L.A. Burning: 2024 Wildfire/Climate in Review

In a most inauspicious opening to 2025 an oligarchical new government is set to take the reins of power in a matter of days. A pair of odd terrorist attacks by apparent disgruntled military assets are now being punctuated by massive wildfires in Southern California driven by 100-mph Santa Anna winds. Citizens scrambling to get out of the way with little or no warning are again front and center in the media. Five are confirmed dead, and as is typical for these situations, more will likely be found. Sunset Boulevard lies in ruins in Pacific Palisades where hydrants ran dry, millions are without power, and authorities say the worst is still to come. Some inhabitants are surrounded by large fires, and over a hundred thousand residents are under evacuation orders. There are at least 1,100 structures lost with tens of thousands more in harms way.

2025 also begins with a crisis in wildland firefighting, specifically pay and retention, and that specifically for beleaguered federal wildland firefighters. State, local and private wildland fire resources have all enjoyed some increased pay and compensation to well above Federal pay scales for the same work. Why is that a problem? Here’s a clue. Where is all the prevention and protection needing to be done? 28% of all land in the U.S. is federally owned. 60% is private, leaving only 22% for combined tribal, state and local government ownership. Federal landowners are responsible for the long-term sustainability and ecological health on a lion’s share of our public lands. Much of the needed work lies on the boundary between federal and private lands. It is federal land managers that develop the plans to protect the wildland urban interface. There is a drain on talent and personnel that leaves fire engines unstaffed and orders for hotshot crews unfilled.

These intersecting crises are largely climate-driven. The performance of America the hegemon on the stage of global climate negotiations has been poor. The Biden administration was not particularly good on climate, while some modest legislative accomplishments in the infrastructure bill were much over-hyped. Of course, Trump the denier, will be much, much worse. Noise about massive federal domestic spending cutbacks makes the likelihood of a pay fix seem remote, all the while the DoD with it’s trillion dollar annual budget hasn’t passed an audit in five years. Rumor has it that federal staffing from Southern California has been hampering the response, forcing wildland firefighters from Oregon and Washington to be mobilized.

2024 was fairly epic, as are most years here with CO2 levels continuing to rise. Here is a list month-by-month of news from the intersection of fire and climate. Thanks to Jeffrey St. Sinclair over at Counterpunch for giving me the seed around which this article was developed in his article, Hell and High Water: the Year in Climate Chaos.

January

+ January 2024 was the eighth consecutive month where monthly global temperatures hit a record high. It was also the planet’s second-wettest January on record, according to NOAA.

February

+ More than 110 people were killed in wildfires on the urban/rural interface near Valparaiso, Chile. Hundreds are still missing, making these the deadliest wildfires in South American history. Many of the fires burned in monocultural plantations.

+ It’s February and Alberta just declared an early opening to “fire season.” There are a total of 54 new fires and dozens remaining from last year that continue to burn.

+ A wildfire in central Nebraska spread to over 71,000 acres in a 24-hour period, causing Nebraska Governor, Jim Pillin, to declare a state disaster and forcing evacuations near North Platte.

March

+ The Smokehouse Creek Fire in West Texas began a week ago Monday, spread more than 80 miles in the space of a few hours and at some points was growing as much as 150 football fields every minute. By Thursday, it had become the second-largest burn in modern American history and is now larger than any California wildfire on record.

+ According to the National Interagency Fire Center, Minnesota & Wisconsin will see an above-normal wildfire risk starting as soon as March. Firefighters across the American Midwest battled early blazes, underscoring research that shows fires are not only growing larger in extent and more severe, but are also emerging in landscapes and seasons in which they were previously rare.

+ By March 1st, 2024, the fire season had already burned 1.5 million acres–more than 50% of all acres burned last year nationally.

+ With at least 150 so-called zombie fires from last year still burning under snow-covered ground, Canada is bracing for another “This year’s fire season may be worse than the record-breaking season of 2023, when 1000s of fires burned 48 million acres million acres. ‘There’s no historical analog to what we’re seeing right now,” said Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildfire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. “Most years they’re not a big deal. But now a lot of these fires have the potential that when the snow melts and it gets warm, dry and windy to actually grow again. So it is a serious issue.”

+ This week State Farm announced plans to not renew around 72,000 property and commercial apartment policies in California starting this summer, largely because of the increased risk of climate-driven wildfires. State Farm is California’s largest property insurer.

