Recipe for fire disaster LA: Heavy rains. Unprecedented heat. Strange spirits.

One fire appears to have been caused by a spark from old electrical wires, the other is suspected to have been started by an Uber driver who was fascinated by the flames.

Ultimately, the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed more than 16,000 homes, businesses and other structures and left 31 people dead. They were the second and third deadliest wildfires in California history — eclipsed only by the Camp Fire that devastated the city of Paradise in 2018, destroying more than 18,000 buildings and killing at least 85 people.

All three of those fires — and many more that have hit California in recent decades — have one key thing in common: Global warming, which many scientists say is contributing to making California’s always-dangerous fire season more intense than ever.

As climate change worsens, California is plagued by wildfires. And many of the state’s most destructive, deadliest and largest fires have occurred in the last half of the century.

Another study, published in 2023, said that summer forest fires in California have burned five times more land between 1996 and 2021 compared to the previous 25 years.

“Climate change is contributing to the increase we’ve seen in fire activity,” said John Abatzoglou, a professor of climate science at UC Merced, one of the study’s co-authors.

Climate change increases the risk of other human factors that often trigger large fires. It is not the only elements of the electrical infrastructure that are suspected of burning and aging in the firestorms of Jan. 7, but so is the way firefighters and officials made decisions before and during a fire, and the role of development in wildland areas that often burn and inadequate escape routes.

Record the dry heat of SoCal to a crisp

The presentation of Southern California’s most destructive wildfires in recorded history was the world’s hottest summer, and California’s hottest July, in the record books.

In fact, the summer has been hotter than ever – in California and around the world.

California and the West buckled in the middle of last July before the Eaton and Palisades fires. Palm Springs marked its hottest day on record, at 124 degrees; so is Las Vegas (120 degrees); Redding (119); Barstow (118); and Palmdale (115). Lancaster also reached 115, tying its all-time high temperature.

Globally, 2024 was also a year for the record books – the entire year was the hottest ever on Earth, worse than any other year in NOAA’s records dating back to 1850.

All that heat has alarming effects on California’s wildfire risk — namely, draining moisture from plants, according to a blog written by UCLA scientists on weather and climate leading to recent wildfires.

The summer and fall of 2024 were some of the hottest since at least 1895 along the southern California coast, the scientists wrote, and higher temperatures in the summer of 2024 “appear to have resulted in a significant decrease in summer fuel consumption.”

The rains of feast or famine

Another expected impact of climate change is an increase in the dramatic wet-to-wet weather surface and the dry-to-dry California whiplash. A separate study published in the journal Nature Reviews in January found that more episodes of “hydroclimate whiplash” are expected around the world due to human-caused global warming.

“Hydroclimate whiplash is already increasing due to global warming, and continued warming will bring about an even greater increase,” said the study’s lead author, climate scientist Daniel Swain, in January. “The whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grasses and brush in the months leading up to the fire season, and then by setting it to much higher levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”

A pattern of floods and droughts worsens vegetation conditions leading to January fires.

California went from its driest three-year period on record, from 2020 to 2022, to consecutive wet years. By mid-2024, according to the UCLA scientists’ blog, the region was one of the greenest it has been since 2000.

Then, much of Southern California had the driest start on record for the water year that began on Oct. 1, 2024, there was almost no rain in the months leading up to the January 2025 fire.

Before the January fire, the last significant rainfall in downtown Los Angeles was one-tenth of an inch on May 5. Between Oct. 1, 2024, the beginning of the water year, until Jan. 15, only 0.16 inches of rain fell, just 3% of the city’s 5.56 inches of rain received during that period.

Almost six decades had passed since the city had dried up like this. The only comparable drier period on record was Oct. 1, 1903, to Jan. 15, 1904, when a little rain accumulated in the middle of the city.

Places that recorded the driest first 3½ months of the water year on record included Los Angeles International Airport, UCLA, Van Nuys, Woodland Hills, San Diego, Lancaster and Camarillo.

“With the severe lack of rain across Southern California,” Neil Lareau, associate professor of atmospheric science at the University of Nevada, Reno, said, “not only was the dry fuel, but the moisture content of the fuel was very low, so it supported that rapid fire growth.”

Santa Ana winds never seen before

Another important factor that caused the destruction of the fires was the strong winds of Santa Ana. There is no evidence to blame the increase in Santa Ana winds on climate change.

But they make dangerous situations already scary. Santa Ana’s extreme winds quickly spread the fires where their ignition points were in the worst areas – high winds in densely populated areas.

“In this case, you had the trifecta,” said Michael Rohde, a former chief of the Orange County Fire Authority who is now an emergency management consultant.

The fires, he said earlier this year, were spread by “very strong winds – which were twice as strong as the average Santa Ana – and they came out of those mountains and into urban debris, and they have a burning resemblance to the fire in Dresden in World War II.”

Urban fires, which jump from house to house due to the explosion of millions of embers, are “much more intense than a typical wild city fire,” Rohde said. “And we have this great loss.”

The winds of Jan. 6 and 7 were no ordinary Santa Ana event. It was a surprise, producing gusts of up to 100 mph, “probably the worst, from the wind, that we’ll see,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Ryan Kittell. “We haven’t seen winds like that since the 2011 hurricane that devastated the Pasadena area.”

These storms were the result of mountain wave wind conditions, meaning they were oriented in such a way that they would quickly descend the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains, causing powerful, dangerous eruptions. The average Santa Ana wind event usually blows in the canyons, but is not strong enough for mountain climbing.

This latest storm brought gusts from the north to the northeast; in a typical Santa Ana wind event, they move from the east to the northeast, said meteorologist Rose Schoenfeld.

In other words, they come to places that don’t usually bear the brunt of Santa Ana’s power — like Altadena and Pacific Palisades.