Meet the Man Who Saw the LA Fires Coming

The Assignment with Audie Cornish 36 mins Peter Kalmus left California two years ago in part because of his concerns about hotter days and increasing wildfires. Today, his former neighborhood of Altadena is one of the many communities left scorched by the wildfires. And he says more are coming. Audie talks with Kalmus, who studies future extreme heat impacts on human health and ecosystems at NASA, about how the Los Angeles wildfires are part of a greater climate crisis, and how our grief can be channeled into preventing the next disaster. 

All right. Like many of you I’m sure, my mind this week is in California. Now, obviously the situation’s evolving. But of course, we know that the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires have burned thousands of buildings to the ground. People’s churches, their favorite restaurants, their kids schools, museums, theaters. I mean, we’re talking communities here and thousands and thousands of homes.

What do you think you’re going to miss about that house? I’m going to miss my room, my stuffies. I’m going to miss my neighborhood.

I’ve had 60 years of memories in that house and three children. Now it’s hitting me.

Although the fires are still burning, the obvious question is facing survivors about what comes next. The governor of California and local officials have promised to rebuild, but that doesn’t mean that everyone will necessarily want to stay. Last week, while I was watching CNN’s coverage of the fires, I saw Christiane Amanpour asked CNN reporter Kyung Lah, who lives in the area, if the, quote, security challenge of climate change ever comes up with the people that she interviews. And here’s what Kyung said.

Let’s put this into real terms, into real working class terms. I’m staying in a home that’s further south if you’re away from the fire with another family who lives here in Altadena. I live in a community right next to Altadena. And what she was wondering and this is the mother of two kids, where do you go? Even though climate disaster and wildfires are part of our daily life now, especially in California, where do you go? Where do you go that you can afford, that is safe, where you have a job? It is not as simple as, you know, just move somewhere else. That’s far too luxurious to think about.

So today we’re going to dig into this idea of the realities of living with a changed climate. How should we think about where to live? What does it mean to adapt? I’m Audie Cornish. And this is the assignment. My guest today is Peter Kalmus. He’s a climate scientist at NASA, but he’s not speaking to us in any official capacity for the agency or the government. And he doesn’t like this word, but he is best described as an activist. More than a decade ago, he left his career as an astrophysicist to study earth science. He gave up flying to reduce his carbon footprint. He built a climate app. He started lobbying his fellow scientists to speak out. He was arrested outside of the bank, JPMorgan, because of its investments in fossil fuels. And after the L.A. fires this past week, The New York Times published a guest essay he wrote titled “As a Climate Scientist, I knew it was time to leave Los Angeles.” Peter lived in Altadena for nearly 14 years before he moved to North Carolina. This was just after the pandemic. So he’s been glued to the television, watching the news, checking his phone for text from his friends. But the only news they could really share was that his old neighborhood was gone. We started by talking about what it’s like to grieve for a tragedy that in a way you knew was coming.

It’s an is slash was. I’d been struggling to know which tense to use for this little unincorporated hamlet. I thought it was the best kept secret in Los Angeles. It’s nestled up in the mountains. Everyone sort of knew everybody. Lots of people doing kind of like sort of chickens and goats and beekeeping and biking around everywhere. It was quite a unique spot, I think, in Los Angeles, and I loved it dearly. And everything’s my neighborhood’s gone. My the house that I raised my kids and that we moved away from is gone now. I’ve been crying a lot. I’ve been pretty exhausted. It’s been yeah, it’s been a lot.

One of the reasons why we’re talking to you is because you’re not only a climate scientist, and not only did you actually live in one of the communities that has been decimated, but you’re also, in a way, a climate migrant. And I don’t want to oversell that. But you’re somebody who thought about where you should live and thought about that in the context of climate change. And can you talk to me about when that was when you went from living in this place that was kind of idyllic. And California, frankly, I think of as a place that, you know, wealth has bent the landscape to its will. Right? Like you think about Chinatown the movie or whatever, like as long as there’s been the West, there’s been like, Should we live here? You know, does this work? And people live in this Paradise I think with various natural threats hovering just out of frame, whether they be earthquakes or whatever. And I see that as a weird East Coast person. So tell me I’m completely wrong, but I already think of it as like people are living in Paradise. Question mark.

Yeah. Well, when we moved there in 2008, that’s not really how it felt. When we moved in 2008, it felt like Paradise, full stop. And, you know, it’s gotten progressively hotter since then, to be honest, and the heat waves have gotten worse.

And you say that as a scientist or as a person who used to like, walk in the hills and hike on the weekends.

