[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We know that all this record rainfall in our area in the last day and this whole summer, but meanwhile on the other side of the country, the Caldor fire is just one of 15 large active fires in California right now according to CNN. It's already burned 320 square miles of land and destroyed more than 700 buildings threatening 32,000 more. They're rationing fresh water from the Colorado River for the first time ever.

That affects a number of Western states. As we get soaked and [inaudible 00:00:49] with record rainfall, parts of the west and Midwest are having record droughts. No wonder that some climate scientists say global warming should actually be called global weirding. Joining me now to talk about how climate change makes some areas wetter and other areas drier over time is Matt Simon, science journalist at Wired. Matt, thanks for coming on today. Welcome to WNYC.

Matt Simon: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start on the moisture side of this. You write on Wired, "A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture." Why is that?

Matt Simon: Sure, so that it comes down actually to the way that the water molecules are actually bouncing around. In a warmer atmosphere, they're doing that more energetically and that actually keeps them from condensing, that is until the atmospheric conditions are right like we're seeing right now on the east coast with these really horrific flooding. When that happens, this all comes out of the atmosphere really, really quickly [inaudible 00:01:49] dumps and rain.

This is obviously a remnant of Ida. What you have is-- and when it's making landfall, obviously extreme winds, but that actually dissipates fairly quickly because it runs out of energy as it makes landfall. That water remains and that's what you're getting over there on these coast right now.

Brian Lehrer: Even if a hurricane becomes downgraded by the time it makes landfall or it's just a tropical depression by the time it gets all the way up here to the Northeast, it's still dumping a lot of water as we saw last night.

Matt Simon: It's big trouble, yes. It's been doing so on its way from Louisiana to New York and New England. What obviously happens here with the hurricane, it's feeding off warmer waters. That's why this one got so powerful, but again, once it hits landfall, it runs out of that water, that energy source. It has been tearing apart Louisiana with 150 mile per hour winds, but that water just continues on.

It dumps out water [unintelligible 00:02:49] Louisiana but saved so much of it for the rest of the track of the hurricane as it moves through the rest of the United States. This has all the fingerprints of climate change. This is exactly how climate scientists are expecting hurricanes to behave in a warmer climate.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you have any science questions for Wired magazine science journalist, Matt Simon, on how climate change is making the planet wetter and dryer at the same time, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 or tweet your question @BrianLehrer. We talked about some of the pressures on moisture from global warming. How can these extremes in opposite directions be happening at the same time?

Matt Simon: Yes, so that's where it gets tricky. We have been hearing from the IPCC report came out a couple of weeks ago that global average warming is at around 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That's an average, but what you're seeing is the Arctic is warming at three times the average rate as the rest of the planet, which is just catastrophic for that region, and then has ripple effects throughout the rest of the planet because these are interconnected atmospheric systems.

What we're seeing on the west coast where I'm at San Francisco right now is extreme drought. The Caldor fire, as you had mentioned, is threatening 32,000 structures right now because it has been supercharged by drought and just the extreme dryness of the landscape. They're now talking at this point about actually the firefighters steering the Caldor fire-- which is out of control, into the burn scar of another giant fire that has just burned around the Nevada-California border.

It's absolutely out of control here in the United States. In the west coast, we have extreme drought just driving these giant fires. On the east coast, you have extreme rainfall, extreme hurricanes. We're being squeezed by climate change and these two contrasting in opposite ways, but it's all coming down to climate change and these interconnected atmospheric systems that they seem a little bit confusing obviously. This is exactly what climate scientists are expecting to happen on a warmer planet.

Brian Lehrer: Can you go more into the drought aspect of that and how climate change or global warming exacerbates that?

Matt Simon: Yes, again, these interconnected atmospheric systems and we have in a weird way the east coast and the Midwest are actually projected to get more rain. That's because again, the atmosphere is holding more water when it's warmer. These atmospheric systems in the [inaudible 00:05:37] United States, this extreme drought is exacerbated by climate change. It's important to note that many of these systems, these hurricanes and droughts, aren't necessarily caused by climate change, but exacerbated by them.

There's actually some thinking that hurricanes may not actually grow more frequent. They will just grow more powerful. Interestingly in California, we're also projected to get less frequent storms, but those storms will be more powerful, so they'll dump a lot of water on the landscape in one go. Then that just really opens up the rest of the season to dry out. It's these really complex and I think interesting atmospheric dynamics at play that seem counterintuitive, but this is all modeled out very well by climate scientists.

