LA fires have multiple causes, but scientists say climate change helped fuel them 

LOS ANGELES — In what California’s governor is saying may be the costliest disaster in U.S. history, the southern California wildfires have killed dozens, destroyed thousands of homes, and forced tens of thousands to evacuate.The wildfire outbreaks included several separate fires that may have had disparate causes and factors that helped them grow, spread, and destroy, but as UCLA Climate Scientist Daniel Swain explained in a briefing, climate change may have set the stage by providing much of the fuel.“It’s been bone dry from about Santa Barbara southward, only a few sprinkles since last season,” he said. “So we’re going on 9-10 months now without meaningful rain.”In total, the LA area has seen less than a fifth of an inch of rain since July 2024, despite entering its typical rainy season. That was after exceptionally wet rainy seasons for the past few years.ALSO READ: ‘Everything was gone’: Local athlete loses childhood home in California wildfiresSwain refers to it as “climate whiplash,” an emerging pattern in which areas oscillate between extremely wet and extremely dry conditions. In Southern California, he said that meant the area started January with a lot of dry vegetation, so when the winds picked up, conditions were ripe for fires to intensify and spread.“There’s not really much evidence that climate change has increased or decreased the magnitude or likelihood of the wind events themselves in Southern California, he said. “But what there is evidence of, and especially moving forward in the future, is that the climate change is increasing the overlap between extremely dry vegetation conditions later in the season and the occurrence of these wind events.”Researchers with World Weather Attribution are currently studying the causes and factors behind the growth and spread of California’s wildfires and plan to release a study in the coming weeks quantifying how much of an impact climate change had on fires.For example, a previous study found climate change doubled the likelihood of the Eastern Canadian fires of 2023 due to higher temperatures, decreased humidity, and low precipitation.VIDEO: ‘Everything was gone’: Local athlete loses childhood home in California wildfires©2025 Cox Media Group