Press Briefing: How the LA Wildfires Are Fueled by Climate Change

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Hello and welcome to another press briefing with Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the Executive Director and Co-founder of Covering Climate Now and also the Environment Correspondent for the Nation Magazine. Our subject today, climate change and news coverage of the Los Angeles mega-fires.

But first, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets that reach a total audience of billions of people around the world. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do better coverage of the defining story of our time. You can go to our website, coveringclimatenow.org, to see a list of our partners, to apply to join our collaboration and sign up for our newsletters and newsroom trainings, all of which are free of charge.

Today, Covering Climate Now launched a new newsletter called Power & Progress, and its first issue will intrigue you. It explains why Joe Biden’s recently announced US climate goals still matter despite Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House.

Now, when I called the Los Angeles fires mega-fires a moment ago, it’s because they have now burned an area the size of the entire city of San Francisco. Dozens of lives have been lost, thousands of buildings destroyed, entire communities are gone. California Governor Gavin Newsom has said the fires may be the costliest disaster in US history. These fires represent a seminal moment for the climate crisis and also for journalism. A review of the news coverage so far shows that most journalism is still not reporting that climate change is driving this kind of increasingly frequent and deadly extreme weather. Too much coverage has ignored climate change altogether, an inexcusable failure when the scientific link between mega-fires and a hotter, drier planet is well established. Too often disinformation has been repeated and is framing the coverage instead of being debunked. And rarely have stories named the ultimate authors of this disaster, fossil fuel companies that for decades have lied about how their products would dangerously overheat the planet.

But today’s press briefing will not focus on the shortcomings of the coverage as much as on how journalists can do better going forward. At Covering Climate Now, we believe that better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution because until the mass public understands that our planetary house is on fire, why it’s on fire and that humanity has all the tools to extinguish the fire, except enough politicians to implement those tools, there simply won’t be enough public pressure to force a change of course.

Now to be clear, there have been some good climate-savvy stories about the fires from the LA Times, from Variety, Axios, The Guardian, ABC News, CBS News and CNN. You’ll find links to those pieces in the chat because they illustrate how straightforward it really is to do better. For example, a story can make the climate connection to these fires without making the entire story a climate story. All you have to do is include one sentence referencing the science and then move on to the rest of the story.

In today’s LA Times, for example, Sammy Roth’s lead this morning read, “Los Angeles is burning. Fossil fuel companies laid the kindling.” TV. Of course, TV needs pictures to tell the story, and brave photographers have provided plenty of images of how explosively these fires have spread, but it’s an editorial choice what narration is paired with these images. Again, it doesn’t take long to make the connection. At ABC News, and we have a panelist from ABC News here today, a weather segment on Good Morning America showed harrowing video of the Pacific Palisades fire while meteorologist Somara Theodore told viewers, “As the climate is changing, we are seeing that these wildfires are becoming more extreme.” She added that this has meant 41% more land is burned by wildfires as a result.

So better news coverage of fires is not only possible, it’s imperative because these disasters are only going to get more common and destructive. There’s a strong Time Magazine cover story where the veteran climate reporter Jeffrey Kluger explained under a headline that went, “The LA fires show the reality of living in a world with 1.5 C warming.” He explained that more warming is inevitable until humans stop burning oil, gas and coal and other carbon-based fuels.

So this press briefing aims to equip journalists with the background knowledge and practical tips that you need to do justice to this decisive moment in the climate crisis. In the first half hour, I’ll pose questions to our panelists. In the second half hour, we take your questions. Please submit them via the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and please include your name and the name of your news outlet. I’ll then read them out for the panelists to answer. And while this briefing is open to everyone, please remember and honor the fact that we will be taking questions from working journalists only.

Now allow me to introduce our panelists. First, Matthew Glasser. He’s the Senior Coordinating Producer for ABC News Climate Unit where he oversees coverage of climate change, environmental issues and extreme weather events by both the National News Division and local ABC owned stations across the country. Also joining us, Rachael Myrow. She’s the senior editor at KQED Silicon Valley News Desk in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can hear her work also on NPR, on The World Broadcast, on WBUR’s Here & Now and the BBC.

And Kaitlyn Trudeau. She’s the Senior Research Associate for Climate Science at the nonprofit Climate Central, which Covering Climate Now proudly counts as one of our closest partners. Kaitlyn leads the group’s fire weather analysis of West Coast climate impacts.

Now I hope you’ll join me in giving all of our colleagues a warm virtual welcome. All right. Matthew, I’d like to start with you because I want to go behind the scenes of that Good Morning America segment I highlighted in my introduction. And before I ask you my questions, I’m going to ask you to talk us through how that segment made it to the air. But first, let’s see that segment. It’s going to be 30 seconds long and my colleague David Dickson should be queuing it up now.

GMA speaker: Right now, we’re talking about the Pacific Palisades and the fires out there, but take a look at this stunning visual of this fire whirl here hitting the ground. Absolutely terrifying. And you know, as the climate is changing, we are seeing that these wildfires are becoming more extreme and we’re getting more extreme weather events. In fact, in 2024, warmest year for the Earth since 1850 when we’ve been keeping records. Earth’s annual temperature was above that 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. And what impact does that potentially mean? 41% more land is burned by wildfires as a result. That’s a look at the forecast across the country. Let’s see what’s going on in your neighborhood.

