Global warming caused mainly by burning of fossil fuels made the hot, dry, and windy conditions that drove the recent deadly fires around Los Angeles about 35 times more likely to occur, an international team of scientists concluded in a rapid attribution analysis released Tuesday.
Today’s climate, heated 2.3° Fahrenheit (1.3° Celsius) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, based on a 10-year running average, also increased the overlap between flammable drought conditions and the strong Santa Ana winds that propelled the flames from vegetated open space into neighborhoods, killing at least 28 people and destroying or damaging more than 16,000 structures.
“Climate change is continuing to destroy lives and livelihoods in the US,” said Friederike Otto, senior climate science lecturer at Imperial College London and co-lead of World Weather Attribution, the research group that analyzed the link between global warming and the fires. Last October, a WWA analysis found global warming fingerprints on all 10 of the world’s deadliest weather disasters since 2004.
