Climate

While deaths and destruction are mounting and tens of thousands flee a devastating inferno in Los Angeles, the President-Elect has used the catastrophic wildfires to spread misinformation, offer false solutions, and disrespect the suffering of people and the hard work of first responders. Here, we provide the facts and avoid the fiction.  

Fact 1: reservoirs are full

Due to a relatively wet winter in Northern California, almost every reservoir in Southern California is at or above its historical average. There is ample water available in reservoirs to fight fires. The challenge is getting the water from the reservoir to the fire fighters. 

Fact 2: California’s water system is a patchwork  

California, like most states, has thousands of water systems. Federal, state, municipal, regional, and private water systems co-exist. Some are connected to each other, some aren’t. What happens hundreds of miles away in one system does not necessarily have an impact on your local supply. In other words, decisions about federal water in one part of the state don’t automatically increase or decrease how much water your local utility has available.  

Fact 3: City water systems are not designed to suppress massive wildfires 

Cities build infrastructure to meet demands without being unnecessarily expensive. For example, water systems are designed for the capacity to deliver enough water to serve customers’ normal household water needs and to provide a limited amount of “fire flow,” or excess capacity for fire suppression. During the initial hours of the Palisades fire, the LA Department of Water and Power experienced unprecedented water demand — four times the normal water use for 15 hours straight. This incredibly high, sustained level of water demand outstripped the ability of the system to keep the water flowing. It was water use, not water supply, that led to a temporary shortage for fire flows.   

Fact 4: Fire fighters often rely on air support to contain rapidly burning fires 

The Palisades fire ignited during some of the worst Santa Ana winds, gusting at more than100 miles per hour at times. This made air support dangerous and unreliable during the critical first few days of the fire, placing a larger burden on the municipal water system.   

Fact: Wildfires are worsening due to climate change 

At a basic level, the connection between wildfires and water is intuitive: fires start more easily, burn more intensely, and spread faster when it’s dry and hot. That’s bad news, because climate change is increasing temperatures and the risk of drought in many regions. It’s particularly pronounced in the western United States, where heatwaves and megadroughts are priming us for wildfire. In fact, western landscapes are now roughly 50 percent drier due to climate change. 

Fact: Fossil fuel companies are privatizing profit and socializing costs of climate change 

Emissions from the products of fossil fuel companies and cement manufacturers have fundamentally reshaped the climate of western North America and left behind a scarred, charred landscape in which people, communities, and the ecosystems that enable their existence are suffering. To-date, taxpayers and victims have been footing the bill for worsening wildfires.  

However, UCS’s new analysis quantifies the contribution of fossil fuel companies to fire conditions. Federal, state, and local governments have the power to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the costs of climate change impacts. And they should. 

California wildfires, Donald Trump’s sentencing, hunger in Khan Younis and freezing temperatures in London: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

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Noaa says last year was the warmest since records began in 1850 and Nasa concurs: ‘The long-term trends are very clear’

It was the hottest year ever recorded for the world’s lands and oceans in 2024, US government scientists have confirmed, providing yet another measure of how the climate crisis is pushing humanity into temperatures we have previously never experienced.

Last year was the hottest in global temperature records stretching back to 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa announced, with the worldwide average 1.46C (2.6F) warmer than the era prior to humans burning huge volumes of planet-heating fossil fuels.

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Events in California reveal how political obstruction is deepening a climate crisis that needs urgent action to prevent it becoming an irreversible disaster

The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have killed at least 10 people, displaced 180,000 and scorched about 40 square miles – an inferno driven by fierce winds and severe drought in what should be California’s wet season. It is a sobering reminder that the climate crisis is driving wildfires to become more frequent, intense and destructive – leaving ruined lives, homes and livelihoods in their wake. The US president Joe Biden responded by mobilising federal aid. By contrast the president-elect, Donald Trump, a convicted felon who was criminally sentenced on Friday, used the disaster to spread disinformation and stoke political division.

The climate crisis knows no national borders. Deadly floods in Spain, Hawaii’s fires and east Africa’s devastating drought show nowhere is safe from its effects. Countries must work toward the global common interest and beyond their narrow national interests. The scale of the climate emergency is such that there is a case to view all crises through a green lens. Instead Mr Trump’s denialism works to foment distrust about the science. He’s not just aiming to delay the onset of truth. He wants to demolish it. It’s a familiar playbook: the fossil fuel industry knows the reality of the climate emergency but chooses profit over responsibility, effectively deceiving the public while the planet burns.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Strong winds and low humidity continue as five fires rage across Los Angeles area, with death toll expected to rise

• California wildfires – live
• Before and after satellite images of California fires show devastation

Weather forecasters in Los Angeles expect fast, dry winds to return towards the end of the weekend, threatening to fuel wildfires that have already destroyed 10,000 structures and killed 10 people.