Brian Lehrer: As far as how human behavior interacts-- I don't mean the human behavior that promotes climate change, but just the way people live at this time, you write, "Astronomical housing prices along the coast-- that's the California coast, have pushed more people east into the states wildland urban interface, where cities meet the forest." Can you break that down further for us and talk about how human housing choices and housing market prices are impacting the effects or the risk for the wildfires.

Matt Simon: This is where I think climate change intersects with social science and some really tragic trends I think. We are pushing so many people out of the Bay Area, other coastal cities in California, because the housing prices are just insane. People can't afford to live here. Where the housing prices are a little bit better is when you head farther east into [unintelligible 00:07:35] Nevada into this wildland urban interface where cities really butt up against the forest.

One really tragic example was with Paradise in 2018, that town was completely nestled in a forest. That fire, which was also exacerbated by climate change, moved so quickly that there was just no time to get everybody out in 86 people died. What you're seeing is that a lot of folks, particularly retirees, are moving more to these areas that are actually affordable.

Also if you're retirees, you might have mobility issues so that's going to make it all the more difficult for you to evacuate in the case of a fast approaching fire. There's an equity problem here. In California, you have to build somewhere and that's increasingly in this wildland urban interface, and that is just not taking into account this new fire regime as climate scientists call it. The fires are way more powerful, and they're moving way faster, and it's getting increasingly difficult to get people out of these areas in time.

Brian Lehrer: It's true in the east too. In fact, you write, "Right now, Americans aren't just living in the danger zones of evermore powerful wildfires and hurricanes, they're flocking there."

Matt Simon: This is I think where it's intersecting weirdly with the COVID pandemic is you have a lot folks moving from the Northeast down south into smaller towns. Florida's population is continuing to grow. It's just these demographic shifts that are putting people very much in the danger zone of these hurricanes and on the west coast of these wildfires and it's always going to be an equity issue.

I just can't harp on that enough. The folks who are least prepared for evacuating from a storm like a hurricane are going to be the most effected. A lot of people just don't have the funds to evacuate to a hotel. They don't have the ability to give up their job. Again, they have mobility issues even, so there's going to be really a reckoning on a community level, on a state level where we're going to need to rethink how to equitably evacuate people from these supercharged storms on the east coast and the South and the wildfires in the west.

Brian Lehrer: Joshua in Brooklyn is calling in about a state that we haven't mentioned yet. Hi, Joshua. You're on WNYC.

Joshua: Hi, how are you? I have a question. I'm from rural Montana. About 25 years ago, my parents bought-- my family from there as well, we bought a really nice pot of land and they built a house. 25 years ago, it was so lush and green and I remember being a kid, there were these little frogs everywhere that they were like grasshoppers, they were everywhere.

I probably haven't seen one of those frogs in like 20 years there. I was just there this last July and the drought is so bad that like full grown trees, the leaves are literally turning brown on the edges. It's a drastic change. I'm just curious what the idea of how far this could actually go, because what I've witnessed in 20 years and even now being on in New York for 10 years is there's a lot more rain here, it's way dryer there.

Is there any idea of how far or how extreme it actually could become? Like how much worse could it actually be?

Matt Simon: This is, I think, where there are so many uncertainties in climate change and part of what makes it so dangerous. Climate scientists are extraordinarily good at modeling out these really complex systems. Hurricane Ida was actually very well predicted, the path of it. What was harder to predict was the rapid intensification as it got closer to shore. The models just aren't very good at that.

In the west, what you're seeing is these really awful knock on effects, so if you have drought in a place like Montana, as you're saying, it's killing these trees and it's drying them out, and it's priming them to burn. That I think intersects with also this long history in the west of fire suppression. When Europeans came around starting 150 years ago, they said, "No, we're not lighting any more fires on this landscape, that's dangerous. We don't want to burn down anybody's homes."

In fact, a very healthy component of a landscape is fire. Native peoples knew this well. It helps clear out brush in a place like Montana to make sure that when fire starts, they don't burn catastrophically. You just get these periodic smaller fires, that's a healthy ecosystem. As we get, as you're saying, into the just extreme levels of dryness and mass mortalities, both from the lack of water for these trees and from things like invasive species, invasive beetles and stuff like that, we are entering uncharted territory.

