Altadena community near Pasadena, where the Eaton fire has damaged or destroyed at least 5,000 structures, was my home for 14 years.

I moved my family away two years ago because, as California’s climate kept growing drier, hotter and more fiery, I feared that our neighborhood would burn. But even I didn’t think fires of this scale and severity would raze it and other large areas of the city this soon. And yet images of Altadena this week show a hellscape, like a landscape out of Octavia Butler’s uncannily prescient climate novel “Parable of the Sower.”

One lesson climate change teaches us again and again is that bad things can happen ahead of schedule. Model predictions for climate impacts have tended to be optimistically biased. But now, unfortunately, the heating is accelerating, outpacing scientists’ expectations.

We must face the fact that no one is coming to save us, especially in disaster-prone places such as Los Angeles, where the risk of catastrophic wildfire has been clear for years. And so many of us face a real choice — to stay or to leave. I chose to leave.

Often called L.A.’s “best kept secret,” Altadena is a quirky hamlet nestled in the foothills, hidden from all the city’s traffic snarls, where everyone seemed to know everyone. I arrived with my family in 2008 to start a post-doctorate degree in astrophysics. It felt like we’d landed in paradise: unlimited guacamole from a huge avocado tree in our backyard; flocks of green parrots squawking overhead; Caltech’s perfect lawns in Pasadena to lie on with my children, even in January.

I started worrying about climate change as a graduate student in 2006. My concerns grew stronger as the planet grew hotter. In 2012, unable to look away, I switched my career from gravitational waves to climate science, taking a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I also started keeping chickens and bees (like so many of my neighbors), volunteering with local climate groups and bicycling around town to give climate talks.

But the climate crisis kept worsening, year after year. I wanted to scream from the rooftops for people to see global heating as the urgent threat that it is. I wrote articles and tweets with salty language and co-founded nonprofits for a climate app and a climate media group.

Then, in September 2020, I experienced heat exhaustion for the first time during an intense heat wave. The next day the Bobcat fire, a megafire, ignited a few miles from our neighborhood high in the Altadena foothills. In Los Angeles, neighborhoods near mountains and wild areas are in greater danger from wildfire. We prepared to evacuate, but, unlike the fires raging now, the blaze was mostly contained to wilderness areas. Still, for weeks, my family and I were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. My lungs burned and my fingers had a constant tingle.

After the Bobcat fire, Los Angeles no longer felt safe. I feared for the health of my family, and I wondered how we would evacuate if the neighborhood started to burn. In 2022, my wife was offered a job in Durham, N.C., and we moved.