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extreme weather
Weather Conditions That Caused the LA Fires Made 35% More Likely By the Climate Crisis
"Without a faster transition away from planet-heating fossil fuels, California will continue to get hotter, drier, and more flammable," said one of the report's co-authors.
Jan 29, 2025
Human-induced planetary warming made the weather conditions that caused the Los Angeles fires 35% more probable, according to a report published on Tuesday by the research organization World Weather Attribution.
The report from WWA, which performs attribution studies that examine how the climate emergency impacts extreme weather events, further fleshes out the public understanding of wildfires that broke out in and around the Los Angeles region in early January. Those fires collectively burned tens of thousands of acres of land, killed 28 people, and destroyed more then 16,000 structures, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Damage estimates indicate that the wildfires, which have placed strain on the California insurance industry, are one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Southern California is no stranger to wildfire and can experience large fires year-round, according to the report's 32 researchers, who hailed from the United States and Europe.
In summer, fires in the region are promoted by low fuel moisture—the measure of the amount of water in a fuel, such as vegetation. In winter, the strong Santa Ana winds can drive fast-burning fires, but their ability to fuel fires in mid-winter is usually nullified by the onset of the region's rainy season, which begins in October-November, the report explains.
According to the researchers, summer 2024 was one of the warmest on record for the Los Angeles region. "As the cool, wet season approached, the typical onset of the rainy season did not arrive. However, the Santa Ana winds arrived, coinciding with very dry fuels," they wrote. There was also more fuel for the recent Los Angeles fires to burn because above-average precipitation during the winters of 2022-23 and 2023-24 had encouraged vegetation growth.
The report's researcher relied on the Fire Weather Index (FWI)—"a composite fire-risk index that accounts for longer-term drying conditions as well as wind and humidity driven conditions that can drive wildfire spread on a given day"—and found that "extreme" FWI conditions that drove the L.A. fires are expected to occur on average once every 17 years now that the globe is 1.3°C warmer relative to the preindustrial period.
That is an increased likelihood of 35% and an increased intensity of about 6% compared to a 1.3°C cooler climate.
To establish the role that the climate emergency has played in this trend, the researchers also combined this observation-based estimate with climate models, eight out of eleven of which showed an increase in extreme FWI conditions in January.
The researchers note that "while we have high confidence in the qualitative change, that the likelihood and intensity of the FWI has increased due to the human-induced climate emergency, the precise numbers have a wide range of uncertainty due to the model performance."
"Without a faster transition away from planet-heating fossil fuels, California will continue to get hotter, drier and more flammable," Clair Barnes, a co-author of the report and researcher at Imperial College London, told to CBC News.
The researchers also looked at changes to the timing of the dry season and found that the length of the dry season has increased by about 23 days since the global climate was 1.3°C cooler. This means that because of the burning of fossil fuels, the dry season and the Santa Ana Winds are increasingly overlapping—a recipe for more fire.
The group also found that the drought conditions leading up to the fires are now more likely to occur. Similarly dry seasons are 2.4 times more likely to happen compared to preindustrial times.
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A Dispatch From the Trumpocalypse
The long and short of it is that the world was going in the wrong direction even before Our Trump returned that second time and turbocharged that all too unfortunate trajectory.
Jan 22, 2025
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet light, warming the planet. It actually absorbs infrared light, and the article has been edited to reflect this.
My name isn’t important, only what I have to say. I’m writing with a pencil because I need to conserve my batteries tonight. It’s Year 24 of Our Trump (though he himself, of course, is no longer with us, just his kids who are running things). I feel like I should try to explain our era to whoever opens this time capsule a century from now, though you may need scuba gear to get at it. A lot of records could be lost by then. The Chinese climate hoax was less of a hoax than we thought at the time. Forgive me, Donald, but despite what the New Evangelical Church says, you were anything but infallible—even if I still can’t say so publicly.
I’d like to move away from the coast, maybe even go north. But real estate in the interior is too pricey, especially at higher elevations away from the flood plains. Looking on the bright side, though, my bunker has held up alright so far, even during the usual Cat 7 hurricanes, and I’ve stocked plenty of canned soup. I do worry, though, about being submerged by a storm surge. No one wants to end up like those poor people in Galveston.
In short, we used up our carbon budget twice as fast as anyone had predicted, though I wasn’t paying attention at the time. My friends then would have thought me crazy if I had.
