Climate

Researchers see a growing health danger from the vast plumes of pollution spawned by wildfires like the ones devastating Los Angeles.

"This is what's left of the home that I grew up in for 31 years," Pacific Palisades resident Greg Benton said as he remembered his recent Christmas celebration with his family in his house. Thousands of Angelenos are returning to their homes to assess the damaged left by five fires which raged through multiple areas of the city. More than 144,000 people are under evacuation orders, local authorities have said

• California fires live

• ‘There’s literally nothing’: surrounded by destruction, Los Angeles begins to process scale of loss

• Community groups provide relief as LA staggers from wildfire emergency

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Elon Musk, one of the brightest minds of his generation, is saying it, so it must be true

Women, eh? They’re simply not to be trusted. Eve ate that apple; Pandora opened that horrible little box; and now women are to blame for the devastating wildfires in California. I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but it’s what Elon Musk, one of the brightest minds of his generation – and one of the most powerful people on Earth – is saying, so it must be true.

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John Vaillant, the author of Fire Weather, explains why fires such as those in Los Angeles are different from those before

When writing about the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and how they affect the behavior and imaginations of southern Californians, Joan Didion once said: “The winds show us how close to the edge we are.”

I’ve lived here my entire life. I evacuated my family’s hillside home as a teenager. I’ve experienced the surrealism of watching ash rain down from the sky more times than I can count. But there is something different, supercharged, about the hurricane-force winds that fueled this week’s catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles.

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We fell in love with the power and speed that fossil fuels brought us. But the price being paid in California, and around the world, has become too high

Zero per cent contained. In layperson’s terms, that means “out of control and burning at will”. It’s a common designation for a wildfire – in the wild. But when a fire like this enters an urban area such as Los Angeles County, the most highly populated metropolitan area in the US, it becomes an exploding bomb, and this one has been detonating since last Tuesday.

By now, the energy release from this wind-driven, drought-fuelled firestorm turned urban conflagration is into the megatons, and the nuclear-scale destruction is there for all to see: block after block and neighbourhood after neighbourhood levelled – roughly 12,000 structures destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, 55 sq miles of city and mountain burnt, nearly 200,000 residents evacuated – so far. There is more to come.

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Can a city lose an entire neighborhood now and simply shuffle on, dragging the local memory like a ghost limb?

Every barrel of oil, every cubic meter of gas, and every ton of coal burned brings us closer to environmental catastrophe

Apocalyptic flames and smoke are raging through southern California in the worst fire in Los Angeles county’s history. At least seven people have died. Thousands of structures have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes. The private forecaster AccuWeather estimates initial damage and economic loss at more than $50bn and has the potential to be the costliest wildfire disaster in American history. The impacts of the disruption and loss faced by community members is incalculable.

While some media outlets are discussing the link between the Los Angeles fires and the climate crisis, the president-elect Donald Trump and rightwing media are using this devastating event to foster misinformation including denying the role of climate crisis.

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Extreme weather events — deadly heat waves, floods, fires and hurricanes — are the consequences of a warming planet, scientists say.

California has focused on fortifying communities against wildfires. But with growing threats, that may not be enough.

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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