There are many ways of framing the scale of the dislocation in Los Angeles this week. As the ferocious ring of five wildfires roared across the region in a multi-day blaze that began Jan. 7., some 180,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes—the equivalent of pitching the entire population of Little Rock, Ark., out into the streets or filling Los Angeles’s massive So-Fi stadium to more than double its capacity and not letting anyone go home again.
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The Southern California blaze was a special kind of hell. At least 10 people lost their lives and officials expect more deaths to come to light before the multiple infernos are tamed. Thousands of homes and a sprawl of entire neighborhoods were transformed into outdoor charnel houses. Nursing home residents in Altadena, Calif., were evacuated into the night—riding in wheelchairs and pushing walkers, many in their night clothes, as a stinging snow of orange embers descended around them. Fire fighters watched helplessly as houses burned, their hoses at the ready but the hydrants to which they were connected producing no water or merely a low-pressure trickle.
“Wildfires do not care about jurisdictional boundaries,” said Kathryn Barger, the chair of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, at a Jan. 9 news conference. Meanwhile, the sextet of localized blazes—the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire, the Hurst fire, the Sunset fire, the Lidia fire, and the Kenneth fire—blurred in the public mind and in the sprawl of destruction into one great undifferentiated inferno.
President-Elect Donald Trump laid blame for the disaster at the feet of Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden. “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” Trump wrote in a Jan. 8 Truth Social post. As for Newsom, Trump faulted the governor for allegedly refusing “to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California.”
Read more: How to Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires
Biden ignored Trump’s broadside. Newsom’s office hit back, posting on X: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration—that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
Trump was wrong about FEMA, which released funds to fight the fires on Jan. 7; he was not wrong about the feeble water system, though it’s possible there is nothing the city could have done to keep it supplied sufficiently. The hydrants are fed by three one-million gallon tanks in the Pacific Palisades hills. Those were not meant to work alone, however, but rather to be supplemented by water from firefighting aircraft that, in this case, couldn’t fly in the cyclonic Santa Ana winds. At a news conference, Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the demand for water was four times greater “than we’ve ever seen in the system.”
But there are bigger—far bigger—factors at play in the disaster, factors that have less to do with local politics and institutional preparedness and more to do with the existential matter of a planet grown sickly from climate change. A crisis that is feeding more and bigger storms and causing more and greater destruction—destruction that lawmakers and other leaders, here and around the world, still seem unable to muster the will to address. Here is the reality: The very metabolism of the Earth has been thrown off by an atmosphere choking on greenhouse gasses, and it will take more than political bickering to set things right. Another reality: Fixing the problem first requires understanding—and, even more fundamentally, accepting—the science. Only then can we implement policies and put in place protocols that help us both reduce the likelihood of more such crises and minimize the death and destruction when they ultimately do occur.
It’s long been established that climate change turbocharges wildfires, with droughts, persistent heat, dried vegetation, and lightning storms all worsening in a warming world and all contributing to out-of-control blazes. That’s just one reason a new report from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Climate Change Service—a report that landed on Jan. 10, while L.A. still burned—arrived as such bad news. According to the release, 2024 was the first year global mean temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.6°C (2.88°F). That blows past the benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which sought to limit future warming to well below 2°C in the 21st century, with a preferred target no higher than 1.5°C. Doing so would help limit the impact of a hotter planet.
In Southern California, the report could be read by the light of a burning city where, at one point, the rapidly moving fire incinerated the equivalent of five football fields per minute. Those blazes came not long after a bad year for wildfires in the U.S. overall. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, a clearinghouse for fire information and logistical resources, by mid-September 2024 alone, more than 38,000 wildfires had incinerated more than 7.8 million American acres—a pace slightly ahead of the annual U.S. average of more than 45,000 wildfires per year.
While it’s still unclear what sparked the L.A. fires, the underlying cause goes back decades—if not centuries. Fire is one of the most primal expressions of a planet in upheaval; the Earth was born in molten violence and, under the right conditions—say, after hundreds of years of emissions released from burning fossil fuels—it still has an exceedingly fiery temperament.
“As our planet continues to heat up, droughts are getting more intense in some regions of the world,” says Peter Kalmus, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The droughts, combined with higher temperatures, cause more frequent and intense fires in those regions.”
Southern California is not remotely the only tinderbox part of the world, but it’s an especially flammable one—not just because of the droughts Kalmus speaks of, but because of their persistence. “The Southwest U.S. has been in megadrought since 1999,” says Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the school for climate and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “This is the primary reason we’re seeing so much more wildfire in the region, and all across the U.S. West up into Canada.”
Then there is the tornadic power of the winds—most notably Southern California’s Santa Ana. Those ferocious atmospheric rapids get their power, explains Frank Marsik, associate research scientist in the college of engineering at the University of Michigan, by being forced to move through narrow channels in the mountains of northern Mexico and Southern California, “resulting in an increase in the speed of the winds. A good analogy for what happens with the Santa Ana winds would be the way that you can increase the speed of water flowing out of a garden hose by putting your thumb over the end, causing the water to flow through a much smaller area.”
