Wild Surf Destroying Beachside Homes in Dana Point

Southern California has had a rough time of it over the last two years. First there were the two January 2025 fires that destroyed two Los Angeles neighborhoods: Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Now, over the last several weeks, there was the El Niño from hell that led to the beaches from Los Angeles to San Diego counties being all but destroyed by high tides caused by a seemingly endless series of Central Pacific tropical storms.

A corollary is the superhot summer of 2026 that refuses to quit. Today the beach was hotter than the Coachella Valley. Technically, this is autumn; but it doesn’t look like it. The only thing that’s different is that the humidity is way down.

What¹s next? A killer earthquake along the San Andreas fault? The complete desertification of the California coast so that it resembles the Atacama in Chile? More wildfires? Monster flooding? Killer heat waves that make L.A. resemble a 350° oven (177° Celsius)? Will AI lead to massacres of innocent humans? Are there, in fact, any innocent humans?

Another summer like this one would make me think seriously of moving to Nome, Alaska, or Ushuaia, Argentina (which lies a mere 600 miles, or 966 kilometers, from Antarctica.

But then one tends to look mat the future by straight-lining the disasters of the past. Nature doesn’t work that way. With all our science, we have no idea what will happen next, and when, and how disastrous. Any forecasting based on this year’s events is (hopefully) jejune.