new study<\/a> published in Earth System Science Data try to quantify the answer, writing that climate change probably made the Eaton and Palisades fires more likely and could have resulted in the burned area being 25 times larger than it would have been without climate change (though there\u2019s a large range of uncertainty in that estimation).<\/p>\n\u201cThose fires in January were just so much more difficult to control because it was so dry, because it was warmer,\u201d said Crystal Kolden, professor and director of the Fire Resilience Center at UC Merced and a co-author of the paper. \u201cAnd that is where that climate change signal is really strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a clear scientific consensus that climate change is associated with hotter temperatures, which can cause plants to dry out faster than they otherwise would.<\/p>\n
However, there\u2019s less certainty around other factors that played a role in January, according to Park Williams, a professor in the Department of Geography at UCLA, whose work was cited in the study but who did not participate in it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear if climate change is causing our rainy seasons to be delayed more often (as was the case in January), though models suggest a trend in that direction, Williams said.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also uncertainty around whether climate change is exacerbating the whiplash between wet and dry years in Southern California \u2014 lots of fuel grew in the two wet years prior to a dry 2024.<\/p>\n
And how it may be changing the Santa Ana winds, which normally do blow in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are all things where the effect of climate change is just much murkier,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n
The future of fire<\/p>\n
Modeling our fire future here is further complicated by the highly variable fuel types, the weather, the homes and the vegetation across Southern California\u2019s topographically complex terrain.<\/p>\n
Some models may work well in wildlands like forests, where the main thing that\u2019s burning is natural vegetation, Kolden said. But many hard-to-predict human factors are present in the wildland urban interface \u2014 places like the Pacific Palisades, where homes are built right up against open natural areas. Those variables can make the models less confident.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u200aI think that it’s important that people who are living in Southern California understand that actually in the greater L.A. area, coastal Southern California, we have not seen an increase in the number of fires or the area burned,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n
Northern California is another story, he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe fingerprint of climate change is just unmistakable\u201d with fires in the Sierra Nevada and North Coast.<\/p>\n
What humans do next is perhaps the biggest X factor, Kolden said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we always say is we can’t model human adaptation,\u201d Kolden said. \u201cWe don’t model humans adapting to these changes and saying, \u2018Yeah, you know what? We actually don’t like having our houses burned down, so we’re going to start hardening our homes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d like to do just that with your landscaping, we’ve got some tips here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keep up with LAist. If you’re enjoying this article, you’ll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":325985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,285,5810,2961,224,5337,17254,2549,5609],"class_list":{"0":"post-325984","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-climate-change","11":"tag-eaton-fire","12":"tag-la","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-losangeles","15":"tag-palisades-fire","16":"tag-southern-california","17":"tag-wildfires"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115422474692494493","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}