Without Climate Collapse, Something Like The Palisades Fire Taking Place In January Would Be An Impossibilitiy

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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. Fire crews have been facing a second night of fierce winds in rugged terrain amid drought and atmospheric conditions that are exceedingly rare for southern California at any time of the year, let alone January, in what is typically the middle of the rainy season – weeks later (or earlier) in the calendar year than other historical major wildfires have occurred.

The next few days will be a harrowing test. Lingering bursts of strong, dry winds into early next week will maintain the potential for additional fires of similar magnitude to form. In a worst-case scenario, the uncontained Palisades and Eaton fires will continue to spread further into the urban Los Angeles metro, while new fires simultaneously and rapidly grow out of control – overtaking additional neighborhoods and limiting evacuation routes more quickly than firefighters can react. In conditions like these, containing a wind-driven blaze is nearly impossible.

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Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jetstream’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.

In the 16 months since the city’s first tropical storm encounter, Los Angeles has endured its hottest summer in history and received just 2% of normal rainfall to start this year’s rainy season – its driest such stretch on record. The grasses from 2023’s tropical storm deluge are still around, adding to the fuel for fires. On its own, that would be a recipe for disaster. But add to that this week’s historic Santa Ana wind storm, which on its own has broken wind speed records across the region for any time of the year, with gusts as high as 100mph early on Wednesday. These have combined to create extreme conditions suitable for wildfire that, on their own, would tax the state’s resources even during even the heart of the summer fire season – let alone during January when many firefighters are on leave and equipment has been moved into storage.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/09/los-angeles-wildfires-climate-disasters