Did Climate Change Burn Los Angeles? transcript

Narrator:

On January 7, 2025, wildfires broke out in Los Angeles County California and quickly spread due to high winds and dry conditions. The largest fire hit the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, destroying thousands of homes and forcing widespread evacuations.

Fires then broke out in nearly two dozen locations throughout the region. Firefighters and emergency crews were rushed in from surrounding counties, the California National Guard was called out, and over a hundred firefighting crews were dispatched from other states and across Canada and Mexico.

Despite massive efforts, as of January 12th most fires were still out of control. Within a week they had taken the lives of at least 25 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate and destroyed more than 12,000 homes and buildings, including some of the most valuable real estate in the country.

Long before the LA fires were brought under control, another hot blaze was already burning: the battle over who, or what, was to blame for the disaster. By now you can probably guess what many politicians and media commentators pointed to. The Los Angeles Times, typically, insisted that “Intensifying climate whiplash set the stage for devastating California fires” while Michael Mann fingered “human caused warmings due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels”.

John Robson:

Climate change. Human caused warmings. Climate whiplash.

It’s your fault, and my fault, and everybody’s fault. Except maybe the mayor of Los Angeles or her fire chief or water manager because it’s all to do with the sky and the wind and the  clouds and the cars they drive in Texas and those gas stoves in Boston, and what we really should do is build more windmills and hike the cost of heating your homes in the winter and cooling them in the summer.

It’s oh-so-predictable. But this time something’s different, because so much climate alarmism has been funded and pushed by the same Hollywood celebrities and California gazillionaires whose houses and neighbourhoods just burned down. And there’s an unavoidable sense that government incompetence played a big role in the scale of the disaster, while climate change is mostly just an excuse to deflect blame. After all, California is no stranger to wildfires and people expect state and local officials to be prepared particularly for predictable emergencies. But were they?

Especially, were the ones prepared who’ve been saying that climate change was making wildfires more common and more serious, and then didn’t fill the reservoirs, manage fuel loads or even devise workable evacuation plans because they were too busy saving us from the extreme weather yet to come to do their actual jobs of saving people from the extreme weather that’s already here and always has been?

For the Climate Discussion Nexus I’m John Robson, and this is a CDN Fact Check on the 2025 Los Angeles fires.

As so often, we at CDN want to talk history here.

Narrator:

California has always been prone to massive fires. In pre-European settlement days Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo named what is now San Pedro Bay “Bahia de los Fumos” or “Bay of Smokes”, when he encountered it on October 8, 1542. So-called “chaparral fires” have been happening for at least 20 million years, which is before humans even existed, let alone reached the Americas.

As a piece in The Free Press put it, “There’s a common misconception that beneath the asphalt, Los Angeles is a desert. It isn’t. It’s grassland. And part of the natural cycle of the grassland ecosystem is fire.”

Adding to the risk are the so-called “Santa Ana winds” which develop in the fall and winter months. They originate in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest and flow out over the mountains to the California coast, bring strong gusts of hot dry air. As the U.S. National Weather Service notes, “These strong winds can cause major property damage. They also increase wildfire risk because of the dryness of the winds and the speed at which they can spread a flame across the landscape.”

John Robson:

And these winds are understood by everyone, even climate alarmists, to be natural. But of course the natural consequence is that the affected areas are naturally vulnerable to fires and always have been. For instance, as Tony Heller dug out of the archives, Pacific Palisades was devasted by fire in 1961… and in 1938.

Not to mention the massive Malibu fires in 1982, 1970, 1958, 1956, 1943… you get the idea.

Narrator:

But while the California climate is known for dryness, it’s actually become slightly less dry over the past six centuries. A 2019 study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Hydrology looked at long term drought and precipitation records for U.S. coastal areas, including Los Angeles. A 2,000 year dryness index built from tree-ring records showed peak drought conditions prior to the 1500s along the Pacific coast, and a trend towards less drought in the centuries since.

Meanwhile, from the same study, the daily precipitation record for downtown LA, which goes back to 1878, shows no trend at all.

