The Guardian Climate Change

More than 1,800 structures destroyed as Eaton and Palisades fires still less than 30% contained

• Wildfires live updates
• Key takeaways

The death toll from the Eaton and Palisades fires that have consumed large swathes of Los Angeles county – and are still less than 30% contained – has risen to 24, according to medical examiners.

The county of Los Angeles medical examiner published a list of fatalities without giving details of any identities. Eight of the dead were found in the Palisades fire zone, and 16 in the Eaton fire zone, the document said.

My generation feels trapped in a political system not built for us. Why wouldn’t we be disillusioned?

I’m scrolling on TikTok after work when I get a text that would have sent 12-year-old Anjali into a spiral, a frenzy of extreme climate anxiety. The text is from a friend letting me know that it’s official – 2024 is the hottest year on record. Not just that, it’s the first year to exceed 1.5C of warming over preindustrial levels.

The news comes as my entire feed is flooded with images of an inferno of flames ripping through neighbourhoods in LA, in winter.

Getty team says no current plans to move prominent pieces from center deemed ‘marvel of anti-fire engineering’

It houses some of the richest treasures of the art world, such as Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, a popular Rembrandt and a priceless collection of paintings, portraits and other works spanning more than seven centuries.

To protect them, the Getty Center in Los Angeles was built in 1997 as “a marvel of anti-fire engineering”, complete with fire-resistant stone and concrete, protected steel, and set in well-irrigated landscaping.

The president-elect is obsessed with drilling for fossil fuels, not to mention taking control of Canada and Greenland and renaming the Gulf of Mexico

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"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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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

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.