I only hope that the state police won’t find my solar panels, which charge my contraband batteries to keep the AC going down here. We’re all haunted by that Black August in Palm Beach. It turns out that they had 100% humidity then. Combine that with temperatures reaching 120ºF and it dead-on kills you. Your sweat just can’t cool you down anymore, and you end up with terminal heat stroke. Of course, most of them could have been saved by air conditioning if it hadn’t been for the blackout at that new nuclear plant. Bad timing. It turns out such plants use water for cooling and, that day, the local water was so hot they had to shut the plant down.
Tipping Point
There was an unforeseen climate tipping point we blundered into. Looking back, I now realize that the U.S. put out 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the year before—yes, before!—the Second Advent of Our Trump. Horrific as that may have been, it was only about 11% of total global emissions, which hit 41.6 billion metric tons that year before the Second Advent (up from 40.6 billion tons in 2023). In short, we used up our carbon budget twice as fast as anyone had predicted, though I wasn’t paying attention at the time. My friends then would have thought me crazy if I had.
Even a few years ago, such facts and figures would have seemed unbearably wonky to me. I didn’t realize my wife would divorce me over them and I’d end up alone here in my bunker, doomscrolling the dark web looking for the catastrophes they don’t let the mainstream media report anymore. Don’t worry, I use a virtual private network and I don’t think the NSA can trace me. The long and short of it is that the world was going in the wrong direction even before Our Trump returned that second time and turbocharged that all too unfortunate trajectory.
Some people think we should flee the Big One. For me, it’s too late. The highways are a parking lot, and the price of gasoline is too steep because of the fracked fields going dry. Maybe Our Trump shouldn’t have banned EVs. And I can’t fly out of here anymore (even if I could afford to). It’s too hot for the airplanes to take off. I hadn’t known it, but flying depends on the air having a certain thickness, and hot air has less volume because the molecules speed up and spread around. That’s what Alfred, my PAIC (Personal AI Chatbot), told me when I asked him. Not sure I understand, but it doesn’t matter. The planes are grounded, and so am I.
The Resurrection and the Triumph of Coal
When Our Trump and Secretary of Energy Joe Manchin put billions into reviving Big Coal, that shot U.S. emissions up to 6 billion metric tons of CO2 in just a couple of years, then 7 billion, and so on, launching an international trend as Trumpist-style parties took over ever more governments globally.
As you might expect, once Elon Musk bankrolled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and helped put it in charge, its Fourth Reich held huge rallies in soccer stadiums where they piled up banned solar panels and wind turbine blades and burned them. Then they rounded up immigrants to use as slave labor in Germany’s revived coal mines. When the European Court of Justice ruled against them, the fascist government in Berlin promptly annexed Belgium. And that essentially marked the end of the European Union.
The Queens neighborhoods near Jamaica Bay are thoroughly waterlogged. Wasn’t Our Trump originally from Queens?
Russia also doubled down on coal. Even in the early 2020s, its Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia was one of the world’s largest coal producers. When Our Trump gave Eastern Europe back to Moscow, the Russian Federation prohibited electric cars and heat pumps so it could sell its oil and gas. Poland predictably returned to being all coal all the time and the Le Pen cartel in France, taking its marching orders from Russia, soon legislated the same prohibitions on green tech. Europe’s carbon dioxide production soon skyrocketed.
But the worst problems lay in Asia, an area about which I’ve only recently started to get up to speed. The leaders of China and India insisted that they were damned if they would make sacrifices and risk labor unrest shutting down their coal industries, when the U.S. and Europe were planning to go all out promoting theirs. Imagine the Chinese communists being afraid of their own workers and, worse yet—something I hadn’t faintly realized then—but at the time half the coal mined in the world came from China and even before Our Great Leader came to power a second time, the Communist Party already had plans to mine a billion more tons of it per year.
With America’s implicit permission, Beijing promptly ramped up production. I found out that they were already putting out 70% of the world’s methane emissions from coal mines in the early ’20s. Even then, there were 1.5 million Chinese coal miners while more than 6% of that country still depended on coal plants for electricity. All those numbers only went up when the Communist Party, citing Our Trump, ramped up coal production, sending billions of tons more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. Alfred says methane is up to 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even if for a shorter period of time.
In the early part of this century, India was already increasing its coal-fired power plants. When the Hindu nationalists fell in love with Our Trump, however, they became yet more bullish on coal. Their CO2 emissions went through the proverbial roof. They say that, given the smog in New Delhi, the capital, nowadays you can’t see two feet in front of you on a typical day, and 10% of Indians have chronic bronchitis.
