- The Los Angeles fires share a key feature with the fires that burned Lahaina, Hawaii and Paradise, California
- Strong winds collided with rapidly drying landscapes full of vegetation to fan the flames.
- The climate crisis is increasing the likelihood of such events.
Last week’s Los Angeles firestorms share one essential characteristic with two of the most horrific wildfires in recent American memory.
The Palisades and Eaton fires may be unprecedented in some ways, but they share a common root cause with the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people in Paradise, California, and the 2023 fire that destroyed Lahaina, Hawaii.
In Paradise, Lahaina and now Los Angeles, the flames grew into monster fires as strong winds met a parched and overgrown landscape.
Scientists expect to see more of this in the future.
The Palisades Fire destroys a neighborhood amid high winds. AP Photo/Ethan Swope
“There’s definitely a trend that increases this type of situation,” Louis Gritzo, chief science officer at commercial property insurer FM, told Business Insider.
In all three cases, the sudden drought had sapped the moisture of the local vegetation, creating abundant kindling for the fire to feed on. Strong winds then picked up the embers and carried them to residential areas.
Wind whips up embers as the Palisades Fire burns on the west side of Los Angeles Ringo Chiu/REUTERS
“When we look at the last really bad fires — the Camp Fire, the Hawaii fires — they all have this in common,” Gritzo said. They have a wet period, a dry period, strong winds, very fast fire spread, a lot of ember transport.
Winds were unfortunate, but rapidly drying vegetation is happening more often as global temperatures rise.
How the climate crisis creates more fire fuel
In Paradise and Los Angeles, dry months followed unusually wet seasons that fueled an explosion of plant growth.
Smoke from the Pacific Palisades rises from the brown, parched hills above the Pacific Coast Highway. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Last winter, heavy rains in Southern California led to about twice the average amount of grasses and shrubs, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
This winter has not been so generous. The last few months have seen almost no rain, shrinking all those grasses and shrubs.
Swain has coined the term “hydroclimatic whiplash”—or simply “weather whiplash”—for these drastic swings between extreme wet and extreme dry conditions. He has observed it all over the planet in recent years, from various regions in the US and Europe to the Middle East and China.
Globally, whiplash has already increased by 33% to 66% since the mid-twentieth century, Swain and his colleagues found in a new paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment on Thursday.
This is because warmer air holds more moisture. As global temperatures rise, so does the ceiling on how much water our atmosphere can hold.
That thirsty atmosphere draws more moisture from the ground at times and, at other times, sheds more rain. Hence, greater flood and drought extremes – and more fire fuel.
The Palisades Fire burns a Christmas tree inside a residence in Pacific Palisades. AP Photo/Ethan Swope
The effect of the climate crisis on wildfires “has been slow to emerge, but it’s emerging very clearly, unfortunately,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a news conference. on Friday announcing that 2024 was the hottest year. record year.
The scientific organization World Weather Attribution has found a clear link between the climate crisis and specific cases of extreme fire weather in Brazil, Chile, Australia and Canada.
The climate signal is “so big” now that it’s clear in global and continental data, but also “you’re seeing it at local scales, you’re seeing it in local weather,” Schmidt said.
Transition from fire to urban fire
So climate change is planting fire fuels in forests and grasslands.
However, once wildfires enter densely populated areas like Lahaina or the Pacific Palisades, they burn wood fences, ornamental yard plants, landscaping mulch and leaves built into roof gutters — then grow to consume homes.
Yard vegetation burns outside a home in Pacific Palisades as the Palisades Fire spreads. David Swanson/AFP/Getty Images
“Natural fuels may fill us with embers, but what’s burning down our homes and forcing us to run and evacuate are human fuels,” Pat Durland, a fire mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years federal. Experience managing wildfires, Business Insider said.
As the climate crisis tips the dice toward extreme wildfires, he says it’s important for city governments and residents to manage those urban fuels by reducing and sequestering them.
“I think anybody can be next under the right circumstances,” Durland said. “It depends on the fuel and the climate.”