Mark Hertsgaard: Matthew, I have so many questions for you, but let’s just start with, I mean you had that incredible video. So once you had that in hand, how did you and the rest of the news team go about deciding okay, we’re going to use this video and we’re going to make the climate connection to it? What was the process for writing that narration, for the script that accompanied it, the editorial, going back and forth? All of this with an eye, of course, to helping our colleagues who are part of this webinar to know how they could do that inside their own newsroom.

Matthew Glasser: Sure. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. I think we have to take it a little higher level though. It’s really not about the day of who’s writing the script, which video’s being picked. It’s more of setting the foundation for doing it on a regular basis, and we do a lot of things to ensure that that happens.

One, our meteorologists are fantastic in terms of understanding the climate science. Some of them have studied climate science, all of them have an interest in climate science. It’s not something that they one day are told oh, today we want to add this to our segment. It’s something that they have an active interest and knowledge in. So having that foundational knowledge and instruction is super important.

There’s really two things that we have to do is one is make sure that the people who are communicating the message have the most accurate information, but also making it clear to the producers and the people who allocate the time, like in that GMA segment, that these are important subjects, important topics and have newsworthy events that are worth the extra 30 seconds, 45 seconds, minute.

One of the things we do here at ABC News is when there are extreme weather events, be it hurricanes, flooding or in this case the fires, we send out a daily climate connections email where we put in very simple language bullet points about making those connections between that extreme weather event and what the science says about climate change.

And so we recognize that not everybody has a deep background in this. We do have climate journalists on staff. Our meteorologists, like I said, are fantastic, but a show producer for a daily show is going to be calculating 17, 18 different topics in a given morning. They may not have that same deep background. So by sending them this climate connections email, they can kind of grab something from it, drop it in, or at least use it as a guideline for helping to navigate and develop their shows and their rundowns. And so we send that out every day. We update it regularly as new science comes in, as new studies come in, we vet them, put them in there, and really encourage our show producers or our platforms to use that if nothing else as foundational ideas for segments or for ideas for future shows. And I think that foundational building of time really makes a difference. It becomes muscle memory in some cases.

In terms of the segment you just saw, obviously, we had that huge milestone of 2024 being the warmest year on record. I don’t know if irony is the right word to describe it coming exactly the time of these fires in LA, but it’s certainly something. And so it obviously made it an ideal opportunity to not only talk about that unfortunate milestone, but to talk about the connection between climate and the fires that we’re seeing.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you for that, Matthew and it’s so striking. You mentioned that you guys send out this climate briefing, and I should also say in full disclosure here, ABC News is one of the 500 plus partners of Covering Climate Now, and so is KQED where Rachael Myrow will be speaking in a moment.

You shared that guidance with me and some of us here at Covering Climate Now, and I wonder if you could just give a little bit more information on that guidance and how you put it together. And again, with an eye towards how other newsrooms could try and emulate that, bearing in mind that of course, many of our colleagues across the country and around the world work in newsrooms that don’t have as much staffing as a big TV network in the United States like ABC. So could you take us through what’s in the briefing and then how do you put that together, especially if you don’t have a whole team of meteorologists like ABC does?

Matthew Glasser: Sure. I think the secret sauce is to not wait until you need it. We use a Google Doc with different topics. Hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, and we build on it in the downtime before these events happen. I think with breaking news, the way they are and how quickly things get going, it’s probably not the right time to start coming up and looking at the research when the fires have already started.

So we work on this document throughout the year. When people have some downtime, we ask them to go take a look at some of these studies. When we see a new study hit, we put it into the document right away. We don’t like to let it sit. We look through it, we vet it, we decide if we think it’s strong and then we drop a paragraph or a statistic into our document. And so when it comes time to send out this note to our colleagues and our fellow journalists, we’ve already done that work in terms of developing the master document. And I can go and click on the link that says wildfires and pull up the wildfire bullet points and drop them into an email. Obviously, you want to keep it updated. Science changes, science evolves. Things that we weren’t so sure about, we become more sure about. And so as that comes down, you want to make sure you keep that document updated and current.

One of the things we really strive to do is make sure everything has citations. Especially in our digital articles, you can’t have too many links in my estimation. If you can put a link to the actual study, the actual NOAA page, the actual NASA information really helps in kind of debunking the people that are always going to come along and try to poke holes in your reporting and in the science. It’s hard to poke holes if they can go directly to the literal data that shows them that this is exactly how it is.

And so even in our notes that we send to colleagues, I make sure to include links to the primary sources because they may want to go deeper, they may need to defend their work in the field. They may go, ‘this is an important point, I want to get some quotes or some statistics.’ So those documents we send out always have the sources and the attribution included as well.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s a really excellent point about having the reporters fortified in advance with that knowledge so that when they’re out in the field doing interviews, they can get soundbites from people, whether it be a fire official or just a victim of the fires. So again, it’s don’t wait until the end. Get this stuff ready in advance, and that enables the reporters to do their job out in the field. That’s Matthew Glasser at ABC News, the Climate Editor there and it’s a perfect segue to turning to you, Kaitlyn Trudeau at Climate Central, talking about the science. And again, bearing in mind that not all news organizations have the resources that an ABC News or a big network does. I want to commend everybody and recommend that everybody look at Climate Central. They are an incredible source of very journalist friendly information, data, graphics that you can put straight on the air that really enable you to tell the climate story in a way that is accurate, but also engages your audiences.

