The air was literally so smoggy, I decided not to go grocery shopping today. Just sticking my head out from the balcony of my apartment gave me a breath-full of ash. Yesterday, I was on the roof of my apartment complex interviewing with SpaceX. It took me a while to realize that the murky gray I saw out by the ocean was not fog but was the Woolsey Fire. It was James Franco’s movie This is the End straight off paper and into reality (but without a demon-ified Jonah Hill, an ax-wielding Emma Watson, and supernatural shenanigans). This mixed feeling of awe and terror was only amplified when I received texts after my interview from my parents, who were up in San Francisco immersed in the haze of the Camp Fire. They were telling me to wear N-95 masks to protect my lungs from the ash.
N-95 masks were the masks I wore when I was cutting carbon fiber in my robotics lab to protect my lungs from deadly carbon fiber dust. Surely, it couldn’t be that bad. But it was.
I think this was the first time climate change really hit me in the face. California was literally on fire. Last year, the Skirball fire near UCLA cancelled classes and final exams, and the evacuation zone was in my backyard. I remember seeing videos on Facebook, watching as flames tore into the mountainside by the Getty Museum and turned it into a recreation of hell on Earth. This year was not to be outdone. The Camp Fire and Woolsey fires are destroying homes left and right, and the winds aren’t making it any easier for firefighters.
Seeing natural disasters like hurricanes on TV is a lot different than the fires in your backyard. Our president’s first response was that California management, but his retort only emphasized the actual issue. Climate change is real, and it is close to home. Maybe the reason why Californians are known to be pot-smoking, environmentalist liberals is because we’ve seen firsthand the effects of global warming. According to UC Merced environmental engineer LeRoy Westerling, warmer weather dries out the flora and brings droughts to the California west coast, causing the areas to become more prone to quick flares. Climate change has become the extra fuel for fires to burn twice the area they otherwise would.
Despite these obvious scientific connections, some professionals (such as Hilary Boudet of Oregon State’s sociology department) point out that opinion on climate change views vary, though they are consistent in the science community. “Political ideology” is the main source of the fluctuating perspectives. If we want to tone down the California fires, it starts first with advocacy to encourage political action.
Let’s extinguish climate change before it affects you, too.
Source:
Our Reliance on Science 