The Indians had rejected criticisms of all those carbon-dioxide emissions from low-lying Bangladesh as “anti-Hindu propaganda.” Our Trump used to say that we’d just get more top-notch beachfront property out of sea-level rise, but now I realize that was a sick joke. If you keep heating up this planet, it melts the surface ice, which goes into the ocean and does indeed cause its level to rise. Warmer water also takes up more space, contributing to sea-level rise. So, the Bay of Bengal did indeed rise to claim the capital, Dhaka, along with 20% of the rest of the country. Famine left tens of millions of its people gaunt or skeletal. When millions of Bangladeshi climate refugees then tried to get into India, its army committed what’s now known as the Great Bangla Genocide. Historians say killings on that scale had never been carried out before.
Goodbye to Trump Tower
At an old, banned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration site on the dark web I found a document that said, “Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever—accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced during human existence.” That was from 2024, and whoever wrote it may now be in one of those reeducation camps for Beijing Ministry of State Security spies accused of promoting what the Trump Environmental Protection Agency branded “the climate hoax.” I might find myself there, too, if anyone discovers just how I feel these days.
I now realize that scientists have known for over a century that carbon dioxide absorbs the infrared light reflected off the Earth’s surface, keeping more of the sun’s heat in our atmosphere. I guess those UV rays used to hit this planet and then radiate back into outer space at a significantly greater rate, leaving us so much cooler than we are now. I never paid attention to any of this back in the twenties of this century. Since then, however, I’ve had time to get up to speed. After all, what else is there to do in this bunker?
Believe me, it was kind of embarrassing in 2034, even to me, when The Tower of Our Trump collapsed in Manhattan. Of course, as he said then, it was absolutely not his fault. Instead, he blamed the immigrant construction workers who built it, but they weren’t to blame, either. These days, at least 3 or 4% of the buildings in New York City are at risk from groundwater table rise. And it isn’t just that. Every time another big storm hits, flooding damages tens of thousands of buildings and turns the subway into a swimming pool.
Worse yet, more than a third of the buildings in New York are at risk from storm surges in year 24 of Our Trump. I read somewhere that the southern tip of Manhattan, the East Village, the Upper East Side, and the Tribeca and Canal Street areas now flood for some months of the year. Likewise, the Queens neighborhoods near Jamaica Bay are thoroughly waterlogged. Wasn’t Our Trump originally from Queens?
And to jump across what’s left of this country for a moment, today I caught someone on the dark web reporting from Phoenix, Arizona. It seems like the population there is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago. Half of the year now it’s dangerously hot and there isn’t enough water. And the electricity blackouts that take out your AC are evidently a nightmare and a half. Same problem, hot river water can’t cool the plant equipment.
That fellow reporting from Phoenix said those local diehards who refuse to leave call themselves Fremen like in the remake of the Dune film and say they need stillsuits. When the Proud Boys won the election for city council there, Our Trump told them to deep-six the local climate action plan, which he swore was for “pussies.” Painting everything white, he insisted, made the city look like a tomb and he wanted the urban tree cover to be cut down for firewood.
Trump’s will be done, as they say.
At least Phoenix is still there. Los Angeles wasn’t so lucky. As it got drier and drier every fall, the Santa Ana winds regularly whipped up wildfires, and one neighborhood after another was turned into cinders. When Beverly Hills went up in flames the way Pacific Palisades had 20 years earlier, that was the nail in the coffin.
The Big One?
Now, I spend my days thinking about the Big One, about how it could all go down. When Chinese forces fired on that American destroyer off Taiwan, the Trump dynasty went ballistic. They said they would bring pain to Beijing like the world had never seen before. They didn’t want to send in ships or troops though, claiming their Dad had been against wasting money on foreign wars.
That was when someone on Fox & Friends (the only “news” show still allowed) suggested a symbolic response, an attack on that big new Chinese military base on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The Trump family immediately ordered a nuclear strike there. I hear Tiffany was the only one who didn’t think it was a good idea. But it melted a lot of the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and the rest of it slid into the ocean. They say it will raise sea level by two feet globally and pretty darn quickly, too, because of that nuke melting so much surface ice. Count on one thing: it will truly be a Trumpocalypse.
That would put my bunker under, of course. I only hope it’s watertight.
