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Like many, I’ve watched with alarm as the California wildfires scorched thousands of acres across Los Angeles County, decimating communities like Altadena and tearing through urban areas at an uncontrollable speed, driven by Santa Ana winds.
Then came the misinformation.
Like with Hurricane Milton. Like with other disasters.
When local power brokers began pointing fingers and taking political shots after fire hydrants (never designed for massive wildfires) ran dry. When President-elect Donald Trump posted, and confidants followed suit. When Instagram amplified posts about AI’s water use and a billionaire couple’s (unrelated) influence in California water.
Misinformation spilled out across the political spectrum, hurled by those who ought to know better and have the capacity to fact-check what they say. And it is aimed at people for whom water systems are complex and often invisible. In that way, because most people do not know where there water comes from — or the social, economic and environmental costs — water is a perfect vector for misinformation to latch onto.
As a changing climate drives more extreme weather events that far eclipse the bounds of what our infrastructure is planned to handle, we are seeing disaster misinformation more and more. Of course, it’s not only with water. The fire response in California has fueled conspiracies well-beyond water policy, though that is what I’ll focus on here.
Focusing first on the person with the largest microphone in the world: Trump.
Last week, he posted this on his social media site, Truth Social:
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California…”
Trump’s claims about the delta smelt were baseless and divorced from the physical realities of how Los Angeles gets its faraway water and how its delivered, as explained by CalMatters, Inside Climate News and others. Reporters and scientists corrected the record, though it is hard to unring such a loud bell, no matter how wrong it is.
Not unlike blaming a hurricane on politicians you do not like, the claim is severed from facts on the ground. Facts like L.A. getting much of its water from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra and imported water from the Colorado River, as well as groundwater. Facts like California’s reservoirs being largely full. Facts like hydrant systems not built to withstand the force of a “perfect-storm” wildfire in a windy and bone-dry California that is confronting a new normal of weather whiplash. Facts like Bay-Delta management also focused on Chinook salmon, and not only the delta smelt.
Instead of facts, misinformation. We saw a new round of “division entrepreneurs,” a term used in a 2024 Springer Nature article by sociologist Caleb Scoville looking at how the delta smelt has been used as a wedge, often by distant actors as a partisan symbol.
But the misinformation did not end there, and Trump was not its only messenger last week. Social media has been filled with conspiracies about where the water is going. Many have blamed Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the billionaire couple behind the $6 billion Wonderful Company, for “hoarding” water at the expense of those in L.A. who need it to fight the fire. This is also simply false and once again untethered from the physical realities of how water works. It is true that the Resnicks own a lot of water— and their operations are (and have been) the subject of scrutiny and accountability journalism. But as SJV Water’s Lois Henry points out, “it’s fairly ironic that the very people often accused of selling the San Joaquin Valley’s water to LA for profit, are now accused of keeping it from the same region.” Once again, the local — on-the-ground — reality is far different from the nationalized misinformation, which both obscures the disaster’s causes/realities of climate change while confusing legitimate and very extant water conversations with unrelated disasters to simply sow outrage.
This is not to defend these systems or modes of management. It is worth critically debating how water is managed, but there is plenty of material to do so on merits.
This is to say that misinformation makes doing so even harder.
If you believe that fighting misinformation requires good information, the fires seem to be a wake-up call in the importance of water literacy — providing more knowledge to people about how water systems work, where water goes and the social, economic, political and environmental costs of delivery. And there has been a lot of crucial and good information coming out of local, state and national news outlets, especially the L.A. Times (a huge shoutout to a newspaper doing the rigorous work of fact-checking and reporting). The Times has covered the water issue from every angle, including the state’s call to investigate fire hydrants and why a local reservoir remained offline.
I love the comparison of good, reported local information to the production base of food webs. Yet even ecosystems that are being fed can falter from external threats.
That’s why I see good information a lot like I see water in putting out a massive fire. It can make the pivotal difference. It is essential. But it is not always a sole solution nor the only tool. Like with fires made worse by climate change, we have to address what turns our information ecosystem into a tinder box. To that end, I highly recommend this Substack by former L.A. Times journalist Matt Pearce about the foundational (if often invisible) role journalists play to feed ecosystems, especially in disasters, and the need to consider policies to combat misinformation actively spread on Big Tech:
I don’t raise this subject idly: Once we defeat these wildfires, California lawmakers have a unique opportunity to study what went wrong with the chaotic information environment in Los Angeles when people’s lives and homes were on the line.
What the science says: Weather whiplash
Nature Reviews published an important and timely study showing how “hydroclimate whiplash” has increased globally since the mid-20th Century as a result of climate change — and the increase has been higher than climate models had once forecast. Major swings from extreme wet to dry periods are forecast to further accelerate with more warming. More on the study from KQED’s Ezra David Romero:
New research cements the idea that California’s weather whiplash is increasing as the atmosphere warms due to human-caused climate change.
“I see the last decade as a preview of what we should expect to see more of,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA. Except that “the wettest wets and the driest dries we’ve seen recently are not the wettest wets and the driest dries we will see in the coming decades.”
A group of climate scientists, led by Swain, published a study on Thursday in the journal Nature Reviews that found what they call “hydroclimate whiplash” — fast swings between alarmingly wet and seriously dry weather — is expanding globally.
The phenomenon has grown up to 66% since the mid-20th century, and the authors expect it to nearly double at 3 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. Average global temperatures could surpass a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in the next five years.

Other stories to watch:
The Department of Interior is initiating a process for a mineral withdrawal of about 269,000 acres in the Amargosa River watershed to protect Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, known for its high concentration of endemic species, including the iconic Devil’s Hole pupfish. More from the Las Vegas Review Journal.
The Supreme Court refused to hear Utah’s public lands case, via Salt Lake Tribune.
California water under a Trump administration, pt. 1 (California WaterBlog)
With a new Congress, what’s next after failed effort to secure Colorado River water for tribes in Arizona? (Colorado Sun)
California groundwater plans enter a season of judgment (Bill Lane Center)