So Kaitlyn, I’d like to ask you here if you could, and it’s of course, a difficult question, but can you give us a very brief audience-friendly summary of the way that climate change affects these fires? How burning fossil fuels increases both the frequency and the severity of the wildfires like those now in Los Angeles.

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here. And I think you asked the right question because I think one of the biggest problems I’m seeing in the coverage is people are really focusing on what was the cause of the fire. Fires are started for many, many reasons, a lot of times by people, and that’s not really what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is that climate change is making these fires much more dangerous than they would be if the climate was not warming. As temperatures are rising, we’re seeing more frequent fire weather conditions like we’ve been seeing in LA. This is really hot, dry, windy conditions that really set the stage for extreme fire behavior and rapid growth. And that is really what people are so worried about because we are seeing, in some parts of the country, an additional two more months every year of fire weather conditions compared to the seventies.

And that doesn’t mean you have two more months of fires. It just means that should a fire break out for any reason, whether it’s started by human, whether it’s dry lightning, anything, that the chances that that fire blows up into a huge mega-fire are much more likely. It’s much higher than if the conditions were otherwise. So it’s really amplifying the risks.

Mark Hertsgaard: And can you briefly again summarize for us why it is that the planet is now getting hotter and drier? And in particular, could you talk about this concept that has gotten a little bit of coverage, the UCLA Climate Scientist, Daniel Swain did a very helpful briefing on it, I think it was last Monday. So you saw a little bit of coverage and Axios and CNN did a story too on what is known, correct me if I’m wrong here, the climate whiplash effect.

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Yeah. So I mean we have all this warming because we are burning fossil fuels and that releases greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And you can kind of think of those as these heat trapping molecules that kind of wraps a blanket around the planet. And so we keep doing that and it’s getting hotter and hotter. And just imagine if you’re sick and you have a fever and someone keeps wrapping blankets around you, it’s going to cause problems.

And so as we have these increasing temperatures, the heat is also increasing the amount of evaporation from the plants, the landscapes, the soil. So it’s drying things out as well and it’s causing more extremes. And when we’re talking about climate whiplash, we’re talking about it’s basically just this change from one extreme to the other. So an example people keep using, last year in Los Angeles around this time, it was very, very wet and there was a lot of precipitation because of the atmospheric rivers that we had, which is great because it helped the drought. But the problem is all that rain really promotes a lot more vegetation and then we are followed by the total opposite, which is drought conditions and really intense heat. Now we have all this new vegetation. Now that vegetation dries out and it’s just basically kindling on the landscape. So you have this kind of boom bust kind of situation that really also amplifies the fuels and the risks that the additional fuels present in situations like this.

Mark Hertsgaard: Great. Thank you so much for that. And that is Kaitlyn Trudeau of Climate Central. Again, as journalists, if not Climate Central is not on your radar screen, you need to fix that right away.

And now turning to Rachael Myrow. Rachael of course is with KQED, as I mentioned, another partner of Covering Climate Now. And Rachael, I believe you’ve been down in LA on the ground since Tuesday. Are you still there now?

Rachael Myrow: I am not there now. I’ve returned to the Bay Area and I’m manically sifting through my take because there are lots of follow-up stories to be done. And yeah, I have to say as a consumer of news, ABC’s local coverage of the fires has been terrific, stellar.

And I should also mention that my title here as Silicon Valley News Desk Editor is relevant because I think many reporters at least got about climate change a long while ago. But we are in a maelstrom of competing narratives by people who have very self-interested reasons to confuse the public, to distract them with conspiracy theories or not really related topics. Like for instance, the plight of the Delta smelt, which has nothing to do with what’s happening right now. And I think it’s kind of incumbent on journalists, not just in our stories, but even when we’re talking to people in the field, to sort of gauge who am I talking to? What are the questions they have? How can I make clear for them? How can I connect the dots for them with the knowledge I have going in?

So in addition to all the other things you’re balancing as a reporter, trying to get the story straight for today, I think it’s also incumbent upon us to explain to the people we’re talking to what’s really true and how you go about finding credible information.

Mark Hertsgaard: Rachael, you seem to have read my mind because this was not planned. This was not rehearsed folks. But my next question to you was going to reference a very strong piece that your colleague, and pardon me if I mispronounce the name, Nisa Khan, did a piece just today for KQED. The headline “Misinformation About the LA Fire Spreads Fast. Here’s How to Spot It.” And I’m going to put a link to that story right now in the chat for everyone. Just give me a moment.

And one of the things I like about the story is that that second sentence in your headline, “Here’s How to Spot It.” So that you as the news organization are reaching out to the public and saying here’s how to protect yourself against this stuff. Which by the way, the crisis that we all have in journalism where legacy outlets are losing audiences, part of the way to reverse that and to regain audiences is to gain their trust. And this is a place where I think legacy media has such a role to play.

So I know you didn’t do that story, Rachael, but I’m assuming that you’re familiar with it. Could you talk a little bit about how KQED and NPR more generally, because I know you’re reporting for them as well on the fires. Say a little bit more about the misinformation that has been circulating and how you and your news organization have tackled that.