John Robson:

Now, some commentators on the recent fires conceded, implicitly or explicitly, that the Los Angeles area has always been fire-prone. But, they insisted, this time was different because it happened in winter which used to be wetter and safer.

Narrator:

The Economist, for instance, wrote that around Los Angeles “Until recently, January wouldn’t have been considered part of fire season. But planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions have also increased the number of days each year with fire-starter weather conditions.”

The Atlantic chimed in with: “The hills were ready to burn. It’s January, well past the time of year when fire season in Southern California is supposed to end. But in this part of the semi-arid chaparral called Los Angeles, fire season can now be any time.”

And according to Bloomberg: “The rise of massive wildfires in the state over the last several years has been exacerbated by climate change. Droughts have become more frequent as temperatures rise. The Los Angeles area has had no meaningful rain for many months, despite the fact that winter is usually the rainy season.”

But numbers from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, an agency hardly prone to climate skepticism, show that average December precipitation in Los Angeles has been trending up since the 1940s, not down.

The same source shows that for January the trend is basically zero.

Of course, some years are drier than others. But in both cases there’s no sign of an increase in annual variability. Besides, it turns out that the two years leading up to the fire were among the wettest on record for LA rather than, as such stories would have you think, part of a man-made trend toward drier and more combustible conditions.

As for the Santa Ana winds, a 2016 study in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters found that since the 1970s there have been no long term trends in their frequency or intensity. A 2019 study in the same journal concluded that climate change was likely making the winds weaker, not stronger, over time.

John Robson:

Finally, the fire conditions for California heading into January 2025 were indeed dry. But they were not unusual overall. On January 2^nd, the US National Interagency Fire Center issued its outlook for the month, in which they noted that Southern California had experienced relatively dry conditions, but that elsewhere in the state rainfall was “bountiful”.

Narrator:

“Precipitation was limited in December, especially across the southern third of the state. Once again, bountiful rainfall was observed in northern California, which extended somewhat into central California. However, much of southern California experienced near record dry conditions. Precipitation in southern California for the past three months is well below normal, generally less than 25% of normal, and in many cases less than 10% of normal, although numbers steadily increased to the north across central California.”

John Robson:

On that basis, the agency concluded that Southern California faced elevated fire risk, but that other areas were pretty much normal, which is not what you’d expect from a “global” warming that causes drought, or even a state-wide version of warming. As the NIFC further warned:

Narrator:

“Southern California continued to experience fire activity during offshore wind events in December. Until widespread rains occur, this risk will continue. Accordingly, above normal significant fire potential is expected for the South Coast Predictive Service Area and adjacent foothills in January. Elsewhere, fire potential will be minimal through April, with the growing cycle beginning to get underway.”

John Robson:

So, here’s the big picture.

While fires have regularly broken out through history, including in California, and prehistory, rainfall over the past few decades has been rising slightly in California rather than vanishing as humans wreck the weather. And while there was local dryness in late 2024, over the past few years it has been particularly abundant, so this alleged trend toward greater dryness simply does not exist.

As for the Santa Ana winds, they're normal at this time of year, haven’t been getting more intense and if anything they are likely to get weaker due to climate change.

That means climate change is not the culprit.

The Los Angeles region is a dry grassland historically prone to wildfires fueled by hot wind gusts and an arid landscape, especially because the area alternates wetter and drier conditions and the former promote thick growth of plants that are liable to burn in the latter. Now there’s a large city built in those fire-prone areas. And what just happened was bound to happen sooner or later, so the authorities should have seen it coming, especially those committed to climate change orthodoxy in which wildfires become more common and more ferocious.

Well, this year, it came.

Narrator:

The fire risk conditions developed quickly when the Santa Ana winds sped up. On January 3^rd the National Weather Service issued an urgent alert for the Los Angeles area, which by January 7th had been upgraded to a “Red Flag” event due to the windstorms.

That was the day the fires started, and from there they quickly grew out of control.

