The Los Angeles Wildfires Are Climate Disasters Compounded. Conditions for a January LA firestorm have not existed before now, writes a meteorologist and climate journalist. Earth Island Journal Eric Holthaus-January 9, 2025An exceptional mix of environmental conditions has created an ongoing firestorm without known historical precedent across southern California this week.The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events — simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond. The Palisades fire now ranks as the most destructive in Los Angeles history with hundreds of homes and other structures destroyed and damage so extensive that it exhausted municipal water supplies. In Pacific Palisades, wealthy homeowners fled by foot after abandoning their cars in gridlocked neighborhoods. In Pasadena, quickly advancing fire prompted evacuations as far into the urban grid as the famous Rose Parade route. Early estimates of the wildfires’ combined economic impact are in the tens of billions of dollars and could place the fires as the most damaging in US history.— exceeding the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. These fires are a watershed moment, not just for residents of LA, but emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.
The short answer is that the greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California.As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly.Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jet stream’s behavior that make wind-driven large wildfires in California more likely. Recent studies have found that Santa Ana wind events could get less frequent but perhaps more intense in the winter months due to the climate crisis.
The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration’s 2023 national climate assessment.....read on https://www.