To be a first responder at this stage in the climate crisis is to face an escalation of violence. For many wildland firefighters, the unprecedented scenes from the last couple of weeks in Los Angeles — dozens dead, tens of thousands without homes, hundreds of thousands more displaced — will appear part of a familiar pattern.
The national conversation, predictably, has followed a pattern as well: Republicans try to dismiss or play down the role of fossil-fuel-driven climate change, and everyone else has to decide whether to ignore them or argue.
How we frame this pattern of violence matters because it directs the focus of our solutions and the fight for accountability. Scientists will spend the next months and years quantifying the exact degree to which this particular disaster can be attributed to climate change. This research is important, but don’t let it distract from the reality facing our state: 18 of the 20 largest wildfires in California’s history have burned since 2000. This wasn’t because of forest management or zoning policy, which have seen some improvements. What’s causing disastrous fires is our changing climate.
Since 1988, when scientists told Congress that fossil fuels would drive catastrophic changes in our climate, humanity has burned more carbon than was emitted over the entire span of human civilization preceding that year, spanning 10,000 years. During those same decades, when we should have been phasing out fossil fuels, the industry leveraged its relationship with the Republican Party to continue raking in record profits — approximately $3.2 billion per day. The fossil fuel industry, once again wielding its power now that President Trump has retaken office, pushed us into this new age of combustion.
As a firefighter, I first encountered this climate violence in 2020, when a record heatwave caused the Dolan fire in Big Sur to double in size overnight. The fire overtook 15 of my colleagues, injuring several. The tragedy barely made the news because the rest of the state was also burning like never before — 4 million acres up in smoke.
“This is what climate chaos looks like,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Sammy Roth this month. Warmer air means drier, more flammable vegetation. More frequent heat waves and droughts add to the combustible potential. Climate change increases the probability extreme events will layer on top of each other, creating the sorts of unprecedented conditions that caused Los Angeles to burn. These conditions doubled in California between 1980 and 2020.
For those of us who live in proximity to wildfires, this won’t come as a surprise. In 2021, just months after my colleagues got burned in the Dolan fire, another record heat wave settled on the West Coast. It caused explosive fires — my boss, a veteran of over 20 years, said possibly the most extreme he had ever seen. It was still spring. I collapsed from heat exhaustion as we fought to defend a town.
I was luckier than many. Hundreds died. As my body collapsed, the heat was causing utility lines to melt and roads to warp along the West Coast. In cities, medical personnel ran low on cooling supplies, so they resorted to filling body bags meant for cadavers with ice, then zipping unconscious victims of heatstroke inside. When people collapsed on sidewalks, they suffered third-degree burns. In hospital records, the thermometers designed to read the body temperatures of patients mostly came out at 107 degrees, which was mysterious until doctors realized that the instruments were not designed to go any higher. Atmospheric scientists faced a similar problem: Their instruments weren’t calibrated to monitor the temperatures in which we were firefighting.
And yet, despite the increasing regularity of these disasters, the same stale arguments from prominent Republicans continue to blame anything but climate change. The critiques of forest management from former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and from his successor representing Bakersfield, Vince Fong, might seem like tame attempts at misdirection compared with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bizarre claims about Jewish space lasers or Elon Musk’s scapegoating of diversity initiatives. But all these arguments ultimately serve the same purpose: to deflect attention from fossil fuels and delay science-backed climate action by distorting the conversation about energy policy and climate disasters.
The right-wing blame game forces us into a false debate: whether disasters like wildfires are caused by climate change or some other factor. This leads people to feel they must select climate change from a list of culprits.
In 2021, as my crew worked to defend giant sequoias from the most destructive wildfire the trees had encountered in millennia, a fellow firefighter said to me: “Sure, climate change is real, but you can’t blame it all on that. There’s other s— happening too.”
By letting the right wing control the narrative in this way, we fuel a fundamental misunderstanding of how climate change works. It’s not a single factor to weigh against others. It’s an intensifier — a force that amplifies and worsens existing conditions. Climate change increases the probability that extreme conditions will compound and become unprecedented. Probabilities may seem abstract, but think of it like Russian roulette: Our lives are at stake, and the fossil fuel industry keeps adding bullets to the cylinder.
This isn’t only true with wildfires. Climate change now operates in the background of most disasters: famines and floods, human displacement, the spread of infectious diseases, armed conflicts. When we talk about climate change as just one variable, we empower right-wing narratives that blame disasters on everything but fossil fuel policies, allowing policymakers to sidestep the climate action we need.
Climate change is embedded in every variable. The real question isn’t whether wildfires are caused by climate change, poor forestry or reckless development; it’s how climate change interacts with other factors. And no disaster mitigation technique will succeed if we keep burning fossil fuels at our current rate.
By understanding the ubiquitous role of climate change, we can design solutions that tackle it and the local conditions that amplify its impacts. In California, for instance, this means transitioning off fossil fuels, encouraging more prescribed burns and hardening homes against fire. Just as disasters arise from the interplay of these factors, solutions must address them together.
You don’t have to engage in a debate about how much of a role climate change played in recent fires. Change the subject: How much environmental, economic and humanitarian violence are we willing to endure? Because, in the words of Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who fled Los Angeles: “How bad things get depends on how long we let the fossil fuel industry call the shots.”
Jordan Thomas, author of the forthcoming “When It All Burns,” is a former wildland firefighter and a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, where he researches the cultural forces that shape wildfire.
