This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Wildfires in Southern California are on track to become the worst natural disaster in US history, governor Gavin Newsom has said amid warnings that the blaze, which has already left at least 16 dead and turned more than 12,000 structures to ashes, could get worse.
The fires, simply and inescapably, are the result of extreme weather conditions which have gripped the region over the past few years. In 2021 and 2022, the Los Angeles area was pounded by heavy rainfall which put vegetative growth on hillsides, canyons and woodland areas on steroids. Drought conditions that returned in 2023 and 2024 turned those areas into dried-out tinderboxes just waiting to ignite.
LA usually gets several inches of rain by now, halfway into the rainy season, but it has only recorded a fifth of an inch in the downtown area since July, its second driest period in almost 150 years of record-keeping. The rest of Southern California is just as bone-dry. Hot Santa Ana winds have also gusted in from the interior of the region towards the coast and offshore, further dehydrating the vegetation. Despite being a long-standing and often much-loved feature of the region, global warming has “added energy to the system”, historian Stephen Pyne has noted, “ramping up all the [already powerful] elements that contribute to California’s firescape”.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped political figures such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk from politicising the devastation in ways only they know how. The president-elect, who will be sworn into the White House in less than a week, blamed the fires on Ukraine for taking all the firetrucks, while his newly-appointed head of DOGE blamed it on ‘diversity’, saying the Los Angeles fire department (LAFD) prioritized DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) over “saving lives and homes”. He also suggested that if LAFD’s fire chief weren’t a woman, then things would be very different.
But the reality, as Stephanie Pincetl points out, is that we are facing the consequences of our own actions. “You simply cannot have enough firefighters on the ground to contain something that is so violent, and with the winds that we experienced”, he told Variety Mag. “We just need to be more accepting of the fact that we have unleashed forces that are beyond our control. And the real finger-pointing that should be taking place is at the oil companies and the continued reliance on fossil energy, which is disturbing the climate.”
While it is easy to be ignorant of the effects of climate change when it’s just crop failures a few thousand miles away or bouts of unbearable heat in countries you have never heard of, most of us won’t be able to ignore it for much longer. As one person famously put it, climate change is a crisis that will manifest as a “series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it”.
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