Notes on the Los Angeles fires, higher education, and climate change

This month I’ve been working on a post about how the Earth just broke the 1.5 C global heating threshold, as part of my work on climate change and the future of higher education. I hope to publish that soon, but the enormous Los Angeles fires just happened — are still happening, in fact. I’ve been posted about this on social media and talking with reporters, so I wanted to share some observations based on my research.

In this post I’ll start with a look at the present, how this disaster is impacting colleges and universities in terms of climate change. Next I’ll consider what the event might mean for higher education’s future. This will be a fast and sketchy post, because the LA event is still developing, and because I’ve already written a lot about the broader topic.

To be clear, this post is not an analysis or summary of the fires per se. There’s plenty of reporting on the fires themselves and the Wikipedia page is, characteristically, quite rich. Instead the focus here is specifically on higher education in the crisis. Additionally, and it should go without saying, my heart goes out to the hundreds of thousands of people directly impacted.

One more introductory point: I’m not arguing that climate change caused the LA fires. I’m saying, in line with what I’ve seen from research, that global warming played a role in making these fires the way they are. Generally, climate change worsens natural disasters like fires, spurring more of them and…