Urgent “red flag” alerts – meaning critical fire weather conditions – announced by the US National Weather Service (NWS) said moderate to strong wind and low humidity would continue on Friday morning, as five fires raged across the metropolis.

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Up to 9in of snow expected in Arkansas and Tennessee as climate crisis leads to more frequent extreme weather cases

More than 80 million people across southern US states were on alert on Friday as a powerful winter storm that dumped heavy snow and glazed roads with ice across much of Texas and Oklahoma lumbered eastward.

Some governors have declared a state of emergency as the weather forced school closures across the region and unleashed havoc for traffic.

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Me mudé con mi familia hace dos años porque, a medida que el clima de California se volvía más seco y caluroso, temía que nuestro vecindario fuera víctima de los incendios.

Constellation Energy’s deal to buy Calpine is being driven by fast-rising demand for electricity in part by the technology industry’s investments in artificial intelligence.

‘Now we have to make sure there’s not a second, financial tragedy that follows the physical catastrophe,’ says consumer advocate

• California wildfires – live

California homeowners who lost everything in this week’s devastating Los Angeles-area fires now have to battle their insurance companies to recover the value of their homeowners’ policies – if they are lucky enough to have insurance at all.

With estimates of the economic damage from the fires now reaching $52bn-$57bn, consumer advocates and veterans of past disasters say homeowners can expect weeks or months of paperwork to prove that they have lost what they say they have lost, if not also pressure from claims adjusters and a whole class of disaster professionals to make a quick settlement for less than they are entitled to under their policies.

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Trump and Maga allies are using the fires to attack leaders like Newsom – possibly foretelling power struggles ahead

If ever a situation cried out for elevating national unity over political divisions, the dystopian scenes emanating from the Los Angeles fires surely qualified.

The catastrophe that has left at least 10 people dead as of Friday morning, more than 1,000 structures destroyed and forced thousands fleeing their homes would – in an ideal and less polarised America – spur humane empathy and solidarity in place of tribal partisanship.

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Death toll rises to 10 as first identified victims were Altadena residents affected by ongoing Eaton fire

• California wildfires – live updates
• Californians: have you been affected by the wildfires?

At least 10 people have been killed in the wildfires still surging across the Los Angeles area.

Victor Shaw, 66, was the first of the fatalities to be named, after he died in the Eaton fire raging to the north-east of LA while attempting to extinguish flames at his home of 55 years in Altadena.

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To solve the climate crisis, power must flow away from the billionaire class

When I feel uncertain, I find it’s helpful to write down things I know to be true. Fossil fuels are causing irreversible planetary overheating. Overheating threatens essentially all life on Earth. Oil and gas executives knew this but they chose to systematically lie and block a climate transition. They continue to make this choice.

I choose to focus my energy on the climate crisis because a habitable planet is a prerequisite for everything worth fighting for, and because the prospect of losing a planet feels horrific and sad to me in a primal way that I can’t express with words. I’m also simply in love with the Earth. But planetary overheating is really just the most geophysical symptom of extractive colonial capitalism – “billionairism” – a system designed to pump wealth from the poor to the rich, creating billionaires, the healthcare crisis, the housing crisis, genocide, hierarchies like racism and patriarchy, and a great deal of suffering.

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution

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After the Bobcat Fire, L.A. no longer felt safe.

A similar campaign of rumors and lies was seen after the North Carolina hurricane, with DEI a primary target

As Los Angeles firefighters battle ongoing blazes, prominent rightwing figures are spreading bigoted criticism of the response and lies about who is to blame, including that the fire is raging because of diversity within the fire department.

The misinformation echoes the claims that plagued the North Carolina hurricane response. Both disasters led to outrage, which partisan actors seized upon to advance their political goals, muddying the already confusing information ecosystem that accompanies a fast-moving news event.

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Global temperatures last year crept past 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key goal for climate diplomacy, raising questions about how much nations can stop the planet from heating up further.

It’s widely used because it can slow flames in ways that water can’t. But it also contains heavy metals and other harmful compounds.

Charity reveals plans to create 250,000 hectares of nature-rich landscape as it marks 130th anniversary

In past decades the focus has been on protecting beautiful landscapes such as the Lake District, trying to save the crumbling coast or breathing life into historic country houses.

Now the National Trust is marking its 130th anniversary by unveiling “moonshot” plans to address what it regards as the current national need – the climate and nature crises.

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Global temperatures last year crept past a key goal, raising questions about how much nations can stop the planet from heating up further.

Highest recorded temperatures supercharged extreme weather – with worse to come, EU data shows

Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”.

The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows. That is a jump of 0.1C from 2023, which was also a record hot year and represents levels of heat never experienced by modern humans.

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It’s possible for massive fires to burn in Australian cities. Planning needs to reflect this

As the Los Angeles wildfires rage, we are watching a disaster unfold in real time.

We knew this would happen eventually. We have moved from possible futures to these things now happening. The deferment has ended.

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