The fires that devastated the districts in Los Angeles, killed 28 people and burned over 16,000 houses and buildings, are not unique, according to a new quick analysis. And researchers say that they now appear considerably more often due to climate change.
The shocking fires, the city blocks in the third largest metropolis of North America, drive home how close the climate crisis brings extreme weather for humans and communities. The new study from the WWA group of global weather attribution (WWA) states that the conditions behind the fires were about 35 percent higher compared to pre-industrial times.
If global warming along the current airways continues, the fire conditions will be a further 35 percent higher by 2100 – a dark picture for the future of LA and Southern California.
“Without a faster transition from the fossil, fossil fuels from planets, California will continue to become hot, drier and flammable,” said Clair Barnes, co-author of the WWA report and researcher at Imperial College London.
When Southern California gets some urgently needed rain, a new analysis indicates that the forest fires in January were 35 percent more likely and the more likely these fires become, the more expensive insurance for everyone.
The study carried out by an international team of 32 researchers used global climate models to project how Weat conditions have changed since the pre-industrial period. In order to be published quickly, the study was not checked or published in a scientific journal, but was based on established attribution methods.
These conditions are now expected every 17 years, although they will occur more frequently if the global temperatures continue to rise.
Simply put, climate change delayed the rain and reinforced the hot and dry conditions that transformed the vegetation around LA into fuel, and then the strong winds left these fires back where they normally do not. All of this becomes more likely if the global temperatures continue to rise.
Delayed winter rain extends the fire season
“The delayed start of the winter rain is a significant problem because it extends the length of the fire season, which means that there are as many more opportunities for weather events like these wind events to align yourself with ignition,” said John Abatzoglou, professor of climatology the University of California Merced and one of the co-authors of the study.
He noticed that with all these things there is a higher risk that one of the resulting fires will be “very difficult to suppress”.
The dry conditions were also carried out after a few years in which California saw more rain, which led to more vegetation in the area. According to Abatzoglou, this means that burning is even more fuel available so that the fire can spread.
And the underlying conditions are all worsened. According to the WWA report, the low rainfall from October to December is now 2.4 times more likely, which increases the risk of dry, fire-prone vegetation. This also means that the dry conditions correspond more closely with the strong winds of Santa Ana, which have contributed to spreading these fires and generally peaked between December and January.
Overall, the dry, fire -prone conditions in Southern California have extended by about 23 days a year and, according to the study, increased the risk of cities like LA.
Abatzoglou says he hoped that the destructive fires will act as a wake -up call for the state in order to prepare these conditions next time.
“Because the next time there will be.”
