LA’s fires weren’t just a “natural” disaster but a climate-driven weather event, revealing how global warming is reshaping California’s future.
As the embers go cold and the smoke clears, Los Angeles assesses the devastation from one of its most catastrophic urban fires.
A stark reality emerges: not just winds but climate change played a significant role in this deadly and destructive event.
A new World Weather Attribution study found that human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of extreme fire conditions by 35 percent and intensified their severity.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Daniel Swain, a leading climate scientist at UCLA and the University of California’s Agricultural and Natural Resources division, frames the January disaster not simply as a fire event, but as “an extreme weather event with fire embedded in it.” This distinction, he explains, is crucial for understanding how climate change is reshaping California’s fire risks.
The disaster, Swain argues, resulted from a perfect storm of climate conditions: two unusually wet winters that promoted vegetation growth, followed by record-breaking heat and an unprecedented dry period, all culminating during southern California’s offshore wind season.
Swain details how weather and climate are intimately connected. This interaction is leading to what he calls “hydroclimate whiplash”: rapid transitions between wet and dry states that are becoming more frequent and intense globally.
The fires demonstrated the limits of human intervention. Even with an army of firefighting personnel and advanced technology, some blazes proved unstoppable. One policy response seems clear: reduce global warming to prevent such infernos from happening in the first place.
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
RSS
Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Transcript Coming Soon…