Rachael Myrow: Well, I think it’s funny, the parallels. So climate change, I think people who are enamored of facts have fully understood that climate change has impacts in terms of our human experience of natural disasters. They are national disasters and international disasters.

So we sort of understand that, but there’s been a shift that’s been required in more recent years as we start to see more intense, more devastating, for instance, wildfires and hurricanes where we’re trying to sort of grasp collectively, and it’s a very difficult thing to do, that the situation has changed. It’s gotten worse on a number of different levels, and we need to respond on a number of different levels. And this is difficult not just for news reporters and the public, but also politicians and policymakers.

And I think as all of us try to affix blame, who started the fire, what politicians should have been doing more, differently in the days before the fire, it’s incumbent on reporters to educate themselves what the power structure looks like, and to explain to everybody that we talk to that, as I put it to a number of people this past weekend, Karen Bass is just the person with her hands on the steering wheel at the time that smoke starts coming out from under the car hood. Right? Yes, she may be responsible for certain actions or inaction, but there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen just to keep mixing my metaphors.

And also, there is this larger issue that many of our housing developments got the go ahead to put bulldozers in the dirt decades ago. Scientists even then were warning that these were not good places to build, but build they did and all the way up through our personal lifetimes. And so when we come to this moment when a major fire takes off, the original sin if you will, is a decision made when our grandparents were alive. And I think this is something that you can’t say it often enough, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. It’s a collective of bad decisions that lead up to today’s horrible moment.

Mark Hertsgaard: Yeah. Which is what makes it especially unfortunate that disinformation has been allowed to frame coverage. I mean, I saw over the weekend when President-elect Donald Trump started issuing these tweets saying… I guess not tweets but social media statements about trying to blame all of this on the so-called water declaration and insulting Governor Newsom and so forth and raising questions about hydrants running dry and all of that. And yet, we know as journalists that Donald Trump has a documented history of lying, of making stuff up out of thin air.

Now why do we give that any credence? Why do we even report that? And not only did we report it, but if you watched the coverage over the weekend, suddenly the framing of the coverage even on the venerable 60 Minutes broadcast begins to look at well, what were local government officials doing? What were they thinking? Instead of asking about the deeper cause of this, which of course is, as we’re talking about, climate change.

So that’s one thing to bear in mind everybody. The proximate cause of these fires, I don’t think it’s been established yet, but as Kaitlyn Trudeau was telling us, many of these fires start by human activity. Whether it’s downed power lines. It could be a spark, it could be somebody’s cigarette, it could be kids playing with matches, it could be outright arson, all kinds of possibilities that are being investigated. But the underlying cause that is making these fires, mega-fires as opposed to smaller fires, is climate change, and it has been striking how little we’ve heard about that.

I’m going to just remind all of our attendees here, and I’m happy to see that there’s 250 of you online with us. Thank you all for being here. You’re all invited if you are a working journalist to ask questions. Please put them there in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen, and I’ll get to as many of them as I can.

But first, I want to go back to you Matthew Glasser at ABC News and ask what is the plan? And I’m going to ask this to all of you. So get ready. What are your plans going forward here? Because we’re hearing today that there’s going to be a renewal of these almost hurricane-force winds, which of course, increases the risk of more fires.

A second theme that is beginning to emerge in the coverage is what’s going to happen to insurance? We’ve talked about rebuilding, but you can’t really rebuild if you’re not going to have insurance on that house. And so what are the plans there at ABC News, both in the spot coverage of the fires in the next say 48 to 72 hours and longer term?

Matthew Glasser: Sure. And thank you Rachael for recognizing the hard work of our colleagues at KBC. I was in LA last week as well. I’m from LA. It’s really hard to cover a story when you’re also worried about your friends and family at the same time. Many of them have had to evacuate. Some of them have lost their homes, and yet, they’re working around the clock to provide this information. And so we’re grateful for that.

And to piggyback that onto Mark’s question is I guess the answer is yes, we have to do all of those things. Climate change is an existential threat to the planet, arguably the most important challenge facing the planet. But it doesn’t make some of those other things we’ve mentioned here less important. We have to find room for all of that. Understanding the actual cause, what set the fire is important. Talking about public policy and urban planning and where we build and how we build is important. Talking about insurance and whether or not we should be insuring houses in these high-risk zones or rebuilding when they get burned repeatedly is important. And of course, understanding the science of what happened is incredibly important.

I also think, and I also think my journalism colleagues would agree, words really matter, especially when it comes to climate change coverage. And I think we can add fuel to the fire, no pun intended, to these deniers and these trolls when we make sweeping statements that we can’t back up with the science. We know in the abstract and the macro the impacts of climate change on these fires and that’s well documented. The research is very sound. But we’re going to need some climate attribution studies to know exactly what the impact was on the fires in Los Angeles.

