Source: nytimes

Currently, there are around 7,718 fires fuming
across California; 20 people are dead so far and almost 5,000 residents have
been burned to ashes. But the cause of one of these fires caught most of our
attention and sparked nationwide outrage over the internet.

The supposed disaster-causing gender-reveal party
was held on September 5th, when a blast of colored smoke revealed the gender of
a soon to be born child of a Californian couple. Of course, the party didn’t go
well as it ignited a massive wildfire raging across 10,000 acres of the El
Dorado Ranch Park in Yuaipa.

Gender reveal parties are useless; we know this
since the day when first expectant parents had the idea to throw one.
Celebrating the gender of their upcoming newborn by engaging in a simple cake
cutting ceremony or an intimate get together of friends and family would have
been enough!  But some couples are
getting really out of control. They go to extreme measures just for the sake of
internet likes and shares.

For example, one expecting couple filled a
hollowed watermelon with blue jello and they had an alligator chomp on it to
reveal the gender.

One couple even hired a small airplane to drop colored
papers on the attendees…

Just btw, a few days after the El Dorado
gender-reveal-party fiasco, another couple paid around USD 100,000 to reveal
the gender of their baby on Burj Khalifa, Dubai. It’s getting uncontrollable!

So, when a gender-reveal party ignited the El
Dorado fire, it was obviously bound to draw attention. The netizens went crazy
with their memes and tweets, and mainstream media clung to the story. Actually,
we would love to blame every single disastrous situation on human stupidity.
But this particular narrative of a massive disaster disguises a very
discomforting truth.

California is on fire not because of a single
gender-reveal party, obviously. Until now, The El Dorado fire alone has burned
down 10,000 of the 2.3 million acres. The west coast is blazing because of a
variety of extreme climatic changes. Climate change deniers will disagree, so
let’s state the facts first:

California has been roasting in record
temperatures for weeks, hitting a record of 49 degrees in September. The
overwhelming heat has turned the state into a hot pot! But there’s an unusually
high range of humidity in the atmosphere, the credit for which goes to a
devastating tropical storm in the eastern Pacific Ocean, which pushes the
plumes of moisture over California.

The dreadful combination of high moistures and
high air temperatures give rise to a specific kind of storm cloud— the one that
draws a little rain, but a massive amount of thunder and lightning. The
lightning struck for more than 10,000 times on August 16 and 17 alone, igniting
375 fires.

Yet, of course, the gender reveal party is the
culprit here! When considering the catastrophic scenes happening in the US, it
is far easier to blame a single stupid party instead of doing something to help
the changing climate.

Good luck future babies!