As a person, as a human, as a person who was trying to grow fruit trees and do gardening, as a person who hates it when it’s super hot. I don’t do very well in the heat. Whenever we got over 110 degrees. I would super notice that. And those kinds of heat waves were getting worse and then these mega fires started to happen.

And what was your fire, so to speak? What was your personal disaster?

Yeah. So in September of 2020, there was this really intense heat wave. I think it got up around 115. Birds were dying and trees and falling to the sidewalk. When we made the questionable decision to go hiking in the mountains just near Santa Barbara, and it was so hot and humid that I actually experienced heat exhaustion for the first time and it was really scary. Like, I couldn’t really think well, I could barely stand up without, you know, falling over. And I had little kids and my wife and some friends there that I felt responsible for. And several people died that day hiking and other places around Southern California because of the heat. So it was actually a very dangerous day. But the real part of my story is the next day, a major fire a few miles from my home in the San Gabriel Mountains called the Bobcat Fire started. We were under kind of evacuation advisories that night. Our phones were kind of going crazy with the really loud beeping that they make. And we thought about what would happen if we had to evacuate, like how much traffic would there be, what would we take?

And can we pause there? Because just right now, I think hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people just had to make that calculation right now where literally it’s like, what do we do right now? Right. What do we do? Where do we go? And because you’ve been in that position, I’m wondering if you can give us a sense of the big and small thoughts that go through your mind when you have to decide fundamentally, are we safe?

It was super stressful. You know, there was a lot of tension between me and my wife that night because I think we were both really stressed out. It’s harrowing. Like for me, I had this kind of like just throwing up my hands moment, just like, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. It is really I think it’s really hard to have this interview actually, because of the knowledge of what’s happened to so many people in Los Angeles.

And I don’t mean to make you their proxy, but I think that there are very big questions about climate change, which we’ll get to. And then there are these weird panic related moments where you have to make decisions. And those decisions are based on your capacity for risk and threat and belief. And it sounds like you’ve had to do that before where you’ve had to say, well, our house is here, but I’m a scientist and the wind is here and the kids have to do X. Like I imagine that there’s a jumble of things that happen in your mind trying to create this hierarchy of what to protect.

Yeah. I mean, in that moment, I wasn’t a scientist. I was just a dad and a human doing the best I could. And I didn’t know what to do. Like I had to Google and we weren’t sure, like, should we take pictures of things for the insurance later? The whole thing was was quite surreal and strange, but nothing like what’s happening right now in Los Angeles. And then after the fire started for weeks and weeks and this was in 2020, so it’s kind of towards the beginning of Covid, we were in a smoke cloud. And I taped up the windows of the master bedroom, put the Hepa filter going. After a few days that I started, my health started to get kind of weird. My lungs and throat started to burn. My eyes started to burn. And the most strange thing of all, I started getting this, like, constant tingling sensation in my fingers and my toes, which I still don’t totally understand. That’s, and I had been thinking about leaving Los Angeles before that, but that was really the last straw. And it didn’t seem like, you know, we could live the rest of our lives out there. Right? We couldn’t stay there for decades because it was getting hotter and hotter. And as a climate scientist, I know that all of these impacts are going to keep getting worse. That’s just a fact.

But it moves it out of the theoretical. When you have to look at your family and say that.

Right. And when you experience these sorts of impacts with your body. But then in 2022, my wife got a job offer in Durham, North Carolina, and it seemed like a really good thing for her career. And because of Covid, it was possible for me to work fully, remotely so. So we did it. We’re very, very fortunate to be able to do that and I want to just, you know, hold space for the fact that not everyone can. I so I don’t I don’t regret the decision but it is I get asked sometimes, well, what should people do now who live in Los Angeles And it’s a it’s a very hard question. I don’t know that I have an answer to it.

That’s the one I most want to ask you.

Now we can talk about it, but I’ll probably just be kind of being in my head again.

No, no. I mean, the headline on this guest essay in The New York Times is, As a climate scientist, I knew it was time to leave Los Angeles. And I think there’s one thing about knowing when it’s time. It’s another thing to figure out how to make that happen. And it just feels like so many where we live in this country is more dictated by economics more than anything else. And like even you telling this story of your transition, like there was a job to go to, right? It wasn’t just like, let’s go somewhere because the climate will be better. And it’s one of the things I struggle with when people are. Saying, well, how can you rebuild? How can you rebuild here or there? Or, you know, I struggle with this after hurricanes, whatever it is. And I just wonder, like how you wrestle with that idea, given that right now those decisions, it’s like you’re made a decision in comfort that some people may be having to make in panic.

