A Weather Event With Fire Embedded

As the embers go cold, the smoke clears and the ashes are carted off in Los Angeles a stark reality emerges: not just winds but climate change played a significant role in this deadly and destructive event.

A new World Weather Attribution study found that human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of extreme fire conditions by 35 percent and intensified their severity.

In this recentWhoWhatWhy podcast, Daniel Swain, a leading climate scientist at UCLA and the University of California’s Agricultural and Natural Resources division, frames the January disaster not simply as a fire event, but as “an extreme weather event with fire embedded in it.” This distinction, he explains, is crucial for understanding how climate change is reshaping fire risks.