John Robson:

It’s not entirely clear how the fires started. But honestly it’s not really that important either. One possible cause is a fallen power line. It could also have been a homeless encampment. The LA Fire Department reported an astounding 13,909 homeless fires in 2023 alone. It also may have been reignition of a fire from a week earlier, which itself may have been caused by hikers.

No one really knows, at least not yet. But as I say, it doesn’t really matter, including whether it was natural, careless or deliberate. What matters, as with wildfires generally, is what happens once a spark does get loose. How much fuel load is there, in what condition, and how effective is our response.

In this case, however it started, once it was underway the immediate problem was that there wasn’t enough water to put it out. Nearby water storage tanks in the Palisades, each holding a million gallons, started going dry within hours, causing fire hydrants to shut down.

Now I know what you’re thinking. How could that be when LA has had so much rain in the past few years? Don’t they have reservoirs? Yes they do. In fact the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez reservoir is a few thousand feet uphill from the Palisades.

Unfortunately, it was empty.

The critical reservoir had been drained a year earlier for maintenance and never reopened. Somehow, despite her $700,000 a year salary, the CEO of the LA Department of Water and Power, not only couldn’t manage to get it finished before fire season, but she didn’t even notify the County or City fire department of the situation.

On the other hand, she had no trouble making time for “social justice”. [Clip of CEO of the LA Department of Water and Power]: “It’s important to me that everything we do, it’s with an equity lens and social justice, and making sure that we right the wrongs that we’ve done in the past from an infrastructure perspective and that we involve the community in that process. And this utility is serious about it, is authentic about it. And so I’m just super excited to be part of that movement.”

Well, there is a certain equity in having the homes of rich, middle-class and poor people alike burn to the ground. But there’s not much fairness or decency in the Los Angeles mayor, or maybe her staff, once she straggled back from Ghana, finding time to delete an online memo in which even fire chief Kristin Crowley, herself a vocal devotee of DEI over more traditional concerns like F-I-R-E, nevertheless begged for more resources for her fire department to, in its spare time, fight fires.

Now in fairness, adding more firefighters might not have helped if they were all like Crowley’s conspicuously physically unfit Deputy Chief and head of the Equity and Human Rights Bureau, who was discovered in a 2019 video responding to concerns about the strength of female firefighters: “’Is she strong enough to do this?’ Or ‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire.’ Which my response is he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” Yeah. Like California.

Now another thing that might have helped would have been reversing the Golden State’s longstanding resistance, largely due to environmentalist pressure, to fire management through vegetation removal and controlled burns.

Narrator:

It’s also emerging that many people in leadership in Los Angeles have never considered their water system suitable for fighting wildfires. A Bloomberg story reported that “Los Angeles authorities said their municipal water systems were working effectively but they were designed for an urban environment, not for tackling wildfires.”

And NBC reported “Experts said the system wasn’t built to fight a major blaze like this one.”

John Robson:

Why the heck not? If your city is in an ecosystem famous for frequent major wildfires, and you believe that climate change is making that situation worse, and you knew that you weren’t ready, why didn’t you give some thought to how you might prepare to fight one? Including controlled burns? Keeping your reservoirs full?

Remember, California has one of the most advanced economies on earth, including technologically, at a period when humans enjoy wealth that our ancestors literally could not have dreamed of. So how can its infrastructure be so inadequate to protecting its inhabitants? What does it say about the incompetence and self satisfaction of the local authorities? Because that’s what’s at stake here, not climate change.

Here at the Climate Discussion Nexus our hearts go out to those who have lost so much in the LA wildfires, especially those who have lost loved ones. If we seem less than sympathetic, it’s to the authorities who let it happen, and to the voters who encouraged them to implement so many bad climate policies that loaded endless costs on ordinary people for no apparent benefit, and, we now learn, at huge risk, all in the name of fixing the weather. But you can’t fix the weather by demanding that everyone install solar panels and drive electric vehicles.

What you can do is put competent people in charge of important systems, ask them to manage them effectively, efficiently, and honestly, and don’t let them blame “climate change” when they have clearly messed up.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus I’m John Robson and that’s our “Fact Check” video on climate change and the January 2025 California fires.