The Guardian Climate Change

Mike Johnson criticizes California state and local officials; Gavin Newsom says ‘hundreds of firefighting assets are currently prepositioned across Southern California’

• Tell us about the financial consequences you are facing due to the California fires

Weather forecasters are predicting that the dry season in Los Angeles is likely to get worse in the coming weeks and that the drought which intensified last week across southern California will continue to worsen into March.

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus has written for the Guardian and says the rain forecast for the next three weeks in Los Angeles means the city’s record-dry start to its rainy season will keep getting worse.

This year’s rainy season is running at just 2% of normal for Los Angeles, which has only seen 0.16in of rain so far.

Weather models increasingly indicate that southern California will receive no rain at all during the rest of January, and potentially no rain during the first week or two of February as well.

The news from California is clear, but we don’t want to see it. It’s too confounding, big, complex. But we can sense the danger

When I send anxious texts to friends in Los Angeles – friends who have been evacuated or who are waiting to leave , friends escaping a fire zone, wondering if their life’s work has been destroyed, worrying about the smoke’s effect on an asthmatic child – I always begin with the same three words:are you OK?

But a continent away, watching photos and videos of a city I love being incinerated, overcome by waves of terror, grief and mourning, I have other questions.

Greens senator sees climate crisis and environment as the ‘elephant in the room’ for 2025 election

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

The Greens are demanding Labor put a moratorium on the destruction of koala habitat and overcome political opponents and mining interests to implement its full suite of promised environment protection laws, in an early attempt to position nature as a federal election issue.

“What we need is the government, the Labor party, to be tougher and to have some guts to stand up and stare them down,” says the party’s environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

Growers blame weather challenges in UK and Europe, which Met Office says will become more frequent with climate breakdown

Broccoli, cauliflower and other brassicas may be in short supply this spring as the mild autumn and winter has caused the crops to come up early, growers have said.

Any shortages will prolong the so-called “hungry gap”, which runs from April to early June, when very few crops grown in the UK are ready to eat.

Global events can feel bigger and more intractable than ever, but there’s still hope

More than 1,800 structures destroyed as Eaton and Palisades fires still less than 30% contained

• Wildfires live updates
• Key takeaways

The death toll from the Eaton and Palisades fires that have consumed large swathes of Los Angeles county – and are still less than 30% contained – has risen to 24, according to medical examiners.

The county of Los Angeles medical examiner published a list of fatalities without giving details of any identities. Eight of the dead were found in the Palisades fire zone, and 16 in the Eaton fire zone, the document said.

My generation feels trapped in a political system not built for us. Why wouldn’t we be disillusioned?

I’m scrolling on TikTok after work when I get a text that would have sent 12-year-old Anjali into a spiral, a frenzy of extreme climate anxiety. The text is from a friend letting me know that it’s official – 2024 is the hottest year on record. Not just that, it’s the first year to exceed 1.5C of warming over preindustrial levels.

The news comes as my entire feed is flooded with images of an inferno of flames ripping through neighbourhoods in LA, in winter.

Getty team says no current plans to move prominent pieces from center deemed ‘marvel of anti-fire engineering’

It houses some of the richest treasures of the art world, such as Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, a popular Rembrandt and a priceless collection of paintings, portraits and other works spanning more than seven centuries.

To protect them, the Getty Center in Los Angeles was built in 1997 as “a marvel of anti-fire engineering”, complete with fire-resistant stone and concrete, protected steel, and set in well-irrigated landscaping.

The president-elect is obsessed with drilling for fossil fuels, not to mention taking control of Canada and Greenland and renaming the Gulf of Mexico

• You can buy a copy of this cartoon

"This is what's left of the home that I grew up in for 31 years," Pacific Palisades resident Greg Benton said as he remembered his recent Christmas celebration with his family in his house. Thousands of Angelenos are returning to their homes to assess the damaged left by five fires which raged through multiple areas of the city. More than 144,000 people are under evacuation orders, local authorities have said

• California fires live

• ‘There’s literally nothing’: surrounded by destruction, Los Angeles begins to process scale of loss

• Community groups provide relief as LA staggers from wildfire emergency

Elon Musk, one of the brightest minds of his generation, is saying it, so it must be true

Women, eh? They’re simply not to be trusted. Eve ate that apple; Pandora opened that horrible little box; and now women are to blame for the devastating wildfires in California. I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but it’s what Elon Musk, one of the brightest minds of his generation – and one of the most powerful people on Earth – is saying, so it must be true.