It’s only been a week. And so when I see these broad declarations that climate change caused these fires, I think that does harm to the overall mission of trying to explain the role of climate change in these complex issues. This was a rare but not unprecedented wind event coupled with the hydroclimate whiplash. Lots of things played into this and I think we have to be nuanced because when we do sweeping declarations and we can’t support it, we open the door for people to poke holes. And once you do that… And I’m not really concerned about the trolls, we’re never going to change them, but there are still a fair amount of people who are uncertain. They don’t have an agenda, they’re not trying to make a buck. They just don’t know. They’re not educated yet. And I don’t want to give ammunition to people who are trying to influence them for ulterior motives, for malicious reasons, by not being sound in the words we choose and the science we use and the way we explain these things, even if it means it takes a little extra time to do so.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks so much. That’s a nice segue to Kaitlyn Trudeau. Kaitlyn, I know you guys, Climate Central is not a news organization. However, I’m quite confident that you are actively thinking about how to respond to this event. And please also pick up on Matthew’s point about attribution because you guys have done, along with the World Weather Attribution Group over in Europe, really great studies on attribution. And for folks who don’t know, attribution science is simply being able to look at how much responsibility, I should say, climate change has for a given extreme weather event. And attribution studies may find that climate change made an event twice as likely as it would’ve been or made such and such fires 10 times more likely or such and such droughts or floods 20 times more likely.

So Kaitlyn, could you talk about that a little bit, please?

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Yeah, absolutely. And kind of going off what Matthew said, I would really discourage people from [saying] climate change caused these events. Because even when we talk about attribution, we’re talking about the fact climate change is making them either more likely or more severe or less likely or less severe. But when you do say, yeah, the word cause, I mean it really does set off people off quite a bit and it encourages mistrust and promotes all those things. So I would just really encourage people to kind of refrain from thinking it that way and just thinking about how does climate change impact these events.

With attributions and attribution science, there are different extreme weather events, different types of extreme weather that we can very seriously and confidently attribute to human caused climate change. There are some extreme weather events that we’re not quite sure yet. We still need more science on it. To attribute an event, you need basically three things. You need a sound understanding of the physics, the physical processes that caused these events. You need long-term consistent observations and you need to be able to reproduce these events in the models. So those three things are needed to be able to confidently attribute. And the kind of event that we can attribute the most confidently is extreme heat, and that is something that is playing a role here in terms of heat is a very important part of fire weather.

So yeah, I mean, thinking about what’s next, I’ve been looking at fire weather data for many years now, and as a native Californian, I’ve always been interested in fires. And I’ve been particularly interested in the large fires we’ve seen in recent years that have been caused by downed power lines. And full disclosure, my grandfather’s house burnt down in the Eaton fire. He’s safe. But this is another situation where we’re wondering what caused these fires? I used to hike out in Eaton Canyon. I’m very familiar with the area. And so I think that that’s something that I’ve seen over and over again. And again, we don’t know if that’s the exact cause, but we’ve been seeing over the years, having to do more of these public safety power shutoffs where utilities are trying to prevent these large fires. But we’re still seeing them and we’ve seen them in the Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas and Marshall Fire in Lahaina.

So many fires in California and I’m really interested to see what we can do about that and if and how we can hold these companies accountable when they do cause these fires. And again, don’t know yet for this one, but I’m just really interested to see what the investigation finds for all of these fires. But I think that, yeah, the causes are important. Don’t overdo it with making statements you can’t support, obviously. And if you have questions, please reach out. There are so many amazing people that I work with who are just so willing to take your questions at any time and really want to help people understand what they can and they can’t say. So if you’re not sure, please reach out anytime.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks, Kaitlyn. I’m going to have a quick follow up to you before going to Rachael, but just a reminder to all of the journalists who are trying to ask questions in the Q&A, please give your news outlet as well as your name. That way we know you’re an actual journalist.

And my follow-up to you, Kaitlyn, is at Covering Climate Now, of course, we are very careful about our language. We don’t say cause. But one of the things that we’ve suggested to journalists that you can say is that climate change helps to drive these kinds of events. Or pardon the pun, climate change fuels these kinds of extreme events. Do those two words fit your approval?

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s great. And we have a lot of really great attribution work that’s been done that gives you great examples of this and the kind of language that I think is the most helpful for people.

But I keep seeing in different articles people saying we can’t attribute any one weather event to climate change, which is incorrect. It used to be a while ago, but the science has developed and I think it’s important to be clear. You don’t have to say all of events can be attributed. That’s not what we’re talking about. And it’s important to be clear of the caveats, the shortcomings, but I think that when we start making these statements and we keep repeating that no event can be attributed, I think it really confuses a lot of people and does a lot more damage than we realize. And all those, I think those words are great.

Matthew Glasser: Mark, we like to use “amplify.” Human amplified climate change.

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Yeah.

Matthew Glasser: Because there is a natural role in all of these things. It’s not 100% humans, but “amplified” feels comfortable to us.

Mark Hertsgaard: Those are good words and of course, we know that it helps to have a number of different words when you write in journalism so you don’t repeat yourself.

Okay. Quickly to Rachael Myrow at KQED, because I want to get into some of the questions from our colleagues around the world, and we’re going to start with a question from India in a moment. But Rachael, what does KQED and if you can speak to it, NPR, what’s your coverage going to be over the coming 48 hours and then beyond?

Rachael Myrow: Oh my goodness. Well, the wonderful thing I will say about the way we approach these disasters now on a regular basis is instead of competing with each other to get this story or that story first, we’re now collaborating. And so yesterday, I had a great conversation with Nancy Wallace, who’s a real estate professor over at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley talking about the insurance market. Talking about her own personal experience as losing her house in the Oakland Hills fire, and also what kind of advice, what kind of big picture thinking she has about the current fires.