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As Trump Takes Office, It’s Time for a Mass Climate Movement
Not only do we know that there is opportunity in how we meet this moment, but there are sparks suggesting that we may actually be on our way.
Jan 20, 2025
This is a jarring time for our country: A far-right autocrat is taking office on a holiday many misrepresent and trivialize as vacation day, obscuring the revolutionary actions of one of the historical greats of the civil rights movement, while whole communities of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles are burning to the ground. Instead of talking about the lives lost and how to support those who will have the most trouble rebuilding, and instead of connecting the dots of these fires to climate change, the incoming administration is intent on spreading disinformation. They are threatening to undo decades of hard-fought progress with lies and deregulation.
Yet, it is often when things seem most bleak, amid grief and heartache, that we reevaluate on the scale the moment demands. That is where the climate movement is right now: The status quo is not working. We are rapidly surpassing many of the planetary thresholds, including the threshold of 1.5°C. As our climate changes, we continue to see an increasing number of catastrophic weather events, as witnessed over the last week in Los Angeles. And despite these climate disasters and massive advances in renewable energy, fossil fuel use also continues to increase; this was true even under former President Joe Biden’s more progressive presidency. Data centers for artificial intelligence and logistics have only added to this increased demand.
We urgently need to change our orientation to how we affect change and what is required. Survivors on the Titanic talked about why they didn’t move: Electricity was still functioning; it didn’t feel like the ship was going down. Being in power can feel like that. But losing power feels different—and we have to be clear-eyed that we will not succeed by lobbying President Donald Trump or his administration, or finding the right words to plead with them. So we must evaluate the levels of power that are available to us, and how we can collectively accept and redistribute the heightened risk that comes in resisting the far-right and their fossil-fueled agenda on the scale we need to.
Rather than a patchwork of different issue-based fights where each issue area elbows the other out of the way to be heard by the administration, we will see the power that is possible through a coordinated movement protecting each other.
There’s hopeful news: Not only do we know that there is opportunity in how we meet this moment, but there are sparks suggesting that we may actually be on our way.
First, we will see, and are already seeing, an increase in exciting local organizing efforts. Groups in the 350 network have been doubling down on organizing against the power of utility companies. Many of our utilities are hurting the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels, while simultaneously gouging customers in the realm of profits. Many groups are holding utilities accountable by banning them from using ratepayers money for lobbying, intervening in hearings, and running bold corporate campaigns to get them to change their practices.
We are also seeing organizers in more and more states pass Make Polluters Pay legislation, which forces the corporations responsible for the climate crisis to pay for its cleanup.
Second, once we’ve accepted that we cannot change the initial moves Trump will make to gut climate progress, we can move into action to create the kind of reaction that might prevent further moves and bolster the local governments and courts’ ability to have an impact. We have seen this work: When Trump issued his infamous “Muslim Ban” order, tens of thousands of people disrupted business as usual at the airports, creating the popular dissent to allow the courts to throw the order out. I suspect we will see similar moves around potentially leaving the Paris accords, mass drilling on public lands, or the overturning of regulations.
The sad reality is that, no matter what Trump does, we know we will see more climate impacts that bring the climate crisis to more and more of our front doors. Amid the grief at all we have lost in the process, we have also seen people rise to the occasion in ways they’d previously been unwilling. In response to the Los Angeles fires, we have seen rapid, creative, and far-reaching mutual aid organizing spreading rapidly: a little ad hoc window into the social protections we are calling for. Data shows that most people now know that fossil fuel companies are responsible for climate change, so alongside strengthening our mutual aid infrastructure, we suspect that we will see an uptick in calls for accountability for those responsible.
Finally, the key to a broad-based movement is, quite simply, a broad base of people. As people think about the climate conditions in LA that caused fires and displacement, we can help them connect the dots to similar conditions that people faced in their home countries, causing them to migrate. We will see support for the immigrant struggle from the climate movement, support for labor rights and government workers for all sectors. In short, rather than a patchwork of different issue-based fights where each issue area elbows the other out of the way to be heard by the administration, we will see the power that is possible through a coordinated movement protecting each other.
None of this will be easy. As befits the true Martin Luther King Jr. who, along with many of his co-organizers, spent countless weeks in jail and braved white supremacist violence which killed so many during the civil rights movement. But we collectively know that this level of organizing and intensification of our struggle is necessary. Conditions change, and we change, and so, we are optimistic that out of what is hard right now, we will finally build something beautiful.
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