Extreme weather fuelling LA's wildfires

No water in the fire hydrants, no money in FEMA [Federal Emergency Mgmt Agency]. This is what Joe Biden is leaving me. Thanks Joe! DONALD TRUMP, US President-elect

- Agencies

WASHINGTON/LOS ANGELES: A prolonged dry spell combined with strong winds has created the "perfect conditions" for Los Angeles wildfires to rage out of control, even though experts say it's too soon to pinpoint exactly how much climate crisis contributed.

At the same time, perennial debates over suburban sprawl and forest management are intensifying, spurred by political mudslinging from incoming President Donald Trump and his close ally Elon Musk.

"We see these fires spread when it is hot and dry and windy, and right now all of those conditions are in place in southern California," Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, told AFP.

"The clearest climate signal for those three conditions is with the temperature," she added. While it's not yet known what started the blazes, "human-caused climate crisis is intensifying the heat that drives wildfires, increasing temperatures in southern California up to two degrees Celsius since 1895," Patrick Gonzalez, a climate change scientist at the University of California, Berkeley told AFP.

'Widening' fire season

Although wildfire activity can vary greatly from year to year, short-term extreme weather conditions helped create the "perfect conditions" for the recent blazes, said wildfire scientist Maria Lucia Ferreira Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.

Last year's El Nino weather system brought heavy rains that fuelled excessive vegetation growth in the first half of 2024.

But the second half of the year was marked by drought across southern California, setting the stage for what scientists call "precipitation whiplash", another potential hallmark of climate crisis that turned the region into a tinderbox.