Global warming turned wildfires into infernos in California

California’s economic output, measured by Gross Domestic Product, would in total be behind only the total GDPs of the U.S., China, Germany or Japan. Its per capita GDP would be the best in the world, argues the California governor’s report.

But this wealth has not enabled the state to contain and manage the wild fires that broke out in Los Angeles Jan. 7. The fires are still burning Jan. 13 with dangerous winds predicted overnight.

Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States, with close to 4 million residents. Its population is around 49% of Latin American origin, 12% Asian and 9% Black and it has a worldwide reputation as a center of the film industry.

It has had major wildfires before the current ones – five major ones since 2018. LA had pre-positioned fire crews following Weather Bureau forecasts. This preparation was inadequate.

The effects of global warming appear to have raised the world’s average air temperature over the 1.5 C target  set in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. A higher air  temperature lets the atmosphere attract and hold more moisture, turning it into an “atmospheric sponge,” which overcame all the efforts of the LA fire department.

To make for a worse situation, the above average rainfall in 2022 and 2023 produced an unusual amount of plant growth. The fall and winter drought in 2024, when less than an inch of rain fell during what was usually the “rainy” season, added to the drying effects of global warming to make the shrubbery vulnerable to burning rapidly.

The weather patterns produced by global warming drew the winds formed over the Mojave Desert through the mountain passes leading to LA, heating the winds and speeding them up. There were wind gusts in the San Gabriel Mountains of 100 miles per hour. These winds fed oxygen to the blazes and pushed their flames before the wind. The smallest fire rapidly grew, almost explosively, and the high winds spread embers for miles.

At least 319,000 people are now under evacuation orders or in evacuation warning areas. These evacuation orders, and the voluntary evacuations many people did on their own, perhaps have been responsible for the low death total — as of January 15 just 25 people — and low number of 16 missing.

AccuWeather late Thursday raised its estimate for damages from the LA fires to between $135 billion and $150 billion — triple the costs initially expected — after blazes ripped through some of Los Angeles County’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Previously they had been spared.

JP Morgan analysts predicted insured losses of $20 billion — and estimated that uninsured losses could soar to well over $100 billion. (businessinsurance.com, Jan. 10) That would make the LA fires the most expensive fire disaster in U.S. history — equal to nearly 4% of California’s annual GDP.

The figure that both AccuWeather and JP Morgan use in their estimates is the number of buildings damaged or destroyed — according to CAL FIRE, the state agency responsible for coordinating fire suppression in California – was about 15,000. Many of these destroyed buildings were the homes of workers who have lost everything.

Workers who are now houseless, many without a car that they need to go to work, will face the harsh problems of being destitute in the richest capitalist state in the world.

And the same processes of global warming that laid Los Angeles so low confront the worldwide working class.