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A professor of atmospheric science from the university of Washington has a couple posts he wrote about how the fires started and it seems like it was probably e

A professor of atmospheric science from the university of Washington has a couple posts he wrote about how the fires started and it seems like it was probably electrical, and could have been avoided (by turning off the grid in the area) given the very clear forecasts for extreme wind. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/did-la-fire-disaster-have-to-happen.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/did-la-fire-disaster-... https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/where-and-how-did-palisades-fire-start.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/where-and-how-did-pal... The other inconvenient truth is that the lack of good water management, prescribed burns, and forest management has been problematic across the country. Climate change isn’t the cause, even though attribution teams desperately try to make it that - it just makes things worse. But forests have dry fuel that will light up at some point and that’s regardless of climate change. There’s inadequate proactive planning for this.

cjcenizal 2y ago
“Climate change isn’t the cause.” The region experienced back to back years of high rainfall, spurring brush growth. This year the region experienced severe drought, converting all of that growth into fuel. Last week the region experienced 100 mph winds, which converted spot fires into fast-spreading conflagrations that could not be fought. This pattern of instability is an outcome of climate change. So yeah, it was caused by climate change.
- RhysU 2y ago
  Which of those named weather events was outside of historical experience in the area? From the outside, wet years and dry years and desert winds seem very much like the expected climate for SoCal.
  - throw0101a 2y ago
    > Which of those named weather events was outside of historical experience in the area? Over the last few decades averages for events have changed, and not for the better: > It was found that nearly all the observed increase in burned areas over the past half-century is due to human-caused climate change. It is estimated that from 1971 to 2021, human-caused climate change contributed to a +172% increase in burned areas, with a +320% increase from 1996 to 2021. In the coming decades, a further increase in annual forest burned areas is expected, ranging from 3% to 52%. * https://www.drought.gov/news/study-finds-climate-change-blame-record-breaking-california-wildfires-2023-08-08 https://www.drought.gov/news/study-finds-climate-change-blam...
    - RhysU 2y ago
      Source paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2213815120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2213815120. The paper, which looks quite good, amounts to (stationary baseline + climate drift) explaining burning more than (stationary baseline) alone. From the paper... > Their respective uncertainty bands overlap for most of the time periods considered; however, starting in 2018, there is a complete separation between CMIP6-ALL and CMIP6-NAT scaling factor distributions suggesting a complete dominance of anthropogenic over natural forcing. ...or incorrect models or uncertainty bands. The paper looks good but like it presumed to find the desired results from the research outset. Beware anything done with simulations that provides 3 significant digits (172% increase!). I don't doubt the influence of climate but I do doubt the certainty of these authors. Going back to the GP, I still want to know how wet years, dry years, and winds are outside of reasonable expectations in SoCal. These are part of the (stationary baseline) the paper should include. From a quick pass on the paper, it's not clear to me that the paper captures hysteresis due to intermittent wet/dry periods. Or that they considered any additive non-stationarity, in (stationary baseline + climate drift), they wouldn't deem anthropogenic. Not denying here. Just enjoying throwing rocks at a paper adjacent to a past life. I have published on uncertainty quantification for computational fluid dynamics that employed explicit slow/fast timescale decompositions.
      - cjcenizal 2y ago
        I love your objective approach and, as an engineer, I appreciate its merits. But I’m afraid you might not like my answer because it’s based on lived experience. I live in the area affected by the Eaton Fire. I’ve been here for 10 years. We experienced severe droughts and wildfires in the first 8, and though they were bad fires and made the air feel like we were living in Bladerunner’s LA, it established a norm. In the winter we got used to seeing rains. 2 years ago at this time of year we had snowfall (!). Last year at this time we had hard rain. This year, same time, we have catastrophic wildfires that wipe out neighborhoods. I’ve never seen winds like the ones we saw. They were terrifying. Like being in a hurricane. Anyway, that’s how I know it’s unusual…
        2y ago
- remarkEon 2y ago
  The revealed preferences of political leaders is that they don't believe Climate Change is the "cause", either. If they did, they would've planned for this instability and increased funding for all of the preventative actions mentioned in this thread and the various links therein. Or do people still think that banning plastic bags and carbon taxes stop wild fires.
whimsicalism 2y ago
bad forest management is a much more proximate cause than climate change, absolutely - not sure why it has become verboten to say. climate change makes a difference at the margin but the sheer number of recent events has a lot more to do with how we manage our forests/urban upscaling.
- freddie_mercury 2y ago
  It's not verboten in a single place. I've seen it mentioned literally hundreds of times the last few days.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    sure it's not verboten in the RW media landscape, but in blue circles you're basically called a trumpista for saying that forest & underbrush management is a larger proximate cause [0][1][2] [0]: https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fast-moving-wildfires-rage-los-angeles-right-wing-media-misleadingly-blame-forest https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fast-moving-wildfires-... [1]: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/12/2296400/-Critics-blast-DEI-Dems-bad-forestry-eco-activists-for-L-A-fires-but-never-mention-climate-crisis https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/12/2296400/-Critics-... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/09/los-angeles-fires-politics/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/09/los-angel...
    - strken 2y ago
      I find both takes misleading. "Windy" doesn't begin to describe winds over 100km/h on a dry and warm(ish) day in an drought. You could probably bulldoze a two hundred metre barrier in front of a bushfire on a day like that and it would still spread from uncontrollable spot fires ahead of the front. I'm not sure any forestry practices could do much against it. Are strong winds directly caused by climate change? Sure, extreme weather events are more common, but it's impossible to say whether any given event would have happened anyway. Reversing climate change might make really bad days less frequent, but it's no more capable of eradicating them than good forestry.
    - 2y ago
areoform 2y ago
> Climate change isn’t the cause, even though attribution teams desperately try to make it that - it just makes things worse. But forests have dry fuel that will light up at some point and that’s regardless of climate change. There’s inadequate proactive planning for this. I think it is worth pushing back on this, because while yes, in the absolute sense, no single incident can be traced back to the broader pattern; the inconvenient truth remains. Our addition of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the long lever that can move the world. Between 1970 and 2020, 381±61 Zetta Joules (10^21 joules) of additional energy was absorbed into the system (i.e. the Earth). This estimate was prepared using satellite data, which is public source, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/ How much energy is this? It's roughly 80% of the estimated energy of the Chicxulub impactor. Albeit spread over a significantly longer period of time. The strongest explosion humanity has ever created is in the order of 10^17 joules, or a hundred Quadrillion Joules. We've managed to add 1.5 million times that number in this 50 years. We've been essentially adding one tsar bomba's worth of energy every fifteen to twenty minutes for the past five decades. Based on my reading so far, we don't actually know what all of this additional energy is doing to the system. One theory based on satellite data has been that 'wet-gets-wetter, dry-gets-drier' — and some satellite data and simulations bear this out. See, this intensity analysis of NASA/German GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbgZ9om0t8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbgZ9om0t8. Now others disagree, because it's a complicated system and we don't know what this energy is doing... And so the debate rages back and forth. But here's the inconvenient truth. While we may not know exactly what all of this additional energy is doing to the system, we do know that it isn't going to do nothing. It is the inescapable truth that we're in the middle of a statistically anomalous period of extreme weather events. Was each and every one of these directly caused due to global warming? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean that the additional energy we've added to the system didn't change the dynamics of the system in such a way that made this outcome more likely. Or, more simply, we've biased the dice and - as they keep getting rolled - we keep getting these "surprises." I am young enough that in my lifetime, the Earth will look dramatically different than the one I was born into. So yes, you're strictly right. But no, I think it's worth examining the statement further and pointing out that yes, this is just the sign of what's to come.
- 2y ago
andrewinardeer 2y ago
A number of bushfires in the 2009 Black Saturday event in Victoria, Australia were started by downed power lines due to wind. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28305127 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28305127 Class action, power company handed biggest payout ever at the time of $480 million. Killed 119 people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. As for water? The bushfires were just too big and engulfed entire townships.