Wildfires are hardly the only sign of our warming world—or the dangerous mile-marker we passed in 2024 when we crossed the 1.5°C excess warming documented in the Copernicus report. Everywhere, the planet showed signs of heat swoon last year, with record high levels of water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; record low expanses of sea ice around Antarctica; and record oceanic temperatures in the North Atlantic, Indian, and western Pacific Oceans. July 22, 2024, went into the books as the hottest single day ever recorded worldwide, with the global average thermometer popping its top at a comparative fever level of 62.8°F (17.16°C). The 13 months that preceded that day were blistering too, with each one from June 2023 to June 2024 clocking in hotter than the same month in any previous year.
“All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus’s European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in a statement that accompanied the release of the report.
Read more: Why Risky Wildfire Zones Have Been Increasing Around the World
Human-generated greenhouse emissions were not the only factors that made 2024 so punishing. From May 2023 to May 2024, an El Niño current prevailed in the tropical Pacific, helping to drive average sea surface temperatures to a record-high 20.87°C (69.56°F), or more than half a degree celsius warmer than the 1991 to 2020 average. But even after El Niño ended and a more moderate La Niña cycle took over, the oceans stayed hot, with sea surface temperatures from July to December 2024 entering the record books second only to the same period in 2023. From June to October, sea ice around Antarctica reached its second lowest extent ever, also behind 2023. The Arctic, at its annual minimum sea ice in September, was its fifth lowest on record.
High sea surface temperatures always lead to accelerated evaporation. In 2024, that meant record levels of water vapor in the atmosphere, with concentrations exceeding the 1991 to 2020 average by 5%. Not only does water vapor itself have a greenhouse effect, it also leads to extreme rainfall events, and 2024 saw plenty of them. They included catastrophic flooding in the northeast U.S. in August; in Spain in October; and in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Germany in September.
Europe as a whole was hit especially hard by 2024’s record heat. The year was the warmest ever for the continent, with average temperatures 0.28°C (0.47°F) hotter than the previous record, set in 2020. Spring and summer were more than one and a half degrees celsius warmer than the seasonal average from 1991 to 2020.
Human health worldwide was affected by the soaring temperatures. When the body cannot cool itself off sufficiently, symptoms of heat stress—including nausea, vomiting, loss of coordination, shortness of breath, dizziness and more—can occur. So-called strong heat stress commonly happens when outdoor temperatures reach or exceed 38°C (100.4°F); extreme heat stress, with more severe symptoms including brain swelling and vital organ damage, happens at 46°C (114.8°F). On July 10, 2024, Copernicus reports that 44% of the globe was affected by either strong or extreme heat stress—5% more than the average annual maximum.
“These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapor levels…meant unprecedented heat waves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people,” said Samantha Burgess, the ECMWF’s strategic lead for climate, in a statement.
That rainfall, interspersed with droughts is one more mechanism that leads to wildfires. Such a boom and bust cycle means a lot of lush greenery that grows in the rainy times, and a lot of dead leaves, trees and other tinder that gets left behind when things dry. “This is a perfect storm of fire weather: a combination of plentiful and extremely dry fuel,” says Kalmus.
Read more: It’s Time to Redefine What a Megafire Is in the Climate Change Era
As earth’s temperature crossed new and troubling thresholds in 2024, so too did the chemistry of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide reached a record of 422 parts per million, or 2.9 parts per million higher than it was in 2023. Once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide—and its ability to warm our planet—remains there for hundreds of years. Methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas which does its damage at much lower concentrations, reached 1,897 parts per billion, or three parts per billion higher than in 2023. Said Laurence Rouil, director of the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service, in a statement: “Our data points clearly to a steady global increase of greenhouse gas emissions and these remain the main agent of climate change.”
Persistent wildfires across the Americas were not only a result of global warming, but a cause of even more future heat, as Bolivia and Venezuela released record levels of wildfire-related carbon dioxide; also due to fires, Canada reached its second highest annual output. The Los Angeles fires are similarly pouring smoke and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the local topography—mountains that trap haze in the Los Angeles Basin—keeping the mess around.
Nothing in the short term is going to ensure Southern California does not see a repeat of this week’s devastation, though the construction of more million-gallon water tanks can help prevent the hydrants from running dry again. The industrial-era greenhouse gas output that created the conditions that fed the fires was centuries in the making and it will, ultimately, be generations in the fixing.
If there was any good news in the Copernicus report it is that a single year that exceeds pre-industrial temperatures by 1.5°C or more is not the end of the story. The Paris agreement considers the 1.5°C threshold breached only if that is the average temperature increase over a 20-year stretch.
And so, as the Los Angeles blaze rages, as fire-ravaged communities take stock of the destruction, as families mourn—as we collectively struggle and grieve and pick up the pieces—the disaster is at once a warning and an admonition: There is still time for aggressive climate action to lower emissions and bring temperatures to heel in the process. “Humanity is in charge of its own destiny…how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence,” said Buontempo. “The future is in our hands. Swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate.”
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