+ In the first two-and-a-half months of 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have burned across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, according to real-time satellite monitoring, a record number for this early in the year.

+ A study in Nature reports that fire suppression may be a more important factor in driving the intensity of wildfires than fuel accumulation.

April

+ The 144,000-acre Windy Deuce Fire stopped near the edge of Borger, Texas, where vegetation had been removed months earlier by a seven-mile prescribed burn. City officials say the burn was effective at protecting homes but faced opposition from some local landowners. Burning fine fuels can offer protection, as well as ecological benefit.

May

During the end of May and June the Pantanal region, the world’s largest tropical wetland area, saw unprecedented wildfire activity with catastrophic consequences for this fragile ecosystem. Up to 5 June, satellite data from Brazil’s Institute for Space Research (INPE) detected a staggering 980% year on year increase in the number of wildfire detections.

June

+ A new study finds tiny particles emitted by wildfire smoke may have contributed to at least 52,000 premature deaths in California over a decade. By 2050, cumulative excess deaths from exposure to wildfire smoke globally could exceed 700,000, a two-thirds increase over current numbers.

+ From a study on the environmental impacts of wildfire smoke on lake ecosystems published in Global Change Biology: “From 2019 to 2021, we found that 99.3% of North America was covered by smoke. An incredible 98.9% of lakes experienced at least 10 smoke-days a year, with 89.6% of lakes receiving 30 smoke-days, and some lakes experiencing up to four months of smoke.” We’re fucked, might be the phrase you’re looking for…

July

The Park Fire outside Chico grew by 5,000 acres an hour in the first 24 hours. It ignited when someone lit a car on fire and rolled it into a forested ravine, but it blew up because the forest is parched bone-dry by year after year of searing summer heat. When finally contained, the Park Fire stood as the fourth largest wildfire in California history at nearly 430,000 acres.

Here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley we tied a record for the most consecutive 100F-degree days, which, sandwiched between an even longer string of 90+ days, prompted a “flash drought,” pushing the wildfire danger from “low” to “high” in the span of a few days. Oregon has effectively dried out. There are currently at least 27 wildfires burning in Oregon across more than 256,500 acres of land.

August

A year ago, the catastrophic wildfires on Maui claimed more than a hundred lives and left 12,000 without housing. As the community rebuilds, access to recovery funds can be a lengthy, difficult process. The effect is the same as has been reported in other disaster areas – gentrification and a worsening of existing inequalities.

A new report from CoreLogic found that 2.6 million homes across 14 western states are at risk from wildfires, led by California with more than 1,258,748 homes in danger, followed by Colorado with 321,294) and Texas with 244,617.

September

+ More than 20% of the Amazonian rainforest is already gone and much of what remains–dried out by a mega-drought and seared by extreme heat–is going up in flames…

+ The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issued an air quality advisory Wednesday, Sept. 11, for Deschutes, Grant, and Wheeler Counties due to smoke from fires in Oregon. And where there’s smoke…

October

+ Fires are burning down towns and resorts in California, Texas is running out of water, and a hurricane is bearing down on Louisiana once again. Yet, neither candidate advanced a position on climate change last night that went much beyond drill, drill, drill and frack, frack, frack…

+ Since 2001, forest fires have shifted north and grown more intense. According to a new study in Science, global CO2 emissions from forest fires have increased by 60% in the last two decades.

+ By the numbers, the 2024 Canadian wildfire season is on track to be the second-worst wildfire season in terms of area burned since 1995, with more than 5.3 million hectares burned so far. That trails far behind last year, which shattered previous records with more than 15 million hectares burned.

November

+ Climate Change Has Dangerously Supercharged Fires, Hurricanes, Floods and Heat Waves. Why Didn’t It Come Up More in the Presidential Campaign? Donald Trump, set to be inaugurated for another four-year term, calls climate change a “scam” and a “hoax.”

December

+ The nine largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2017, including three of the five deadliest.

+ Throughout 2024 wildfires were particularly intense and destructive in the Pantanal wetlands, the Amazon, Canada, and the western US due to severe drought conditions. The Pantanal experienced a 980% increase in wildfire activity compared to the previous year.

+ In 2024, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached a record high of 41.2 billion tons, exacerbating climate change and contributing to more extreme weather events, including wildfires.