Opinion | As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles

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.

I’ve been watching this week’s tragedy unfold from afar, piecing the story together through local news reports and texts and videos from friends, some of whom have lost homes, trying to figure out what has burned and what hasn’t. Our dog’s pet hospital, gone. The church where our boys’ string recitals took place, gone. The weird Bunny Museum I’d wonder about on my bicycle, waiting for the light to change; the friendly hardware store I went to a hundred times; the coffee shop where I’d meet friends and climate activists; all gone.

My former neighbor texted me Thursday to say that our little cul-de-sac burned, his house and ours and all our neighbors’ homes except for one. The beautiful house we raised our children in, gone; and my tears finally came.

No place is truly safe anymore. A few months ago, Hurricane Helene pummeled the western part of my new state and the city of Asheville, which many once considered a climate haven. The Pacific Northwest seemed safe until the 2021 heat dome. Hawaii seemed safe until the deadly fires on Maui in 2023.

For those who have lost everything in climate disasters, the apocalypse has already arrived. And as the planet gets hotter, climate disasters will get more frequent and more intense. The cost of these fires will be immense, and they will affect the insurance industry and the housing market.

How bad things get depends on how long we let the fossil fuel industry continue to call the shots. The oil, gas and coal corporations have known for half a century that they were causing irreversible climate chaos, and their executives, lobbyists and lawyers chose to spread disinformation and block the transition to cleaner energy. In 2021, testifying in front of Congress, several C.E.O.s refused to end efforts to block climate action or take responsibility for their disinformation. They use their wealth to control our politicians.

We need to build bridges to people on all sides of the political spectrum who are waking up as climate chaos worsens, despite the gross falsehoods from many Republican leaders.

Nothing will change until our anger gets powerful enough. But once you accept the truth of loss, and the truth of who perpetrated and profited from that loss, the anger comes rushing in, as fierce as the Santa Ana winds.

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the author of “Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution.”

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