There's often disputes about how the influence of anthropogenic climate change plays out in the weather or as a factor in natural disasters such as catastrophic storms or as per below the Los Angeles wildfires.
whatever the actual influence, i contend it's always better to take advice on the subject from experts who have actually studied what happened as opposed to armchair critics who shoot their mouth off from positions of near total ignorance.
you'd think this would be obvious, but not now and not in this world.
so, below is the start of a piece published overnight on yaleclimateconnections.org that summarizes the work of 32 experts who looked at the causes of the catastrophic wildfires and the destruction these brought.
"Human-caused climate change worsened the ferocious January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires by reducing rainfall, drying out vegetation, and increasing the overlap between fire season and the winter Santa Ana wind season, according to a rapid analysis released today by World Weather Attribution, conducted by 32 researchers, including leading wildfire scientists from the U.S. and Europe.
"The fires burned over 50,000 acres, killed at least 28 people, and destroyed over 16,000 structures, according to Cal Fire.
"The study’s main findings:
"The hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the fires were about 35% more likely and 6% more intense due to 1.3 degrees Celsius of global warming that has occurred since preindustrial times, caused primarily by the burning of oil, gas and coal.
"These fire-prone conditions can be expected to recur about once every 17 years in the current climate, but will become a further 35% more likely if warming reaches 2.6 degrees Celsius by 2100, which is predicted to happen under three of the five main IPCC emission scenarios (from moderate to high-end).
"Low rainfall from October through December in the current climate is about 2.4 times more likely compared to the preindustrial climate, but this change cannot be confidently attributed to human-caused climate change.
"Fire-prone conditions because of human-caused climate change have increased by about 23 extra days each year, increasing the chance a fire will start from October through December, which coincides with the onset of peak Santa Ana wind season.
"Water infrastructure, not designed to fight a rapidly expanding wildfire, was unable to keep up with scale and extreme needs during the Eaton and Palisades wildfires.
"The results echo the conclusions of an earlier UCLA rapid attribution study, which found, “Climate change may be linked to roughly a quarter of the extreme fuel moisture deficit when the fires began. The fires would still have been extreme without climate change, but probably somewhat smaller and less intense.”"
