Warming climate created ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic fires, NASA researcher says

Geoff Bennett:

Prolonged drought and those powerful Santa Ana winds set up extreme conditions that have fueled those devastating Los Angeles area wildfires, conditions compounded by climate change.

And, today, researchers from NOAA and NASA underlined that point, releasing analysis showing that 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history dating back almost 200 years. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred in the past decade, according to those agencies.

To break down the report and its implications were joined by Gavin Schmidt. He's the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA.

Thanks for being with us.

Gavin Schmidt, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies: Thank you very much.

Geoff Bennett:

Let's talk first about the wildfires, because wildfires are uncommon in the winter months. So help us understand the conditions, the factors that came together that contributed to these devastating wildfires out in Los Angeles.

Gavin Schmidt:

So fires need a number of ingredients. So you need to have fuel that's going to burn. You need to have what's called fire weather. That's the dry air and the strong winds that are most conducive to allowing wildfires to spread.

And, of course, you need an ignition source. And the climate aspect of this is very much in the both in the fuel load and in the fire weather aspect. So, in Southern California, we used to think of the late fall as being fire season. Well, now fire season stretches out all year because the temperatures and the evaporative draw, the drying out of the land surface, has been increasing as temperatures have increased.

And so the other part of that is the fuel load. One of the things that we have been seeing in California is this kind of whiplash between extreme wet events, like multiple atmospheric rivers at the beginning of last year, and then extreme dry events. So it hasn't really rained in the Los Angeles area for months now.

And that has led to both a spur of growth when there was water, and then all of that growth has dried out providing like a — unfortunately, a perfect storm for fires this season. And now in the wintertime, when you get these strong Santa Ana winds coming off the cold mountains into the warm basin, those have provided that extra component of fire weather, and we're seeing the results.

Geoff Bennett:

If our baseline is changing in these large-scale destructive events are becoming more common, what more can we do to mitigate it?

Gavin Schmidt:

Well, I mean, we can mitigate things on the long term by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases that we're putting into the atmosphere.

Until we do that, temperatures are going to keep rising and we're going to keep having these announcements about record warm years. And the impacts of that global mean temperature change on intense rainfall, on wildfires, on sea level rise on heat waves are going to continue to get worse.

There are local adaptations that we can that we can do to prevent the worst things. We can build better, in the same way that we build better for earthquakes. We can build better for fire-prone environments. We can try and manage things.

But a lot of this is unfortunately kind of beyond our control.

Geoff Bennett:

Well, as we mentioned, NASA and NOAA released a study today showing that 2024 was the hottest year on record. What story does the data tell and what are the implications?

Gavin Schmidt:

Well, the biggest story is the long-term trends, right?

We have warmed roughly 1.5 degrees Centigrade — that's about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit — since the late 19th century, since the mid 19th century. That is about halfway to the Pliocene. And the Pliocene was a period about three million years ago when it was about three degrees warmer, like five degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and there was no ice in Greenland, and the Arctic forests went all the way up to the Arctic Ocean.

And sea level was something like 80 feet higher than today. And we have gone up about half that distance in just 150 years. So what our data shows — and it's not just our data, it's everybody's data — is that we are having an impact on the climate. This is not a minor perturbation. This is a very big deal indeed.

And that ongoing trend that we can see so clearly in the data that kind of really started in the 1960s and has been relentless and perhaps even increasing in the last few years is abundantly clear.

Geoff Bennett:

Quite a warning.

Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, thanks for being with us.

Gavin Schmidt:

Thank you very much.