Now, even before I’m going to figure out what bit I’m going to use in my own stories this week, I’m uploading it to the Slack channel where we have multiple news organizations so people can see that. We upload whole specials, we upload the links of our completed stories, and as a result, we’re all sort of pulling oars together in the boat. And I think that really, really helps because there are bigger stations like my own, we have our own KQED Science Desk with multiple people. It’s very well staffed and very well funded. NPR has its own science desk, but there are all these little tiny stations all over California and indeed the American West that don’t have those resources. That have a hamster run radio station with one guy doing it all 24/7. And for those people, these resources are immensely helpful.

So I would argue along those lines, cooperation versus competition. But yeah, as you’ve just heard, we’re looking at all the things that are happening while the firefighters are still trying to get a handle on these major blazes. How do people begin to rebuild? Where do they send their pets while they’re staying with friends or family, multiple families in one apartment? We’re trying to look at the human cost and the human strategizing that’s happening as we go into the second week of these fires devastating Southern California.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks. That’s Rachael Myrow with KQED and that’s music to our ears here at Covering Climate Now, collaboration. We are a collaboration of over 500 news outlets around the world. We believe in newsrooms and journalists working together. So thank you, Rachael, for highlighting that.

Okay, now we’re going to turn to questions. We’re going to start, as I say in India, and then we’re going to go to a dear colleague of mine from El País, Spain. But from India the question is… Let me just find it here. It’s from Down to Earth Magazine, and the question is, “Have there been scientific estimates of how many greenhouse gas emissions the wildfires themselves have contributed since January 7th?”

Kaitlyn, I’d like to turn to you on that, and if there haven’t been, that’s fine, but just let us know.

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Yeah. I haven’t heard of any personally. Wildfires definitely can cause a huge, huge increase in emissions, but I don’t know if that there have been any estimates quite yet.

Mark Hertsgaard: Yeah, I think that they probably have not been yet. And in fact, I worked with NPR on a story a couple of years ago that looked at how wildfire emissions have indeed increased over time, but we don’t have that data yet. Stay tuned for that. That’s a good idea for a follow-up story. Matthew?

Matthew Glasser: I will say there’s been some great research on the Canadian wildfires and their contribution to emissions. So it’s not LA, but it can give you some insight into the kind of damage that they can do in terms of those emissions.

Mark Hertsgaard: Yeah, yeah. It is a major factor for sure. And so this would be a great follow-up story for anyone out there to do. Talk to scientists at Climate Central. Also, another resource if you’re trying to get to scientists is something called SciLine. That’s spelled S-C-I-L-I-N-E, SciLine. That’s a group of scientists who have been pre-vetted to speak to the media in the sense that they’ve had media training. They will give you audience friendly sound bites and explain science in a comprehensible way and respond to you on deadline. My colleague David Dickson has just put their website in the chat there, SciLine.

Now turning to a question from my colleague María Mónica Monsalve S. She is a reporter at El País for America Futura, and she asks, “Besides the increasing temperature, what other conditions play a role in fire weather? For example, evaporation, soil humidity, vegetation, et cetera.” Again, Kaitlyn, I think that’s for you.

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Yeah. I mean, it’s really all connected, right? So we have this warming that’s causing an increase in arid conditions as well. So it’s the warming, it’s the drying, it’s the increases in extreme. And yeah, we’re seeing that that is causing all kinds of different contributing factors. But what’s primarily the main parts of fire weather are temperature, humidity or aridity and wind speed. But there are many other factors that people look at, but those are the three main contributing ones.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks. And here is not a question, but an update from our colleagues at World Weather Attribution. I mentioned them earlier, and Sam Fraser-Baxter has written to say that World Weather Attribution has started an attribution study on the LA fires. Any journalist who would like to receive the embargoed study and press release, which is going to be published, he says in the next two to three weeks, please email the following address, WWAMedia@imperial.AC.UK, and we’ll put that in the chat as well.

Now I want to move on to a question from a US colleague, and this is from Geneva Zoltek at KTNV Las Vegas. Really practical question. “How do we as journalists triage in these moments? I tend to get overwhelmed by the volume of news that needs to be covered in the environmental sphere. From land use changes here in Nevada, extreme heat, wildfires in LA. How should we be prioritizing our news coverage?” I’m going to turn to you for that one, Matthew.

Matthew Glasser: Sure. I think obviously, there’s a variety of opinions on this. To me, I look at the acute phase and the chronic phase as we would in medicine. In the early days, while we’d like to try to get some of the climate connections in, saving lives, saving property are the most important thing. And so when we have people out on the front lines, we are really about making sure people have the most up-to-date information, where the evacuations are, where the most risk is. We have to make sure people are safe. We have to try to help people be safe.

As the days go on and the fires get a little bit better under control, we can then start looking at some of the bigger issues like the insurance, like the role of climate. So my suggestion is focus on the most immediate, urgent thing first, and then give yourself the opportunity to start looking at some of those bigger questions in the days to come. Because there’s no possible way to do it all at the same time and quite frankly, I don’t think you should. As people are fleeing and they literally were getting out of their cars and running for their lives, it’s probably not the right time to be talking about the insurance problem. Really, that’s the time to be helping people get out of harm’s way. So time and place I think are really important in these extreme and dangerous situations. And Rachael might have a thought too.

