{"id":49322,"date":"2019-10-31T15:55:09","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T20:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49322"},"modified":"2019-10-31T15:55:12","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T20:55:12","slug":"has-the-climate-crisis-made-california-too-dangerous-to-live-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49322","title":{"rendered":"Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in?<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As with so many things, Californians are going first where the rest of us will follow\u00a0.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a>
 The San Francisco skyline is shrouded in smoke from wildfires in the north part of the state. Photograph: Jose Carlos Fajardo\/Associated Press<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Monday morning dawned smoky across much of California<\/a>, and it dawned scary \u2013 over the weekend winds as high as a hundred miles an hour had whipped wildfires through forests and subdivisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t the first time this had happened \u2013 indeed, it\u2019s happened every year for the last three \u2013 and this time the flames were licking against communities destroyed in 2017. Reporters spoke to one family that had moved into their rebuilt home on Saturday, only to be immediately evacuated again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spectacle was cinematic: at one point, fire jumped the Carquinez Strait at the end of San Francisco Bay, shrouding the bridge on Interstate 80 in smoke and flame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even areas that didn\u2019t actually burn felt the effects: Pacific Gas and Electric turned off power to millions, fearful that when the wind tore down its wires they would spark new conflagrations.Advertisement<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three years in a row feels like \u2013 well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal. That\u2019s what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the following sentence: the fires had \u201cintensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit\u201d. Read that again: the local paper is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its citizens might have to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, this comes as no real surprise. My most recent book, Falter, centered on the notion that the climate crisis was making large swaths of the world increasingly off-limits to humans. Cities in Asia and the Middle East where the temperature now reaches the upper 120s \u2013 levels so high that the human body can\u2019t really cool itself; island nations (and Florida beaches) where each high tide washes through the living room or the streets; Arctic villages relocating because, with sea ice vanished, the ocean erodes the shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? As with so many things, Californians are going first where the rest of us will follow\u00a0. Monday morning dawned smoky across much of California, and it dawned scary \u2013 over the weekend winds as high as a hundred miles an hour had whipped wildfires through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7013,101,141,27477],"class_list":["post-49322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-bill-mckibben","tag-california","tag-climate-change","tag-the-guardian-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49323,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49322\/revisions\/49323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}