The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles are just the latest spasm of extreme weather that is growing more furious as well as more unpredictable around the world.
As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement on Friday (Saturday NZT) that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.
With temperatures rising around the world and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the planet has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.
The firestorms ravaging the country’s second-largest city are just the latest spasm of extreme weather that is growing more furious as well as more unpredictable. Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. The same is true for cyclones in Appalachia, where Hurricanes Helene and Milton shocked the country when they tore through mountain communities in October.
Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. Storms are getting bigger and carrying more moisture. And soaring temperatures worldwide are leading to heat waves and drought, which can be devastating on their own and leave communities vulnerable to dangers such as mudslides when heavy rains return.
Around the world, extreme weather and searing heat killed thousands of people last year and displaced millions, with pilgrims dying as temperatures soared in Saudi Arabia. In Europe, extreme heat contributed to at least 47,000 deaths in 2023. In the United States, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades.
“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate-related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”
The fires currently raging in greater LA are already among the most destructive in US history. By Friday, the blazes had consumed more than 36,000 acres and destroyed thousands of buildings. As of midday Friday, at least 10 people were dead, and losses could top US$100 billion (NZ$180b), according to AccuWeather.
Although it is not possible to say with certainty as any specific weather event unfolds whether it was worsened or made more likely by global warming, the Los Angeles fires are being driven by a number of factors that scientists have linked to fire weather and that are becoming increasingly common on a hotter planet.
Last winter, Southern California got huge amounts of rain that led to extensive vegetation growth. Now, months into what is typically the rainy season, Los Angeles is experiencing a drought. The last time it rained more than a tenth of an inch was on May 5. Since then, it has been the second-driest period in the city’s recorded history.
Temperatures in the region have also been higher than normal. As a result, many of the plants that grew last year are parched, turning trees, grasses and bushes into kindling that was ready to explode.
That combination of heat and dryness, which scientists say is linked to climate change, created the ideal conditions for an urban firestorm.
“Wintertime fires in Southern California require a lot of extreme climate and weather events to occur at once,” said Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA. “And the warmer the temperatures, the more intense the fires.”
A third factor fueling the fires, the fierce Santa Ana winds, which blow West from Utah and Nevada, cannot be directly linked to climate change, scientists say. But the winds this week have been particularly ferocious, gusting at more than 100mph (161kmh), as fierce as a Category 2 hurricane.
Fires across the West have been getting worse in recent years. In 2017, thousands of homes in Santa Rosa, California, burned to the ground. The next year, the Camp fire levelled more than 13,000 homes in Paradise, California. In 2021, roughly 1000 homes burned near Boulder, Colorado.
And from the boreal forests of Canada to the redwood groves of Oregon, large fires have been incinerating vast areas of wilderness.
“In the last couple years, we’ve seen an increase in extreme weather events and increasing amounts of billion-dollar disasters,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate focused on wildfires and the West Coast at Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. “It’s very clear that something is off, and that something is that we’re pumping an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere and causing the climate systems to go out of whack.”
As the Los Angeles fires consumed some of the most valuable real estate in the world, an unfolding tragedy became fodder for political attacks.
President-elect Donald Trump blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for the disaster. Trump inaccurately claimed that state and federal protections for a threatened fish had hampered firefighting efforts by leading to water shortages.
And on Thursday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an ally of Trump’s, inserted himself into the debate over the role climate change plays in wildfires.
“Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim,” Musk wrote to his 211 million followers on X, the social media site he owns. He said the loss of homes was primarily the result of “nonsensical overregulation” and “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water”.
Those claims were rebutted by scientists, who noted that, as humans continue to warm the planet with emissions, extreme weather is becoming more common.
In LA, residents displaced by the fires watched in exasperation as the unfolding disaster was politicised.
“People are just wanting to blame somebody else,” said Sheila Morovati, a climate activist who lives in Pacific Palisades and saw her neighbourhood burn. “What about all the dryness? What about the temperatures? There’s so many pieces that are all pointing back to climate change.”
News that 2024 was the hottest year on record was hardly a surprise. The previous hottest year was 2023. All 10 of the hottest years on record have come in the past decade.
“We sound like a broken record but only because the records keep breaking,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global temperatures. “They will continue to break until we get emissions under control.”
But the world is not getting emissions under control. In fact, countries last year released record amounts of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere, even as the consequences of climate change have become painfully clear. US efforts to cut emissions largely stalled last year.
The inevitable result: more heat and more extreme weather.
In late September and early October, Hurricane Helene, which scientists said was made worse by climate change, roared across the Southeast, unleashed deadly floods and landslides in several states, including North Carolina.
Months earlier, researchers showed that the devastating floods that swamped Porto Alegre, Brazil, would not have been so severe were it not for human-caused global warming.
In May, scientists found the fingerprints of climate change on a crippling heat wave that gripped India, and found that an early heat wave in West Africa last spring was made 10 times more likely by climate change.
On Friday, parts of the South that are not used to winter weather, including Atlanta, saw sleet and snow, disrupting travel and cancelling flights. But it’s unclear whether the recent blast of cold air that has led to plunging temperatures across the Southeast and Gulf Coast states was caused by a warming climate.
“We just don’t see robust increases in severe cold events,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a research organisation. “If anything, they’re decreasing.”
Heat waves. Drought. Fires. Superstorms. Floods. Mudslides. These are the growing threats of a rapidly warming world, and scientists say nowhere is entirely protected from the effects of climate change.
“We think sometimes that if we live in a city, we’re not vulnerable to natural forces,” Schmidt said. “But we are, and it comes as a huge shock to people. There’s no ‘Get Out of Climate Change Free’ card.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David Gelles and Austyn Gaffney
Photographs by: Ariana Drehsler, Kyle Grillot, Getty Images and AFP
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