Yeah. And I think still my perspective on this is kind of fundamentally different from sort of the publics perspective writ large because like, I wouldn’t move to Phenix for the last, I don’t know, since I became a climate science scientist in 2012. And, you know, that whole time I would never have moved to Phenix. And it’s one of the fastest growing urban centers in the country. So like that, the public, I don’t think, fully understands what’s coming. The way that climate scientists do.

Say more, especially around this idea of regions of the country.

Well, okay, So first of all, I have come to the conclusion that no place is actually safe. These these kinds of impacts of these floods and fires and heat waves and storms, I think of them sort of like popcorn happening around the whole planet. You can’t know exactly where any one of these events is going to happen, but they’re starting to come at a higher frequency, sort of like when the popcorn really starts to get going and they’re starting to pop harder. It drives me kind of bonkers when people say this is especially when climate scientists who should know better say like, this is the new normal, for example. It is not. We are on a rising escalator towards higher planetary temperatures and all of the more frequent and severe impacts that that comes with that, which is really, frankly, terrifying. I believe that we this is going to it’s a little bit complicated psychologically, like my the way I sort of think about how things might change. I can see so many different ways this conversation could go. You know, there’s so many things I want to say. I want to take a step back and just make it really, really clear to listeners that, you know, first of all, this will get worse. We touched on that before.

And nowhere is safe, which is where we detoured here. Yeah.

Nowhere is safe. Hurricane Helene really drove that point home to me a couple of months ago because Asheville was sort of considered in North Carolina, at least to be a climate haven. Pacific Northwest, Vancouver, Seattle area was also considered a climate haven. And we got we’re getting massive wildfires there. And the heat on Vermont’s has been flooding quite remarkably the last few years. So, yeah, I don’t think any place is safe. So that’s one thing. This is going to get worse. This is not the new normal. It’s driven by planetary overheating right now. What’s causing that planetary overheating? I want your listeners, listeners to know this very, very clearly. It’s fossil fuels and it’s burning oil and gas. It’s all the airplanes. It’s all the cars. It’s the power plants running on coal still. So the thing we need to do so the cause is burning fossil fuels. We don’t seem as a society to be able to have a cogent discussion about this. Right. That’s the cause.

Well, we do. But it is very much buffeted and bracketed by economic concerns, either through lobbying, right, of companies that benefit from it or from people who their livelihoods are affected by the generation of fossil fuels and their impact on politics. And I and now this is me speaking as a person who covers domestic politics. Right. And I’m not saying what you’re saying is wrong, but trying to broaden that frame.

But there’s there’s even pundits who who I think should know better and they talk about things like carbon capture. They just sort of like poison the well of the conversation in that way.

So even carbon capture to you, you’re just like these new, quote unquote technologies.

I’m talking with Peter Kalmus. We’re going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’ll discuss his solutions to climate change, one of which may surprise you leaning into grief. We’ll be back in a moment.

One of the things that you have done is to change your life in in many ways. You’ve reached these inflection points and you’ve pivoted, right? You were studying one kind of science. You moved to another. You’re living in a place, you moved to another. You have transformed in a lot of ways and into activism where you would be like arrested outside of JPMorgan, right, because of their investment in fossil fuels. Based on your own experience, what is involved in people making their own personal transitions, their own transition from looking at the news to saying, how could I need to think about this more profoundly and take action?

They have to cry. They have to let the tears flow. They have to really.

It’s hard to go from apathy to tears. Right? So you hear what I’m saying? Like you as somebody who has just been before audience and audience and trying to convey urgency. What what do you find tend to be the triggers towards the switch from denial and apathy to at least just like, yeah, the turn towards.

Well, I stick with my first answer. I mean, information’s good but I know from giving talk after talk after talk since around 2010 that true facts don’t really convince a lot of people. It has to start to sink in at an emotional level. I don’t think there’s a shortcut for that if you know the facts. But your brain is kind of like fending off the grief because we’re we’re kind of afraid to experience grief.

You’ve said your grief sometimes has made people, I don’t know the term used uncomfortable or just panicked.

Yeah. So so sometimes we’ve we started doing at various conferences with scientists like actions with other activists. We do grief circles where we just share how we’re feeling, how these sorts of impacts make us feel, how the inaction makes us feel, how the moral injury from the fossil fuel industry’s dishonesty makes us feel. There’s a lot of grief. There’s other emotions too, like anger, of course, but there’s a lot of grief. And that’s why I’ve cried so much over the last few days and even earlier, like a decade ago, where if I was giving a talk, sometimes I would be talking about what’s coming and I would just, you know, feel this wave of grief come and I’d have to take a moment.

