Oct 22, 2026 · 34 min · 10 segments
Climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain joins host Beth Ruyak to explain why this winter’s El Niño sharply raises California’s risk of heavy rain, flooding and coastal erosion this winter. They also…
Beth RuyakHost
In fact, the governor's state of emergency declaration includes 18 whereas paragraphs, whereas there is weather, whereas there are forecasts, whereas there is all the different justifications for then all the different paragraphs asking agencies and departments and all kinds of municipalities to get involved in exactly the kind of of work that you're talking about, I want to stay with that political idea for a moment.
With where weather and climate are going, should there be more political involvement in regulating people's habitat, people's choices of homes and living spaces in connection with, again, these horrifically dangerous areas?
And this is a scientific question and a political question all in one, because there's the question of the physical hazards.
And as it turns out in California, people usually either live in a floodplain or a flood risk zone or a wildfire zone.
There are some folks who live in both same time, interestingly, but there's not too many people who are outside of either of them.
And so the majority of Californians are exposed to fire or flood hazards of some sort at some point in time.
The challenge is that the disaster losses are rapidly outpacing, as far as we can tell, even the increase in these hazards.
Some researchers have called this the expanding bullseye effect, the idea that if there is a fire or a flood or a hurricane or whatever the hazard might be, If you expand the physical size of the footprint that people live within, the very same event from 50 or 100 years ago is going to cause more damage and potentially harm more people because there's just more humans and more stuff in the way.
And so the question then is, How do we manage that? Because we know the risk of these physical hazards is increasing due to climate change.
We know the risk of the human exposure is also increasing for other reasons, namely that more and more people are sort of expanding suburbs, small towns are becoming not so small towns.
It's a question even about affordability of housing, you know, which sounds like something quite far afield from El Nino.
And, you know, we have this challenge in a place like California where the cost of living is very high, that people increasingly move out of urban cores, which in many cases are the most protected areas when it comes to wildfire risk, for example, or sometimes flood risk.
These, in many cases, are the places that are at really high risk of either fire or flood, depending on where you are in the state of California.
So the affordability question has actually been pushing more and more people into geophysically high risk zones.
Where people really didn't live in large numbers, even as recently as 30, 40, 50 years ago.
And I think, you know, the question often that comes to mind, people say, well, should people move out of harm's way? You know, should we mandate that people move?
In fact, the governor's state of emergency declaration includes 18 whereas paragraphs, whereas there is weather, whereas there are forecasts, whereas there is all the different justifications for then all the different paragraphs asking agencies and departments and all kinds of municipalities to get involved in exactly the kind of of work that you're talking about, I want to stay with that political idea for a moment.
With where weather and climate are going, should there be more political involvement in regulating people's habitat, people's choices of homes and living spaces in connection with, again, these horrifically dangerous areas?
And this is a scientific question and a political question all in one, because there's the question of the physical hazards.
And as it turns out in California, people usually either live in a floodplain or a flood risk zone or a wildfire zone.
There are some folks who live in both same time, interestingly, but there's not too many people who are outside of either of them.
And so the majority of Californians are exposed to fire or flood hazards of some sort at some point in time.
The challenge is that the disaster losses are rapidly outpacing, as far as we can tell, even the increase in these hazards.
Some researchers have called this the expanding bullseye effect, the idea that if there is a fire or a flood or a hurricane or whatever the hazard might be, If you expand the physical size of the footprint that people live within, the very same event from 50 or 100 years ago is going to cause more damage and potentially harm more people because there's just more humans and more stuff in the way.
And so the question then is, How do we manage that? Because we know the risk of these physical hazards is increasing due to climate change.
We know the risk of the human exposure is also increasing for other reasons, namely that more and more people are sort of expanding suburbs, small towns are becoming not so small towns.
It's a question even about affordability of housing, you know, which sounds like something quite far afield from El Nino.
And, you know, we have this challenge in a place like California where the cost of living is very high, that people increasingly move out of urban cores, which in many cases are the most protected areas when it comes to wildfire risk, for example, or sometimes flood risk.
These, in many cases, are the places that are at really high risk of either fire or flood, depending on where you are in the state of California.
So the affordability question has actually been pushing more and more people into geophysically high risk zones.
Where people really didn't live in large numbers, even as recently as 30, 40, 50 years ago.
And I think, you know, the question often that comes to mind, people say, well, should people move out of harm's way? You know, should we mandate that people move?
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