January 24, 2025
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We are living in a dystopian climate thriller. It’s time to rewrite the ending
Decades of warnings about the threat of climate change were ignored. With homes everywhere burning, flooding and being washed away, it’s time to start listening to scientists’ advice on climate action.

A motorcyclist stops to look at a burning home during the Eaton Fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, California, on January 8, 2025.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
The dark visions of dystopian futures presented by science fiction writers, television shows, and Hollywood disaster movies are no longer fiction. Actual floods, droughts, wildfires, and coastal storms, especially the devastating fires that devastated Los Angeles, are sounding a stark alarm. Our refusal to aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not a matter of some distant, uncertain future. It has become our reality today.
The time has come to reject climate change denial and accelerate building disaster resilience in our cities and homes.
It’s not like we weren’t warned. Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm about growing climate risks for decades. Despite repeated warnings, we have failed to adequately mitigate or adapt to climate change. As the popular meme says, “We are in the midst of the longest, saddest, most excruciating, unsatisfying ‘I told you so’ in the history of the world.”
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In 1969, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo to President Nixon about these risks, warning of a 10-foot sea level rise and “Goodbye New York.” But he was ignored. In 1977, President Carter’s science advisor Frank Press wrote of the scale and speed of impending climate change: importance and difficulty. ”
In 2007, at the release of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report summarizing the current state of climate science knowledge, John Holdren of Harvard University (later a science advisor to President Barack Obama) said the following: Alleviation, adaptation, suffering. I’ll try some of each. The question is what the mix will be like. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation we need and the less suffering we suffer. ”
Perhaps you are like me, too, and there are many good stories hinting at a dystopian future where aliens, extreme geophysical phenomena, or other catastrophes wreak havoc on cities, society, or the entire planet. Maybe you’re a fan of the (and sometimes bad) TV shows and movies. Los Angeles is a popular target for many of these films due to its iconic status and perhaps because the entertainment industry is concentrated there. A city is destroyed in the 1974 film earthquakestarring Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner. Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche race around LA in flames in 1997. volcano. During global climate change in 2004, a tornado destroyed the iconic Hollywood sign and Capitol Records building the day after tomorrow. more recently blade runner 2049 Syfy network series spreadGiant sea walls are trying to protect future Los Angeles and New York City from rising sea levels due to climate change.
Whether politicians want to admit it or not, what we are witnessing in real life shows that we are living in a dystopian science fiction movie.
Incredibly, leading policymakers and experts continue to deny scientific reality. After a series of devastating wildfires so far in 2020, then-President Donald Trump told a California official that “I don’t think the science knows” about global warming. He dismissed concerns about climate change. “It’s getting cooler, so keep an eye on me.” Five increasingly heated years later, President Trump continues to ignore the science of the Los Angeles disaster, instead addressing California’s water policy, diversity and inclusion efforts, He likes to criticize endangered fish species and political opponents. His major campaign donor, Elon Musk, has also advocated grossly unscientific views denying the role of climate change.
They are wrong, and it is our responsibility as scientists to say so. These fires were clearly influenced by anthropogenic climate change. Global temperatures are accelerating. 2024 will be the hottest year in recorded history, with the hottest 10 years all occurring in the past 10 years, continuing a century-long warming trend. Extreme hydrological events such as floods and droughts are accelerating, and Southern California is becoming extremely dry. Los Angeles has seen little rain in more than 10 months, marking the start of the driest rainy season on record, drying out soil and vegetation and setting the stage for extreme winds to intensify and spread the fires.
We must stop refusing to acknowledge the role of climate change. This hampers efforts to reduce harmful emissions and mitigate climate change. It causes an inability to strengthen the ability to adapt to impacts that are no longer avoidable. And the human suffering caused by accelerating disasters will be significantly worse.
We know what will happen, but we also know what to do. In addition to aggressively accelerating the energy transition away from fossil fuels, changing individual behavior and reducing carbon emissions from other sources, we need to scale up efforts to build resilience to inevitable impacts. There is.
These include strategies such as improving wildfire resilience through better land management, and policy reforms such as building with fire-resistant materials and designs, reducing vegetation around homes, and restricting development in high-risk areas. means. Communities need to strengthen their water systems by modernizing infrastructure, diversifying water supplies, and strengthening firefighting efforts. Coastal assets at risk from rising sea levels and intensifying storms will need to be protected, relocated or abandoned. Despite pressure from developers to build in hazardous areas, new construction in hazardous areas must be halted and any rebuilding must be based on higher and safer standards and designs. Must be something.
It’s time to listen to science, stop listening to the naysayers, and work to re-fictionalize our dystopian future.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.