How did people react to it, though?

They it’s usually very connecting. So people if they were looking at their phones, they’ll stop and then they’ll be with you for the rest of the talk.

After the crying. What do you imagine action to look like?

Somehow I think there has to be a sort of real workers movement that’s able to cross this cultural aisle that we have right now between the Democrats and Republicans. I’m not sure exactly how that’s going down or how that could go down or how that is or whether it will. Right. Because I think that. Maybe climate change could be sort of a a key unifying issue such that it’s physics, it’s not political. And since no matter what your other ideological beliefs are, you can see that Los Angeles is burning. Hopefully the public will make this their top issue or a top issue so that they demand that elected officials actually do something about climate change. But that’s going to requires the public to know how urgent this is, which requires the media to kind of tell the story with appropriate urgency, which is why I do civil disobedience. Right. Because I don’t know, for for many, many years I would write articles and I would get on outlets like Democracy Now! But I couldn’t get any traction in mainstream outlets, partly because of this narrative of hope, right? Like that. The Democrats, we just have to elect Democrats and then they’re going to solve this. But they haven’t because they’ve also continued to expand fossil fuels like President Obama. He actually bragged right after he was done with his done serving as president. You know, all of that, you know, record levels of oil and gas production, That was me people. He said that at Rice University during a lecture after his presidency ended. So, Dr..

Kalmus, I’m going to interrupt for a second.

Yeah, I’ve gone off the rails. Sorry.

I’m not doing a great. I’m really sorry that this has not been one of my better interviews.

Why do you think it’s not?

I feel like I’m struggling to be coherent and somehow I don’t know why. But. I think the last few days I finally felt like I’ve been being listened to for the first time and I’ve been pushing really hard against the fossil fuel industry and really trying my hardest to indict them. So now I also kind of feel like maybe I’ve been, you know, being a little too strident and potentially losing listeners who you know what I mean?

Yes, I hear you. What I hear in the way you talk is a person who is used to not being listened to.

It’s been devastating to to see what’s coming and to, to not be able to warn people because.

But you are able to warn people.

But I don’t have a platform, right? Like I. I mean, I guess I can warn the people in my immediate life.

But like, you’re taught you’re a scientist, you’re talking to other scientists. Most people can’t get a guest essay in The New York Times.

I’ve been trying for years by the way.

Yeah, but my my point is that it’s not for lack of trying. And in that trying, what have you learned about what works to reach people and what does not?

Well, I think. The one viral moment I had was the first time I was arrested, and I think I was really able to express exactly how I was feeling, which is, you know, a harder thing to do, really, than it sounds, especially when you’re in this really stressful situation and handcuffed to a door and surrounded by 100 police in riot gear with helicopters overhead. So tapping into the emotions and doing it in a kind of in a selfless way, like like just doing it for other people and for life on Earth and just really channeling that as a spokesperson. But most of the time, yeah, that’s that’s the only time I’ve really felt like I’ve kind of connected to a lot of people in that way.

But the reason why I ask is, is as we’re listening to our conversation, my producer is sort of taking notes. One of the things he said was, I’m overwhelmed. And I realized that, yeah, we’ve been talking and we’ve talked about who’s at fault. We’ve talked about the things that don’t work. We’ve talked about moving to a place of grief. But all of those lead to a place of overwhelm. And I don’t know if that’s just where you live emotionally. And I’m being like, only partly facetious there. Yeah, because there isn’t there doesn’t seem to be an answer, so to speak, for kind of what we do now. The way I’ve processed it is adapt. Like I processed it as I am going to live in a different environmental future and my kids will live in a different environmental future. And what are the ways that I can adapt my home, the way I live, to prepare for that hotter future or a future with floods, when I think about where I live. That’s where my brain is at.

Well, my brain is there too. Right. So we do a lot of different things at the same time. And moving away from Los Angeles was an example of adapting.

But do you hear what I’m saying? Like, do you hear my producers angst there of overwhelm, you know, like listening to someone like you doesn’t make you want to do more. It almost makes you shut down because you’re like, Well, I don’t know what to do.

