Persistent heat and dangerous wildfire conditions could impact these parts of the US this weekend - abcnews.com

The Take

Jordan Calloway · Government Secrets & FOIA

# THE TAKE We're watching a climate crisis get reported as weather. That's the real story ABC and KARE11 buried. Seventy-two counties under red flag warnings isn't a weekend forecast—it's a systemic failure. The National Interagency Fire Center has data showing wildfire season now runs 78 days longer than it did in 1970. I've reviewed NOAA's own internal memos (obtained via FOIA) showing officials knew Western fire risk was accelerating as early as 2008. Nothing structural changed. What changed? The messaging. Now we get "persistent heat conditions" instead of "anthropogenic climate destabilization." Safer. Vaguer. Better for ad revenue. I'm not saying individual meteorologists are complicit—they're not. But the institutional framing conveniently depoliticizes a crisis that demands federal accountability. BLM land management decisions, EPA enforcement gaps, energy sector lobbying—none of it gets mentioned when we're just reporting weekend hazards. This is how they do it: atomize the catastrophe into discrete weather events. Makes it harder to demand the policy reversals actually required. The heat's not persistent. The evasion is.