You can’t turn on the news without seeing the latest in the devastation that the wildfires in the LA basin have caused to people, homes, businesses, and more. Current estimates put the costs of the devastation as high as $275 billion. More than 27 people have died in the fires, as of recent estimates and nearly 180,000 people have been displaced or evacuated. The fires have burnt more than 27,000 acres, and both the Palisades fire and the Eaton Fire, further inland continue to burn, with experts saying that the fire could last for weeks as crews from around the world, battle tough terrain and impossibly strong Santa Ana winds, that during their peak reached 100mph.

This is what a front-row seat to a climate change-fueled catastrophe looks like in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and it has occurred against the backdrop where the globe has very likely officially crossed the 1.5-degree threshold and where an emerging American oligarchy is preparing to back out of climate commitments and “drill baby drill.”

Contextualizing the Crisis in Los Angeles

This devastating loss of life, property, and ecosystems is all taking place against a backdrop of an increasingly warming world where climate experts and scientists are increasingly struggling to model both the present and future conditions.

A few weeks ago scientists from the EU, Japan and the US confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record, with an average temperature 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial era. This marks the very first time that that record has been broken, and the globe has surpassed the limits that were agreed to during 2015’s Paris Climate negotiations. The World Meteorological Foundation confirmed that the data was correct, according to Reuters. Copernicus, the EU organization that keeps an eye on the planet and its environment noted that “climate change [is] pushing the planet's temperature to levels never before experienced by modern humans.”

While the globe will need to spend a few years beyond the 1.5-degree threshold to break the limit “officially,” it's highly likely that we’re headed in that direction and that climate change and disruption are here to stay. The annual global temperature was 1.6 C degrees above the threshold in 2024.

An analysis this week from the University of California Los Angeles, indisputably links the fires in LA to climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels.

According to the analysis, “Vegetation in the area where Palisades and Eaton Fires ignited was 25 percent drier than it would have been in the absence of climate change. “We believe that the fires would still have been extreme without the climate change components noted above, but would have been somewhat smaller and less intense,” said the analysis’s authors in a press release from U.C.L.A. A separate analysis by the ClimaMeter, a group of climate scientists working to provide rapid assessments of weather extremes using climate models, also found that climate change had amplified the dry conditions—with temperatures up to five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) hotter and conditions up to 15 percent drier in the past few decades than in the period from 1950 to 1986,” Scientific American reported.

While vegetation was drier, California has had some extremely wet winters, followed by very dry summers and autumns, which also contributed to the ongoing conflagrations. Wetter conditions cause massive growth, which then dries out and becomes exceedingly flammable. Scientists are calling this “weather whiplash.” This combined with unseasonably high Santa Ana winds (the Santa Anas typically blow from September through May), that reached 100 miles per hour during the fires, caused literal firestorms of burning embers to travel as far as a mile ahead of the fires both in Eaton Canyon, near Altadena which has been devastated, and in the Palisades which remains just 31% contained as of this writing.

Warming Globe, More Extreme and Unpredictable Weather

As the globe continues to warm, one of the key effects will be an increase in unpredictable and extreme weather.

For farmers, that has thrown much of the climate science they have come to rely on to plant and harvest crops into turmoil, as The Atlantic reports. Global warming is moving faster than many current models can predict–even with greenhouse gas-emitting AI and increasing computing power. As the story notes, “Our picture of what is happening and probably will happen on Earth is less hazy than it’s ever been.”

While climate models can predict with broad strokes what might happen, climate scientists are noticing an increasingly alarming trend: Repeated and extreme hot spots on every continent except Antarctica. These hot spots are far worse than the current climate models predict, and climate scientists are increasingly unsure of what the data means for the future of our planet, especially because those hotspots continue to occur in places where a majority of humanity lives. The story in the Atlantic argues that it’s not necessarily that climate science is bad (or because the models are faulty); it's that global warming is advancing at such an outrageous pace that there’s simply no way to foretell the exact nature of climate impacts.

Add into this equation the fact that many of the common carbon sinks like the global forest and ocean are absorbing less and less carbon. For example, forested areas we have long relied on as carbon sinks are absorbing less and less carbon and in some cases, becoming carbon emitters themselves, like the forests in Finland. As the oceans warm, they too are absorbing less carbon which is in turn causing the planet to heat even more, which in turn is causing more extreme weather events like those that contributed to the massive wildfires in LA.

The risk here is that without accurate or even approximate climate models, humans cannot protect food and water sources, let alone predict the weather. Droughts, famine, fire, floods, massive storms, and disease (including global pandemics like Covid-19) are likely to become more frequent and cause more suffering, loss and damage in a world that is rapidly heating up.

The devastating wildfires in LA are only the most recent examples of how our world will change in the face of a rapidly heating environment, yet that’s not to say that nothing can be done to slow it down or stop it. Perhaps the wildfires in LA will serve as an impetus for a dramatic shift in the way we tackle the climate crisis, in the face of irrefutable facts.

New Climate Jobs & Employers

Check out some of the latest featured jobs below. If you don't see anything that speaks to you, you can always go to Climatebase to explore thousands of other opportunities.

Savanna Institute

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Collaborative Earth

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Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County

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Solom

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Powin Energy

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Environmental Defense Fund

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Basis Climate

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Reunion

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