The New York Times, on Climate, 10 November 2026

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A New York Times Reporter on El Niño and His California Childhood

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I recently spent a week in the Los Angeles area reporting a story about El Niño, the climate phenomenon that is reshaping the world’s weather patterns. Driving through neighborhoods charred by fire and watching homes fall into the sea was a potent reminder that global warming is already having devastating effects on communities across the country. It was also a powerful trip down memory lane. I grew up in Northern California, a land where the threat of natural disaster is never far away.

Mixed in with my memories of Disneyland and days on the beach are flashbacks of floods, fires and storms. Indeed, some of my earliest memories involve catastrophes. When I was 10, my father took me to Game 3 of the 1989 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s. Minutes before the first pitch, a great rumble rose up from beneath the ground as the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake ruptured the San Andreas fault.

As the shaking began, we were sitting beneath the upper deck of Candlestick Park, eating fistfuls of Cracker Jack. I glanced up to see many tons of concrete and rebar trembling above my head. I looked to the outfield and saw the towering lights swaying like palm trees. Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, the “Bash Brothers” who would lead the A’s to the championship, wobbled like toy soldiers on the manicured grass. Candlestick Park in San Francisco during Game 3 of the World Series in 1989, interrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake; damage to the Cypress Freeway in Oakland after the quake.

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About this analysis

David Gelles writes a first-person Times Insider piece about reporting on El Niño in Los Angeles, then recalls the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake from his childhood. The text supplied stops at a paywall after the earthquake scene. Nothing in the part we can read misleads the reader, and it states plainly that global warming is already doing harm.

What it gets right

  • “global warming is already having devastating effects on communities across the country”

    The reporter ties the fire and coastal damage he saw to global warming in his own voice, as fact and with no hedge. This matches the documented record that warming has made fire weather and other extremes more frequent or more severe (R2).

  • “the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake ruptured the San Andreas fault”

    The reporter describes the earthquake concretely, with its magnitude and the fault involved. He does not tie it to climate or invent a cause, so the reader can tell a geological disaster apart from a climate-driven one.

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