cjcenizal 2y ago

“Climate change isn’t the cause.” The region experienced back to back years of high rainfall, spurring brush growth. This year the region experienced severe drought, converting all of that growth into fuel. Last week the region experienced 100 mph winds, which converted spot fires into fast-spreading conflagrations that could not be fought. This pattern of instability is an outcome of climate change. So yeah, it was caused by climate change.

RhysU 2y ago
Which of those named weather events was outside of historical experience in the area? From the outside, wet years and dry years and desert winds seem very much like the expected climate for SoCal.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > Which of those named weather events was outside of historical experience in the area? Over the last few decades averages for events have changed, and not for the better: > It was found that nearly all the observed increase in burned areas over the past half-century is due to human-caused climate change. It is estimated that from 1971 to 2021, human-caused climate change contributed to a +172% increase in burned areas, with a +320% increase from 1996 to 2021. In the coming decades, a further increase in annual forest burned areas is expected, ranging from 3% to 52%. * https://www.drought.gov/news/study-finds-climate-change-blame-record-breaking-california-wildfires-2023-08-08 https://www.drought.gov/news/study-finds-climate-change-blam...
  - RhysU 2y ago
    Source paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2213815120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2213815120. The paper, which looks quite good, amounts to (stationary baseline + climate drift) explaining burning more than (stationary baseline) alone. From the paper... > Their respective uncertainty bands overlap for most of the time periods considered; however, starting in 2018, there is a complete separation between CMIP6-ALL and CMIP6-NAT scaling factor distributions suggesting a complete dominance of anthropogenic over natural forcing. ...or incorrect models or uncertainty bands. The paper looks good but like it presumed to find the desired results from the research outset. Beware anything done with simulations that provides 3 significant digits (172% increase!). I don't doubt the influence of climate but I do doubt the certainty of these authors. Going back to the GP, I still want to know how wet years, dry years, and winds are outside of reasonable expectations in SoCal. These are part of the (stationary baseline) the paper should include. From a quick pass on the paper, it's not clear to me that the paper captures hysteresis due to intermittent wet/dry periods. Or that they considered any additive non-stationarity, in (stationary baseline + climate drift), they wouldn't deem anthropogenic. Not denying here. Just enjoying throwing rocks at a paper adjacent to a past life. I have published on uncertainty quantification for computational fluid dynamics that employed explicit slow/fast timescale decompositions.
    - cjcenizal 2y ago
      I love your objective approach and, as an engineer, I appreciate its merits. But I’m afraid you might not like my answer because it’s based on lived experience. I live in the area affected by the Eaton Fire. I’ve been here for 10 years. We experienced severe droughts and wildfires in the first 8, and though they were bad fires and made the air feel like we were living in Bladerunner’s LA, it established a norm. In the winter we got used to seeing rains. 2 years ago at this time of year we had snowfall (!). Last year at this time we had hard rain. This year, same time, we have catastrophic wildfires that wipe out neighborhoods. I’ve never seen winds like the ones we saw. They were terrifying. Like being in a hurricane. Anyway, that’s how I know it’s unusual…
      - 2y ago
remarkEon 2y ago
The revealed preferences of political leaders is that they don't believe Climate Change is the "cause", either. If they did, they would've planned for this instability and increased funding for all of the preventative actions mentioned in this thread and the various links therein. Or do people still think that banning plastic bags and carbon taxes stop wild fires.

