You may find this interesting reading.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/wildfires-los-angeles-climate-crisis-john-vaillant
"We don’t know who or what exactly started the Los Angeles wildfires but what role has (climate change) played?"
It’s certainly not the cause of the fires, but it is an enhancer, an enabler and an energizer of the fires. I coined a term in Fire Weather, which is “21st-century fires”. It burns fundamentally differently than it used to, and it’s responding to climate change and the atmosphere’s growing ability to hold heat at low elevations and heat everything around us. Climate science ain’t rocket science. When you make things hotter and drier, they burn more easily. We have basically tweaked nature, pissed it off and we have altered the climate of this planet in a way that makes it more hostile to our ambitions and safety.
How do you connect Canada’s 2016 Fort McMurray fire, which you documented extensively in your book, to other massive fires like we saw more recently in Paradise, Maui and now Los Angeles?
The intensity of the fire that burned through Fort McMurry in 2016, in the sub-Arctic of Canada when there was still ice on the lakes, burned basically the same way as the ones in LA. You had the drought, you had the fuel, you had the wind and that’s all you need. That can be recreated anywhere in the world. Any city can burn now. LA is effectively surrounded by fires and the wind will decide the fate of LA. That is a weird situation to be in, but it’s also a very honest one. I don’t care what business you’re in, nature owns 51% of it, at least. We act as if we own it. We share it. That’s what LA is discovering.
What would you say to political leaders and billionaires who put the blame for these fires on Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass or Governor Gavin Newsom?
Unfortunately, we have the most powerful people in the world trying to distract and obfuscate and frankly lie about this. The idea of leaders lying about science is so fundamentally wrong and damaging and civilization-corroding. What do you do when the future president of the United States attacks the most populous state in the union? Using every opportunity to foment division and partisanship is absolutely toxic – as toxic as supercharging the atmosphere with fossil fuels that make the entire world more combustible.
like i said, i worked for my towns conservation dept and when we had a couple close call fires one summer we took action, the same action the fire chief and others said was not taken, we've had many drier summers in the 25 years since then and we've had no problems since. would the precautions stop the threat completely?? maybe not, but it sure seems like the better way to go to me. what exactly would you do then to help prevent this again?? ban oil?? more regulations?? more taxes to combat climate change?? this was my point about people going down with the ship, not learning and then getting on the boat again, you can still be on one side and say maybe things werent done right