The California wildfires are not ‘natural disasters’

Stuti Mishra, The Independent

California is burning — again. This time, in the middle of January, scorching homes in one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Flames are threatening Hollywood landmarks, devouring multimillion-dollar mansions and forcing more than 130,000 residents to flee. Thick smoke has turned the city’s iconic skyline into a dystopian haze. By now, at least 10 people had been killed, at least 2,000 buildings scorched, and more than 330,000 left without power. Everyone you speak to is saying the same thing: wildfires are a part of California’s identity, but this is the worst they’ve seen.

But the fires ripping through Los Angeles are not just another “natural disaster”. This is the future that climate scientists have been warning about for decades, brought to the doorsteps of the some of the world’s most influential people. So why has it taken us so long to care? Southern California’s shift from months of record rain to extreme drought — an example of “weather whiplash” — has created the perfect conditions for the catastrophic wildfires now ravaging Los Angeles. Add powerful Santa Ana winds and you get wildfires moving with unprecedented speed and scale. The swing between heavy rains and drought isn’t an isolated event. Scientists have consistently warned that trapped heat in the atmosphere is intensifying disasters everywhere. The climate crisis isn’t just making disasters more frequent; it’s making them more unpredictable, more intense, and harder to prepare for globally.

In Los Angeles, fire crews faced four times the normal water demand within hours of the blaze starting, draining million-gallon tanks meant to fight fires. The infrastructure simply wasn’t built for this new reality. These flames are not “natural disasters.” They are man-made catastrophes; fuelled by policies that have allowed fossil fuel use to go unchecked and disinformation to cloud public understanding, which is unfortunately set to get worse. Even as wildfires rage, the machinery of denial continues to thrive. A quick scroll through Elon Musk-owned X shows blame being diverted to “diversity hirings”, while the voices of climate scientists are ignored. On sections of the right-wing media, the Los Angeles Fire Department’s first openly lesbian chief has been the target of ugly attacks.

While many actors like Mark Hamill and Steve Guttenberg kept public informed of evacuations and even lent a hand, conservative actor James Woods — whose Pacific Palisades home is threatened — denied climate change’s role entirely, instead pointing fingers at diversity. Meanwhile, Donald Trump claimed that California’s water regulations were to blame for depleted fire hydrants. Local officials, however, pointed to outdated infrastructure and unprecedented demand as the real culprits. Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer and CEO of the Los Angeles department of water and power, told reporters they saw “four times the normal demand” for 15 hours straight, which lowered the water pressure.

This misinformation isn’t just stemming from ignorance, it is part of a familiar playbook of climate denial comes into action after any disaster that strikes the US. Denial today isn’t just about rejecting climate science outright; it’s about muddying the waters, distracting with cultural blame games and sowing confusion. And if you think this is just California’s problem; think again. The same forces fueling these wildfires — rising temperatures, extreme weather and failing infrastructure — are changing life everywhere.

In 2024, extreme weather cost Americans over $500bn in damages, from back-to-back hurricanes to deadly heatwaves. Crops are failing in the Great Plains. Cities in the Midwest are buckling under relentless heatwaves. Entire towns are being wiped off the map by floods, fires and storms. And the human toll is immeasurable: families uprooted, livelihoods destroyed, and communities torn apart. But any attempt to see these events as interconnected symptoms of a planet pushed to its limits is shut down with criticism.

Unfortunately, the noise of misinformation is only set to get worse with Mr Trump’s return to the Oval Office. During his previous term, he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, gutted environmental protections, and doubled down on oil and gas production. Now, his administration is poised to unleash even more fossil fuel drilling, accelerating the climate crisis. This is exactly what scientists have been warning against: the longer we delay action, the worse the consequences become. Denial isn’t just ignorance; it’s an active barrier to understanding a global problem.

2024 has been confirmed as the hottest year on record, beating 2023. The fires are just the latest in the series of several recordbreaking disasters the world has seen in the last couple of years. The flames scorching LA don’t care about politics; who or what we are blaming – and neither should we. The choice is clear: we can confront the multifaceted crisis and fight for a livable future at every level, or we can let the world burn.