Firefighters are battling to save the Reagan Library from being destroyed by the Easy fire, the Los Angeles Times is reporting. “The fire was being held back by an aggressive ground and aerial attack on the ridges beyond Simi’s modern residential estates.”
The climate crisis is intensifying California’s fire seasons. A study published in 2015 found that California wild fires were increasing in number in severity and climate change was in part to blame. Another study, published in 2019, suggests that the climate crisis will make the fires even worse.
“Our data show that climate has been the main driver of fire on a regional scale,” said Richard Vachula, a Ph.D. student in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and the study’s lead author. “We find that warm and dry conditions promote fire, which in light of climate model predictions suggests that future fires may be more extensive than we have observed in the last century.”
So, is it poetic justice that Reagan’s presidential library is being threatened by wild fires that are now more extreme due to global warming? If only Ronald Reagan could have done something about climate change more than 35 years ago other than helping his party politicize the science and cutting funding for climate science research, then California today may not be faced with a hellscape.
As “The View from Washington, D.C.” from the American Institute of Physics website for The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart, explains:
Global Warming Rises as a Political Issue (1980-1983)
By 1980, many climate scientists thought it likely that harmful global warming was on the way, but Federal budgets for their research were not rising. In 1981, Ronald Reagan took the presidency with an administration that openly scorned their concerns. He brought with him a backlash that had been building against the environmental movement. Many conservatives denied nearly every environmental worry, global warming included. They lumped all such concerns together as the rants of business-hating liberals, a Trojan Horse for government regulation. The National Climate Program Office found itself serving, as an observer put it, as "an outpost in enemy territory." The new administration laid plans to cut funding for CO2 studies in particular, deeming such research unnecessary. Everything connected with the subject became politically sensitive. Thus when NASA scientist James Hansen published a study showing that the world had been getting warmer, and the New York Times made it a front-page story, the DOE reneged on funding they had promised Hansen. He had to lay off five people from his institute. Such cutbacks were not enough for the DOE program's enemies. "The question of concern," one staff scientist remarked, "will be whether we have jobs rather than how we spend money." This was only one example of a politicization of science that extended into areas as diverse as smog pollution and embryonic research.
A total gutting of greenhouse effect research was narrowly averted when scientists rallied behind Representative Albert Gore, Jr. […]
The Reagan administration saw the EPA report as a political attack and attacked it in return, opening a caustic public debate between people who were alarmed by global warming and people who felt it could be ignored. […]
Leaders of the Reagan administration particularly distrusted any activity, even research, that they connected with a threat of government interference with business. Overall, the Federal government spent less money for the environmental sciences during the 1980s than during the 1970s. NASA and NOAA suffered cuts severe enough to force the entire meteorological program into stagnation, so that weather satellites launched in the 2000s would be flying with 1970s technology. As for global warming, by one discouraged estimate the Reagan administration spent less than $50 million per year for research directly focused on the topic — a trivial sum compared with many other research programs.
Reagan’s library was designed to withstand wildfires and earthquakes; and firefighting efforts are being focused upon the building and its archives, but people with houses in the area may not be so well protected. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Officials devoted significant manpower to areas near the Reagan Library through the morning to protect the well-known structure. Helicopters repeatedly dropped loads of water behind the library amid 60-mph winds, turning the flames into smoke on a ridge 300 feet below. As wind gusts blew strong enough to knock a person off balance, two super-scooper planes dipped down behind the library, unleashing a large volume of water that created its own rainbow.
So, even after his death, people hope Reagan’s legacy of trickle down still might work. There is a belief that the library’s presence will help save homes in the area, one evacuated resident said:
“One thing is sure,” he said. “They aren’t going to let Reagan’s library burn — and that protects us.”