LA is on fire and we can't put it out
What is happening right now in Southern California is evidence that the current communication between science and politics is not going to be able to adapt to climate change. I would even go a step further and say that adaptation to climate change will not be able to deal with fires of such magnitude in our lifetime. We are losing that fight, and it is time we conceded that loss, and instead put our effort and attention to something that science says will work - reduce emissions and stop a terrible situation from getting even worse.
There are various factors that have given rise to the current level of burning in Southern California. The two most instrumental are:
- The violent and extensive Santa Ana Winds, blowing at huge (but not unprecedented) velocities. These happen repeatedly and predictably ten times a year, but have never caused fires of such magnitude.
- The extended dry period before these fires began, which reduced the moisture content of the Southern California air to just 4% of what it has been on average from 2012-2024.
The second factor is caused by global warming. Temperatures last year were a global average of 1.6 C above pre-industrial levels. This, combined with the La Nina component of the ENSO arriving, created extreme aridity in the Southern California climate. Sceptics may point at La Nina and say that this dryness, which gave rise to prefect incendiary fuel in the form of dead and dusty woodland, was caused by natural factors. But never in Los Angeles County's 175 year history has a La Nina event caused such a level of dryness - I will repeat, this winter was 4% of the usual humidity for Southern California. For reference, an ENSO cycle occurs once every 3-7 years on average; there have been plenty of La Nina events in LA's history, coinciding with plenty of violent Santa Ana Winds, and never before has such widespread destruction occurred. The extended dryness experienced in Los Angeles County is due to increasing global temperatures - and that is a fact.
Water, more specifically water infrastructure, has been the most important political issue in California since it was first colonised. The north of the state gets huge amounts of snowfall that then melts and flows down mountains into rivers. Franklin D Roosevelt's campaign of civil engineering did the unthinkable, and created a network for snowmelt at the north of the state to travel from reservoir to reservoir, climbing across the state's extreme differences in topography, and arriving for use 1300 km away in Los Angeles homes. It was an incredible feat of man managing nature and it should not be scoffed at. It has provided one of the driest and least habitable places in the United States the opportunity to grow into its second biggest city.
Mr Trump would like you to believe that with more water, the Los Angeles Fire Department would have been suitably equipped to fight and put out these fires. The scientific consensus is that no amount of water reservoirs would be ample to fight such a fire. The volume of the resource and its accessibility was depleted too quickly; that is true. Wealthy agricultural lobbyists have created a non-issue surrounding an already extinct fish so that far-right fanatics like Mr Trump have a liberal cause to blame this current crisis on. The problems with this argument are so variable and so deep that I don't want to spend four hours writing about them here. I heavily recommend watching this brilliantly made video essay instead. That being said, the amount of water that the fire department had/have access to doesn't actually matter. It is never going to be enough. The fire is too big and too hot for any method of extinguishment that we have developed. And we have never been more equipped to fight fires than right now.
LA and Southern California in general is the best place in the world when it comes to firefighting research and technology; akin to how Japan is so well-versed in the science of earthquakes. We have satellites that take photographs at such frequency and resolution that we can map out the extent of a wildfire accurately to the minute. We have UAVs that can do much of the search-and-rescue and extinguishing efforts for us. We have more efficient and better protected helicopters, fire hoses, and extinguishing chemicals. But this fire is too big for us to fight. It is an impossible endeavour. And it's not just me saying that, it's the experts at UCLA, it's the LA Fire Department, it's anyone who knows anything about the fighting of fires. Mr Trump does not know anything about the fighting of fires, nor do I believe he has consulted with anyone who does. The most important thing now is to ask how we stop it from happening again.
Fire begets greater fires (to an extent of course). The leftover surroundings where these fires have blazed are arid and chaotic - the perfect fuel source for future events. And these events are near-definitely going to happen. If we want to stop them from happening, we need to restore the moisture that was present in California just a few years ago. We need an atmospheric system that we know we can manage, which is not one that is greater than . But that ship has sailed. This is how bad it's going to be from now on. But it could get even worse. This region of aridity and therefore the region of incineration will continue to expand if we don't stop the worsening now.
We are unable to adapt to fires like this. Adaptation is not an option, at least not if we want to avoid this particular consequence of global warming. And we do: in geological history it has been widely theorised and studied that great temperature increases were accompanied by global spreads of wildfires. How do you think all those fossil fuels got there in the first place? This is another very interesting and important topic I don't want to dwell on for too long.
Reduce emissions and this problem does not get worse than it is right now. Continue emissions and this problem gets worse and worse for everyone. Not just the western United States, but forested environments across every continent (at certain latitudes, depending on their tendency for precipitation events) are liable to experience more and more devastating wildfires. If this pre-inauguration behaviour is not evidence enough that the current political acceptance of denying science's trust is some of the most destructive thinking we have seen in modern times, I don't know what is. And it honestly scares me.