Scientists Affirms That The Los Angeles Fires Were Made Worse Due To Climate Change

Two massive wildfires that ignited on January 7 in Los Angeles have become the most destructive and potentially costliest in the city’s history.

Still burning after three weeks, the Palisades and Eaton fires have so far claimed 28 lives and destroyed more than 16,000 structures.

The warm, dry, and heavily forested West Coast of the United States has long been susceptible to devastating wildfires. However, a recent study has determined that climate change, driven by fossil fuel combustion, has significantly worsened the problem.

According to World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global coalition of scientists analyzing climate change’s role in extreme weather events, the hot, dry, and windy conditions that fueled the Los Angeles fires were approximately 35% more likely due to climate change.

Since pre-industrial times, global temperatures have risen by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit), with 2024 being recorded as the hottest year to date.

The study’s authors noted that the additional heat contributed to unusually low rainfall from October to December, which, in turn, intensified the dry Santa Ana winds that fanned the flames.

“All across the western and southern US, we expect to see increasing drying effects with climate change, meaning more flammable conditions,” said Theo Keeping, a lead author of the WWA study and a wildfire researcher at the University of Reading in the UK.

“The likelihood of these events is growing much faster than during previous decades,” he added.

While wildfires in winter are not unprecedented, they are typically more extensive during the summer months from July to September.

Human-driven climate change has altered both the frequency and severity of fire-prone conditions in Los Angeles to the extent that such weather now occurs every 17 years, compared to every 23 years in the pre-industrial era, according to Keeping. However, he cautioned that this estimate does not fully account for the high climatic variability in the region.

If global temperatures continue rising at their current pace and reach an increase of 2.6 degrees Celsius by the century’s end, the likelihood of extreme wildfires could rise by another 35%, the study found.

Climate ‘Whiplash’ Intensifies Wildfire Risk

A warming planet is fueling a weather pattern known as “hydroclimate whiplash,” where years of heavy rainfall are followed by severe drought.

Warmer air holds more moisture, but while it can release this moisture in the form of precipitation, it can also absorb it more rapidly, Keeping explained.

Periods of higher rainfall promote lush vegetation growth, increasing fuel loads—something that occurred in 2023, according to the study’s lead author.

However, in 2024, the anticipated October-December rainfall failed to materialize, leaving behind dry vegetation that became highly flammable, further intensifying the wildfires.

This climate whiplash will continue to generate “more devastating wildfire events” in the future, Keeping warned.

Overall, the length of the dry season in Southern California has extended by 23 days compared to when the global climate was 1.3 degrees Celsius cooler, according to climate models used in the WWA study.

Since May 2024, Los Angeles has received little to no regular rainfall, leaving the region in an extended fire-prone state. The dry conditions were exacerbated by the Santa Ana winds, which typically occur from October to March when temperatures are cooler.

The overlapping effects of these dry winds and an increasingly fire-prone cool season are often underrepresented in climate models, the researchers noted.

“Drought conditions are more frequently pushing into winter, increasing the chance a fire will break out during strong Santa Ana winds that can turn small ignitions into deadly infernos,” explained Clair Barnes, a World Weather Attribution researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.

Global Wildfire Trends Confirmed

The WWA study is among a growing number of reports attributing extreme wildfire events to human-induced climate change—including those in Canada in 2023 and Brazil in 2024.

The Los Angeles study cites the latest findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which confirm that rising global temperatures are creating increasingly fire-prone conditions worldwide, including in Mexico and across western and northwestern North America.

“When we look across all of the scientific literature, there’s a very clear increasing wildfire risk in lots of parts of the world,” said Keeping.

WWA researchers emphasized that the primary driver behind these climate-fueled fires is the burning of fossil fuels.

“Without a faster transition away from planet-heating fossil fuels, California will continue to get hotter, drier, and more flammable,” Barnes stated.