Rachael Myrow: Oh, I would just be in total agreement. Although unfortunately, this week we have both happening at the same time. So on the one hand, we have people where am I going to rent a place? Aunt Barbara is getting tired of me and the three kids and the four dogs. That’s happening right now for that person. So if you want to be delivering news you can use, that’s important as well.

At the same time that you have, if you’re a local news outlet, most of your people on the, this is the zone where you really shouldn’t be drinking the water right now, and if you live north of San Vicente, for the love of God, get out early. Please. All of those stories, you need to be reporting them not once, but multiple times, perhaps on the hour, on the half hour. So there’s that. But again, those are local stations that are serving a local audience.

If you are elsewhere watching in horror, I would say instead of trying to duplicate, I would say amplify what you see local newsrooms doing and then focus on how you can, for your audience, make this news sound like something they need to activate about. So if you’re covering the news from Hawaii or Japan or Indonesia or Germany, here are the local events we experienced in the past. Here are the events we’re worried about experiencing in the near future and helping your audience get the sense that this is not just oh, those poor benighted celebrity infested Angelenos. So that they understand that this is about them too.

Mark Hertsgaard: Excellent. Excellent suggestions there from our colleagues. And again, this is how we as journalists gain and regain the trust of audiences by showing that you’re on their side, that you’re factual. You’re not just giving them news you can use when they shop. You’re giving them news they can use when they’re faced with a climate disaster. And as the science is increasingly showing us, there is no place on this planet where people are not susceptible to climate disasters in the years ahead.

Turning now to a colleague of ours from North Carolina, picking up on Rachael’s point, which just suffered recently a devastating climate-driven event. This is from Michelle Alfini, and she is at WSOC TV. That’s in Charlotte, North Carolina. And she says, “As a climate department of one at WSOC, how would you recommend getting started on building a research document like Matthew Glasser suggested? And once such a document is made, how can I get my colleagues in the newsroom into the habit of referencing that information in the stories that they’re doing that may touch on climate events but aren’t earmarked for the climate section of the newscast?” Matthew, over to you.

Matthew Glasser: Sure. That’s a great question. So I think first, I would identify the key climate issues in your region. Narrow it down a little bit. We are a national platform. We’re an international platform. We have to cover everything, but you don’t have as many fires as you have floods and other things. So I would say pick a couple of the key extreme weather events that have climate connections and focus on that. Don’t try to do everything early on in that document.

And then, as Kaitlyn said, reach out for help. Not only can the climate science community point you in the right direction. They can help you make sense of some of these studies and put them in language that are accessible to you and your colleagues. Because really at the end of the day, it’s not just about making the audience understand. It’s about making your colleagues who don’t have this background understand. They are not going to want to put stuff in their stories and their shows that they’re confused about. They don’t want to be wrong. They don’t want to be attacked by the climate denier community. And so sometimes the path of least resistance is to just not do it.

So you need to make sure that this stuff is locked down and written in a way that is accessible to people who don’t have the same background or interest. And a great way to do that is working with the very scientists who are doing this research. And then be patient. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. We send out the climate connections every day, and there’s some days when nobody uses it at all. But there’s some days when a lot of shows use it.

Don’t be discouraged. It’s going to take time. People have to keep seeing it. They have to keep seeing it, they have to keep seeing it. I have an office here, but I also have a desk in the newsroom. I sit in the newsroom most of the time because then I can overhear when someone’s talking about something that I can insert myself into. So listen, if you hear some of your colleagues talking about, “Oh, we’re going to go do a story on insurance.” Hey, actually there’s a climate aspect to that and I can send you a couple of lines that you can drop in. You really do have to insert yourself when it comes to this beat in other people’s work. And it’s not because they don’t want to do it. They just often don’t know. And if they do know, they don’t know exactly how to integrate it into a story when the story itself isn’t about that particular thing.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s really good practical advice and I’ll use it as an opportunity to say that Covering Climate Now offers trainings to local TV stations across the country. In fact, we have already trained scores of such stations at CBS News, NBC News, Univision, Telemundo, Fox News, Sinclair Stations in various parts of the country. And I’m happy to say, as Matthew knows and through his efforts that we’re about to start with ABC local stations as well. So if you’re part of a local TV station and you’d like these trainings, they are available in both English and Spanish. Get in touch with us via editors@coveringclimatenow.org.

Now, a quick question from one of our partners in Germany, the newspaper Taz. This is a question from Tabea Kirchner, climate journalist. This is for you, Kaitlyn. “As the Santa Ana winds are fueling these wildfires, I’d like to ask if climate change is also making the Santa Ana winds more likely or stronger.”

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Yeah. So the Santa Ana winds, they’re seasonal. Get them around this time of year, but they’re not usually quite this extreme. So wind in the atmosphere, it moves based on pressure differences. There’s high pressure that builds over the Great Basin and the area of low pressure kind of off the coast of LA. So the larger the pressure difference, the faster the wind will move. There’s a lot of other things that are happening in there in Santa Ana winds, but I think there’s a lot more research that needs to be done because some people think that because with the warming, there’s going to be less of a pressure difference, which theoretically could slow the winds. But again, there’s so many factors. I think that people still don’t have quite a good understanding of that yet, and at least not that I’ve seen quite yet. But I do believe that that will be something people look more at.