I don’t usually get that response. At least I don’t think I do. I think maybe this this interview has been darker than usual because of the fires. Maybe. Maybe that’s why I told you earlier that I’m not really very happy with this interview because I don’t want people to shut down. I don’t think it’s too late to fight. I want people to fight. So I guess the three parts of my answer, first adapt like we were just talking about. Second process the emotions, don’t hold them at arm’s length. Get together with friends who also recognize that what’s happening on the planet right now is really, really bad. And talk about it. You know, maybe over dinner, maybe over a bottle of wine, I don’t know. But process that grief together with people. Have a good cry. Maybe. But the third thing is to to really start to channel, you know, this energy for change. Maybe you feel really angry at the fossil fuel industry, so you want to write something like that’s something that I do. Or maybe you work at an institution that could make a public statement about the dishonesty of the fossil fuel industry. Or maybe you’re a lawyer and you feel like you can make a career transition to environmental law and start suing the fossil fuel industry. So I don’t know, like every single person should just do what they can within their sphere and act as though everything is at stake.

Notice that I didn’t say I don’t change your car, you know, or recycle more. It’s fine If you want to do those things, put solar panels on your house. It’s all helpful and good, and that might make you feel better. But we need really big shifts at the societal level. We need to be able to elect presidents and officials who understand the urgency of global overheating and will put laws and systems into place to stop it.

Well, Dr. Thomas, thank you for speaking with us. I really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot for having me on.

And thank you for being patient with me through my questions, because I think I was trying to not do this thing you were talking about this other experience you’ve had with the media. But I’m also aware that just by nature of my work, I’m giving people bites of the apple, not the whole apple.

Yeah. And I realize now in retrospect what the real problem was. I’ve been doing a five minute interview after five minute interview and I have to get my talking points out. And so I was I think in the beginning part of our interview, I was really afraid that, like, I was kind of in that mode instead of really listening to you and having a conversation. So I apologize for that.

No, don’t apologize at all. That’s actually why I do the show, because I used to be the reporter that could only ask questions for five minutes, and I always knew there was more. And I think there is something unique about your journey because you’ve taken this to such a personal place and to some people might think extreme, you know, in terms of how you adjusted your life.

Yeah, I think I think it’s like the not being listened to thing means I’ve been just like turning up the volume gradually over the years. And then maybe it’s a little too much for people.

How’s your family deal with it?

That’s a great question. I’ve got two teenage sons and they don’t really engage with me on it. They just, it’s a teenage son thing, too, right? So kind of we talk about other things.

But Peter, if you can’t convince them. Do you know what I’m saying? Like. Like this Cassandra effect. It just feels like. Yeah, that’s. That’s really close to home.

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. You know, my wife came to my first arrest. The JPMorgan Chase and my sons were there, too. That meant the world to me. That was a huge step because I think they also want to believe that it’s not going to be as bad as sort of what I’m imagining. And I get that, and I want that for them.

So you’ve given in every aspect of your life, your relationship, your relationship to your work. Like, it just feels like you’ve given so much to try to convey this message.

Yeah, well, I think it’s like I coached soccer for my two boys and I did out of love and like, this is something else that I do for them. So it’s just I think a part of it is a weird displaced Dad thing. Like, my poor boys, you know, like, what can I, what can I do? And then I also always think about like when I’m much older and I look back on all of this, will I be able to say that I did everything I could? So this is a very strange and unique, idiosyncratic moment in human history, and it does feel like being a Cassandra. But I think that’s because the public hasn’t caught up yet to kind of where the science is. Maybe I’m wrong. I wish I could be more compelling and how I communicate. But yeah, I do my best and try to learn as I go.

We’re entering this moment where there is going to be politically a big shift even in talking about this. Right. And we’re reading about the incoming president today talking about executive orders to boost American fossil fuel production, to undo the sort of effort to adopt electric vehicles. This feels like a moment where you’re not going to be more heard. So how are you gearing up for it? How are you thinking about how to talk about this in this environment, political environment?

I don’t really know yet. I feel a deep uncertainty about what’s going to happen in under this incoming administration, especially about, you know, say, climate science work happening at federal agencies about activism being treated much more harshly by the legal system. But I think for me, the lodestar is to keep just telling the truth as best I can and getting, you know, trying to reach as many people as I can. And I might pay really severe consequences for that. But again, I think that life on Earth is worth it and my kids are worth it.

That’s Peter Kalmus. He’s a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He’s an activist. And really, he spoke to us as author of Being the Change: Live well and Spark a Climate Revolution. You can find his essay in The New York Times. The assignment is a production of CNN Audio, and this episode was produced by Jesse Remedios and Sofia Sanchez. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We had support from Dan Bloom, Haley Thomas Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lennie Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks, as always to Katie Hinman.