whimsicalism 2y ago

bad forest management is a much more proximate cause than climate change, absolutely - not sure why it has become verboten to say. climate change makes a difference at the margin but the sheer number of recent events has a lot more to do with how we manage our forests/urban upscaling.

freddie_mercury 2y ago
It's not verboten in a single place. I've seen it mentioned literally hundreds of times the last few days.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  sure it's not verboten in the RW media landscape, but in blue circles you're basically called a trumpista for saying that forest & underbrush management is a larger proximate cause [0][1][2] [0]: https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fast-moving-wildfires-rage-los-angeles-right-wing-media-misleadingly-blame-forest https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fast-moving-wildfires-... [1]: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/12/2296400/-Critics-blast-DEI-Dems-bad-forestry-eco-activists-for-L-A-fires-but-never-mention-climate-crisis https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/12/2296400/-Critics-... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/09/los-angeles-fires-politics/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/09/los-angel...
  - strken 2y ago
    I find both takes misleading. "Windy" doesn't begin to describe winds over 100km/h on a dry and warm(ish) day in an drought. You could probably bulldoze a two hundred metre barrier in front of a bushfire on a day like that and it would still spread from uncontrollable spot fires ahead of the front. I'm not sure any forestry practices could do much against it. Are strong winds directly caused by climate change? Sure, extreme weather events are more common, but it's impossible to say whether any given event would have happened anyway. Reversing climate change might make really bad days less frequent, but it's no more capable of eradicating them than good forestry.
  - 2y ago

areoform 2y ago

> Climate change isn’t the cause, even though attribution teams desperately try to make it that - it just makes things worse. But forests have dry fuel that will light up at some point and that’s regardless of climate change. There’s inadequate proactive planning for this. I think it is worth pushing back on this, because while yes, in the absolute sense, no single incident can be traced back to the broader pattern; the inconvenient truth remains. Our addition of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the long lever that can move the world. Between 1970 and 2020, 381±61 Zetta Joules (10^21 joules) of additional energy was absorbed into the system (i.e. the Earth). This estimate was prepared using satellite data, which is public source, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/ How much energy is this? It's roughly 80% of the estimated energy of the Chicxulub impactor. Albeit spread over a significantly longer period of time. The strongest explosion humanity has ever created is in the order of 10^17 joules, or a hundred Quadrillion Joules. We've managed to add 1.5 million times that number in this 50 years. We've been essentially adding one tsar bomba's worth of energy every fifteen to twenty minutes for the past five decades. Based on my reading so far, we don't actually know what all of this additional energy is doing to the system. One theory based on satellite data has been that 'wet-gets-wetter, dry-gets-drier' — and some satellite data and simulations bear this out. See, this intensity analysis of NASA/German GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbgZ9om0t8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbgZ9om0t8. Now others disagree, because it's a complicated system and we don't know what this energy is doing... And so the debate rages back and forth. But here's the inconvenient truth. While we may not know exactly what all of this additional energy is doing to the system, we do know that it isn't going to do nothing. It is the inescapable truth that we're in the middle of a statistically anomalous period of extreme weather events. Was each and every one of these directly caused due to global warming? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean that the additional energy we've added to the system didn't change the dynamics of the system in such a way that made this outcome more likely. Or, more simply, we've biased the dice and - as they keep getting rolled - we keep getting these "surprises." I am young enough that in my lifetime, the Earth will look dramatically different than the one I was born into. So yes, you're strictly right. But no, I think it's worth examining the statement further and pointing out that yes, this is just the sign of what's to come.

2y ago

andrewinardeer 2y ago

A number of bushfires in the 2009 Black Saturday event in Victoria, Australia were started by downed power lines due to wind. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28305127 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28305127 Class action, power company handed biggest payout ever at the time of $480 million. Killed 119 people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. As for water? The bushfires were just too big and engulfed entire townships.