Ben Lowry: On my recent trip to the southwest US I saw how it now faces worryingly extreme weather

​I also saw some daffodils when I was there and bought a bunch of them for the office, and placed them in a glass by the window. I took a photo of them, against the city centre skyline outside, and its backdrop of glorious blue skies.

Then I posted the image (see it below on this page) in a WhatsApp phone message that I sent to some relatives, colleagues and friends.

It was intended as an early, happy indication of spring – the gradual return of light and life in January, one of the small joys of this sometimes bleak time of year.

Such daffodils are, I believe, grown outside of Northern Ireland. As far as I am aware they are not yet emerging on the ground in the province but even so my heart lifts when I first see them and I think of the slowly increasing light (even though the worst of winter conditions might yet be ahead).

One person who replied to my message was a friend from school, David Morrow, whose story is on pages two and three (and more of it below).

It is not the first time we have discussed the contrasting weather between Northern Ireland and California, where he now happily lives. I had visited him in Los Angeles when I was there in the latter half of October and the first half of November.

The thing that had struck my most about that holiday in the southwestern United States, aside from the US presidential election (which had been one of my main reasons for travelling out there), was the weather. I have discussed the weather briefly in some of my subsequent columns here.

It was, on the whole, almost perfect. Most days were somewhere in the 20s Celsius, typically towards the lower end of that spectrum. Almost every day was entirely sunny.

This was the same in the election swing states of Nevada and Arizona, where I had travelled to visit relatives and also to see Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appear at election rallies. So it was never too hot, and never cold, in my US trip – which lasted more than three weeks.

But I had just missed a heatwave in early October, that had reached San Francisco, the northern California city into which I had flown from Dublin. It is not generally a hot location, but temperatures had been approaching 100 Fahrenheit (38 C).

And when I got to Phoenix it was the first time that it had been relatively cool in that part of Arizona for months. In fact Phoenix had had 113 consecutive days, from May to September, over 100F (high 30s C). Not only that, it had almost 70 days this year that were over 110F (43C), quite a few of them approaching a staggering 120 F (49C).

Phoenix has always been hot. It is in the desert and was largely uninhabited until a century or so ago, when advances in designing buildings helped to shut out heat, and then the arrival of air conditioning.

Now humans have tamed nature and the greater Phoenix area has become a vast metropolis, with millions of people. It is almost a mega city, like LA. Except that humans can’t really tame nature, as we are currently seeing in Los Angeles.

In Phoenix I talked to a resident, originally from the northern US, who echoed what I heard other people say. He had moved there for the warm weather, particularly in winter. But the exceptionally warm weather months, he said, were now becoming too hot: it is now four and half months of brutally hot weather when once it was three months of very hot.

Yes, you can escape that heat, such people told me: you go from air conditioned house to air conditioned car to air conditioned shop or office. But that means you are escaping the outdoors for a very large part of the year.

Is that what people think of when they think of moving to a warmer clime? That for much of your life you are always escaping the glorious outdoors? In other words Phoenix has gone from very, very hot to perhaps unbearably hot.

Back to David Morrow and LA: in response to my daffodil pics we had a brief chat on WhatsApp, early morning his time, just after lunch mine.

He explained how it was perfect conditions for the sort of deadly blaze that has torn across the southwest United States in recent years, causing devastation in places, including the wealthy coastal enclave of Malibu in 2023, near Los Angeles (Malibu has had serious fires again this winter).

A few hours later, after explaining that temperatures were in the mid 20s Celsius with low humidity, David then saw from his apartment the blaze in the Pacific Palisades hills, about five miles away. You can see his images on pages two and three and another above.

This all began to unfold at around 1115am California time Tuesday, 715pm UK. Then an hour later, at 12.20pm (820pm UK) later there was so much smoke from the fire that he could no longer see the hills (the picture on this page – note that the smoke is even worse than the P3 pic). We had a story (click here), using his pictures and video, online by 845pm UK time.

The marvel of technology is that you report the other side of the world at once without needing a satellite phone. But it means you see tragedy almost instantly.

And this is a huge tragedy. Even if, as we all hope, the loss of life is not too high, some of the finest housing on earth is ruined. Will the entire Hollywood Hills dream residential area become unliveable? If so, extraordinary human engineering amid difficult terrain will have had to retreat in the face of nature and climate change.

As it happens, on Tuesday I had in my chat with David outlined my fear that an entire neighbourhood in LA would be taken out by fire. I was very troubled in 2018 to read of the Camp Fire that killed almost 100 people, albeit in a more remote part of California.​ Sadly this week exactly that scenario in LA, entire neighbourhoods being destroyed, happened.

I hope to write more about weather in coming months. For now: there is much to be said for our non extreme climate in NI.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor