Good morning. Los Angeles shows that the rules of wildfire season no longer apply – more on that below, along with the big charts to watch in 2025 and another Liberal leadership race. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Steven MacKinnon is the latest cabinet minister to decline a run for Liberal leadership
- Energy export restrictions are ‘on the table’ to respond to U.S. tariff threats, Mélanie Joly says
- Meet the Canadian-led team building a case against al-Assad over his regime’s war crimes
Burned homes near L.A.'s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood.JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images
Climate
‘It’s fire year’
If we’re guided by historical trends, then fire season in Southern California is supposed to end in October. The state should be midway through its rainy season by now. But historical trends are largely useless in a warming world that just crossed the 1.5 C threshold. There’s been no meaningful amount of rain in Los Angeles since May, and last summer was, like the summer before it, the hottest on record. The land is now the second-driest it’s been since record-keeping started more than a century ago.
Those bone-dry conditions, coupled with 160-kilometre-per-hour Santa Ana winds, fuelled the wildfires that have ravaged L.A. for the past week. Mayor Karen Bass said the extensive drought and powerful winds created a “perfect storm,” but climate scientists have another phrase for this phenomena: They’re called “compound climate events,” when weather disasters stack on top of each other and produce much more damage than they would on their own. The 2021 wildfire that destroyed 95 per cent of Lytton, B.C., was a compound climate event. So were the back-to-back extreme hurricanes, Milton and Helene, that hit the U.S. this fall.
“There is no fire season,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said last week. “It’s fire year.” To figure out what that means – for our infrastructure, insurance, and already exhausted emergency responders – I spoke with Canadian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of public policy at Texas Tech University and the global chief scientist of Nature United.
Extreme heat, hurricanes, and wildfires used to follow seasonal rules – not any more. Should we start expecting climate disasters to happen anywhere, any time?
The seasons for all these extreme events are expanding. The heat wave season is getting longer. The tornado and severe storm season is now year-round. Ocean temperatures are getting warm enough for a hurricane earlier in the year and staying warm enough for longer. Wildfire season has been extended by months. Last year, out west in Canada, we saw fires restarting as early as February, whereas normally you wouldn’t see them until months later.
What are the implications for resources and emergency responders who are already stretched to the limit?
Just before the pandemic I was in Alaska, which used to have a very well-defined fire season. Firefighters from lower down in North America would come up, help out, and go home. But now, with fire seasons expanding all across North America, we can no longer shuttle resources from here to there and back again, because everyone needs them at the same time. There increasingly isn’t enough money to go around, either. The amount it takes to recover from a disaster is six to 12 times greater than the amount to prevent or reduce the vulnerability in the first place.
As a climate scientist, I spend most of my time studying that vulnerability. How prepared are we? In the case of wildfires: Have we ensured there isn’t vegetation around structures? Are we using building materials that can withstand fire? In the case of hurricanes: Are we building not only to withstand winds, but creating places in our cities for the water to go, so it doesn’t flood our homes? For heat: Are we climate-proofing our infrastructure, from rail lines that warp to public buildings and schools that need cooling? What about our social structures? How are we caring for senior citizens, people with medical issues, people in low-income neighbourhoods already more prone to extreme heat and flooding? Because climate change affects us all, but it doesn’t affect us equally.
Firefighters in Jasper, Alta., last summer. The wildfires were another compound extreme event.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
It also affects the affordability – and even availability – of home insurance. State Farm has dropped customers in high-risk areas, including 69 per cent of policies last year in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, which has seen some of the worst wildfire destruction.
I was talking with a colleague who lives in Miami, one of the cities most vulnerable to sea-level rise. Her home insurance doubled in the last year alone. I live in Texas, and last year, our insurer said they wouldn’t cover us any more due to climate risks. Our new insurance company increased our fees by 50 per cent. In some parts of Texas, Louisiana, and California, you can’t get home insurance. You definitely can’t get flood or fire insurance. Increasingly, people can’t even get car insurance. That’s not how you adapt to climate change – it makes us more vulnerable, rather than less, as a society.
It’s fair to say that climate change is increasing these compound climate events, right?
Yes. For a long time, we scientists looked at these events in isolation, but during the first Trump administration, I co-authored one of the first formal assessments of how climate change increases the risk of compound events. And it shows that there’s a multiplying effect. So it’s not just linear. One thing I know for sure is, even as scientists, we consistently underestimate how climate change affects every aspect of our society, from our health to our food to our water to our future.
Is there anything that can help with that underestimation?
Extreme event attribution is one of the most important emerging areas of climate science. Increasingly, we are able to put a number on how much worse climate change made one specific event. We can say climate change made the 2021 heat wave and wildfires at least 150 times more likely. We can say 50 per cent more rain fell during Hurricane Milton because of a warmer ocean and more water vapour in the atmosphere. We can even put a number on how many more dollars of damage were caused by climate change supersizing an event – 75 per cent of the direct economic damages for 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, for example.
We can make maps of which homes would not have been flooded or burned down if it weren’t for climate change. Scientists have estimated that, since 1986, 37 per cent of the area scorched by wildfires across western North America – including Canada – was caused by the carbon emissions of 88 companies.
I’m really curious to see what that means legally, because we can now tie specific events to the emissions from specific countries and companies. I have no doubt there are lawyers studying that right now, and that we’ll see these types of lawsuits emerge in the next five years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Chart
We’re (regrettably) number one
As high debt loads collide with elevated interest rates, Canada’s share of disposable income put toward debt payments has risen well beyond other G7 countries – limiting household spending and compounding Canada’s vulnerability to external shocks (like Donald Trump). Find more of The Globe’s big charts to watch in 2025 here.
The Week
What we’re following
Today: The leadership race for the Quebec Liberal Party kicks off, though you may have been understandably distracted by that other Liberal leadership race.
Today: Weeks after the Canada Industrial Relations Board ordered postal workers back on the job, it will hear a challenge from their union.
Tomorrow: The impeachment trial of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol starts, though it’s unclear if he’ll appear in court.
Wednesday: The U.S. Senate confirmation hearing for Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney-general, begins.
Sunday: The Oscar nominations are announced, after the voting deadline was extended by two days due to the L.A. wildfires.