Wind is really hard. Even with fire weather, it gets easy to talk about temperature and humidity. It’s difficult to talk about wind. It’s very localized and there’s a lot of aspects that change much more rapidly. So I’d say stay tuned. I bet there would be more in coming years.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks for that, Kaitlyn. And I’m just looking at another question actually from a colleague of yours at ABC News, Matthew, called Matt Allen who asked the same question basically about Santa Ana winds. So again, stay tuned on that.

I’d like to take a question now from my dear old colleagues at KALW. That’s a second public radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area, and this is from Mary Catherine O’Connor. She asks, “Given the massive number of structures that are burning in LA, the air quality is likely far more toxic now than in wildfires that occur in wildlands. I’ve been struck and frankly worried by how few reporters and sources have been wearing face masks inside the areas impacted by the fires. I’m wondering whether any newsrooms have best practices on protecting reporters and all journalists and encouraging sources to protect themselves in these situations.” Let me go first to you, Rachael and then Matt, if you have any guidance on that as well.

Rachael Myrow: So sorry. Say again. The question is?

Mark Hertsgaard: Do you have guidance on, are your journalists required to wear face masks when they’re out in these kinds of settings and encourage their sources to do the same?

Rachael Myrow: Required? It’s hard to require reporters who are out of sight of the bosses, but yeah, everything is possible. We receive regular trainings. We have multiple fire kits that include everything because, of course, your reporters may have some ridiculous thing that made sense during the pandemic but is not designed for this current event. And there is a constant reiteration in group emails and Slack channels about the importance not just of protecting yourself and recommending protections for the people that you’re interviewing, but reminding people again to that earlier comment that climate change has changed the nexus of risk, right?

So what I used to do in the past to make sure I wasn’t anywhere near the flames of a major wildfire is not enough for today. And now I need to think about what happens when the fire weather created by the storm system itself is sending embers and going to outrun me in my car when I’m out there. That kind of planning and training and just situational awareness is something you really need to train your people to be doing early and often before the event hits.

Because otherwise, the temptation will be when your reporter’s out in the field, oh, I got this. I’ve done this before. I know what the risks are. I know how to protect myself and the people I’m talking to. Everyone could use a refresher course and more than one.

Mark Hertsgaard: So again, that’s a reminder. Let’s prepare in advance. Very hard to respond in all the different ways that we need to on the fly. So get your reporting resources ready, have your journalists trained and so forth. I’m going to ask each of you to give a very quick answer to the following question, because we’ve got to get out of here on time.

So very quickly to each of you, here’s a question from Jessica Zubia Calsada, and she works with Impact Media, most of whose audience is Gen Z, who typically care deeply about environmental and social issues. Her question is, “How can we engage Gen Z effectively in our climate coverage?”

Matthew Glasser, of course, there’s nothing that legacy television needs more than a younger audience. So how are you guys tackling that? And then I’ll go to each of you and please keep your answer to 30 seconds at most.

Matthew Glasser: Right. So before I was at ABC, I helped run NBC LX, which was an experimental network at NBC for young viewers, particularly Gen Zers. And the one thing we found was one of the most effective ways to get them engaged is by solutions-driven journalism. They don’t just want to know what’s happening. They want to know what they can do about it.

And so a key way for that demographic to be engaged is to not just report, but to give them actionable things that they can do. Not partisan things, but actionable things that they can do so they feel like they’re making a difference. Whether it’s donating, whether it’s getting involved, whether it’s who to write to, but they don’t want to just be told something.

Mark Hertsgaard: Covering Climate Now has a background resource for that that we put together with our colleagues at the Solutions Journalism Network about how to do good climate solutions reporting, which is not about cheerleading or sugarcoating. It’s about interrogating potential solutions, both technological and political. Same question to you, Kaitlyn. From a scientific standpoint, what do you say to Gen Zers?

Kaitlyn Trudeau: Well, I mean, yeah, I just echo what Matthew said. I think giving solutions is incredibly important. The idea and the understanding of climate change for a lot of Gen Zers really takes a huge toll. And so I think it’s important to encourage them to embrace solutions, to use their voice. Make sure that they are using that. We are also lucky to be able to have a voice to vote. So to really use it so that you can elect leaders who care about the things that you care about.

But yeah, giving solutions and not just telling them that their future is terrifying. But letting them know what they can do and that there are solutions that we have and that can make a real difference.

Mark Hertsgaard: And finally, you Rachael Myrow at KQED.

Rachael Myrow: People like to see themselves reflected in the news they consume. Include their voices, include their faces. Show them in every story you can manage to show them and they will see that you are talking to them as well as their elders.

Mark Hertsgaard: Excellent advice and stay tuned to Covering Climate Now for announcements. In a couple of weeks, we’re going to be rolling out something called the 89% Project, which talks about and leads off from the fact that 89% of the people in the world want their governments to be doing more to solve climate change. The fact that their governments aren’t doing that reflects a democracy deficit, but that’s something that engaged journalism can help address. 89% Project, stay tuned for that.

Meanwhile, let me thank all of our guests today for a really fascinating and very constructive conversation. We’ve had Matthew Glasser at ABC News, Kaitlyn Trudeau at Climate Central, and Rachael Myrow at KQED NPR. And on behalf of everyone at Covering Climate Now, I’m Mark Hertsgaard wishing you a very pleasant day.