Models can't tell you whether a beetle is going to kill a tree in a certain area. It's intersecting with so many different factors. Again, climate scientists are super good at modeling so much of this, but climate change is moving with such a rapid pace that it's increasingly difficult to keep up with these knock on effects that we were just not expecting.

Brian Lehrer: Jesus in Queens you're on WNYC. Hi, Jesus.

Jesus: How are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right. What have you got?

Jesus: All right. Pretty simple question, going back 100 years, 1800s, we've had the same exact weather conditions that we're having now. Explain to me, how is that climate change? When back in the 1800s, we had the exact same kind of weather conditions that we are having now that every 100 years, this earth goes through a change. Explain to me how that's climate change?

Brian Lehrer: Well, for one thing, we're not having the exact same conditions that we had 100-years-ago. Last night, we had the most rainfall in Central Park in one hour-- just to take one hyper-local example, than was ever recorded. More than three inches of rain fell in one hour, that's never happened before. In fact, the previous record was less than two inches and that just happened a week and a half ago, Saturday, the previous weekend.

There are all these other things that go on lines that we can see that track the increasingly warming temperatures over time, warmer than they were 100 years ago. That's warmer than they were 200 years ago. It tracks with the industrial era. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Matt. That's just the first line of a very long scientific discourse, if we want to go there.

Matt Simon: Sure it is. It's important to know that this Hurricane Ida was tied for the most powerful storm ever to make landfall in Louisiana. It was tied with the storm that came the year before, which is a pretty strong signal. As scientists are talking about now with the storm that hit New York last night, that was a once in a 500-maybe-thousand-year storm. Scientists are, first of all, tracking at the very core of this the rising global temperatures. That is very clear.

It is very clear that is anthropogenic, that is human caused. We have seen-- I don't know exactly where the figures stand now, but last year, it was something like 15 of the most powerful 20 wildfires in California history happened in the past five years. These are very, very clear signals and this is just the beginning, really. This is not the last powerful storm that New York is going to see. I should say the storm exacerbated by climate change. Scientists know very clearly that this has all the fingerprints of climate change on it.

Brian Lehrer: There are so many long-term trend lines we could point to like all 10 of the warmest years on record globally have happened since the year 2000. You just look at the progression of industrial era when these admissions have been taking place and the gradual warming of the planet, it would have to be some massive coincidence for it to track that closely. One more, Susie in Sussex, you on WNYC. Hi, Susie?

Susie: Hey there, thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Susie: I just wanted to make a point which is tangential to what you guys are talking about, but I wanted to object to the term global weirding. I think that the terminology that we use to describe climate change is really important. Actually, I did my thesis on this when I was studying at NYU Environmental Law. Global warming was a term that was developed by a conservative marketing guru called Frank Luntz, who also coined the term death tax instead of a state tax.

He's good at using words to make an emotional reaction and warming sounds like a good thing. Weirding sounds like a freak show, like, "Okay, a bunch of clowns are going to be coming out of a VW," or something like that. The term that my research showed that we should be using is climate destruction, which is fueled by human activity and is more accurately describing what's happening to our planet.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. I will say I used that term-- you caught people who just tuned in don't know you're bringing this up because I mentioned in the intro with things getting drier in the west and wetter in the east at the same time that it's an example of what some climate scientists call global weirding rather than global warming. I do get that from the one of the leading climate scientists in the world, Katharine Hayhoe, who we have scheduled as a guest for later this month.

Just to say that something that really top dedicated climate scientists are using in some cases to describe how it's not all in one direction. Climate skeptics or deniers shouldn't say, "Oh, if it's warmer here and colder there or drier here and wet here." No, it can be weird and still be a function of the same thing, so that's why they go there. I take your point, we don't want to write something this serious off as just a freak show, which makes it sound trivial or incomprehensible, so Susie, thank you.

Susie's going to get the last word, plus my response as we leave it there with Matt Simon, science Journalists at Wired, talking about how it could be so much drier in the west than usual and so much wetter in the east from the same underlying [inaudible 00:18:42] . Matt, thanks for coming on.

Matt Simon: Thank you for having me.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.