John Vaillant, the author of Fire Weather, explains why fires such as those in Los Angeles are different from those before

When writing about the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and how they affect the behavior and imaginations of southern Californians, Joan Didion once said: “The winds show us how close to the edge we are.”

I’ve lived here my entire life. I evacuated my family’s hillside home as a teenager. I’ve experienced the surrealism of watching ash rain down from the sky more times than I can count. But there is something different, supercharged, about the hurricane-force winds that fueled this week’s catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles.

We fell in love with the power and speed that fossil fuels brought us. But the price being paid in California, and around the world, has become too high

Zero per cent contained. In layperson’s terms, that means “out of control and burning at will”. It’s a common designation for a wildfire – in the wild. But when a fire like this enters an urban area such as Los Angeles County, the most highly populated metropolitan area in the US, it becomes an exploding bomb, and this one has been detonating since last Tuesday.

By now, the energy release from this wind-driven, drought-fuelled firestorm turned urban conflagration is into the megatons, and the nuclear-scale destruction is there for all to see: block after block and neighbourhood after neighbourhood levelled – roughly 12,000 structures destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, 55 sq miles of city and mountain burnt, nearly 200,000 residents evacuated – so far. There is more to come.

Every barrel of oil, every cubic meter of gas, and every ton of coal burned brings us closer to environmental catastrophe

Apocalyptic flames and smoke are raging through southern California in the worst fire in Los Angeles county’s history. At least seven people have died. Thousands of structures have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes. The private forecaster AccuWeather estimates initial damage and economic loss at more than $50bn and has the potential to be the costliest wildfire disaster in American history. The impacts of the disruption and loss faced by community members is incalculable.

While some media outlets are discussing the link between the Los Angeles fires and the climate crisis, the president-elect Donald Trump and rightwing media are using this devastating event to foster misinformation including denying the role of climate crisis.

California wildfires, Donald Trump’s sentencing, hunger in Khan Younis and freezing temperatures in London: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Noaa says last year was the warmest since records began in 1850 and Nasa concurs: ‘The long-term trends are very clear’

It was the hottest year ever recorded for the world’s lands and oceans in 2024, US government scientists have confirmed, providing yet another measure of how the climate crisis is pushing humanity into temperatures we have previously never experienced.

Last year was the hottest in global temperature records stretching back to 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa announced, with the worldwide average 1.46C (2.6F) warmer than the era prior to humans burning huge volumes of planet-heating fossil fuels.

Events in California reveal how political obstruction is deepening a climate crisis that needs urgent action to prevent it becoming an irreversible disaster

The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have killed at least 10 people, displaced 180,000 and scorched about 40 square miles – an inferno driven by fierce winds and severe drought in what should be California’s wet season. It is a sobering reminder that the climate crisis is driving wildfires to become more frequent, intense and destructive – leaving ruined lives, homes and livelihoods in their wake. The US president Joe Biden responded by mobilising federal aid. By contrast the president-elect, Donald Trump, a convicted felon who was criminally sentenced on Friday, used the disaster to spread disinformation and stoke political division.

The climate crisis knows no national borders. Deadly floods in Spain, Hawaii’s fires and east Africa’s devastating drought show nowhere is safe from its effects. Countries must work toward the global common interest and beyond their narrow national interests. The scale of the climate emergency is such that there is a case to view all crises through a green lens. Instead Mr Trump’s denialism works to foment distrust about the science. He’s not just aiming to delay the onset of truth. He wants to demolish it. It’s a familiar playbook: the fossil fuel industry knows the reality of the climate emergency but chooses profit over responsibility, effectively deceiving the public while the planet burns.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Strong winds and low humidity continue as five fires rage across Los Angeles area, with death toll expected to rise

• California wildfires – live
• Before and after satellite images of California fires show devastation

Weather forecasters in Los Angeles expect fast, dry winds to return towards the end of the weekend, threatening to fuel wildfires that have already destroyed 10,000 structures and killed 10 people.

Urgent “red flag” alerts – meaning critical fire weather conditions – announced by the US National Weather Service (NWS) said moderate to strong wind and low humidity would continue on Friday morning, as five fires raged across the metropolis.

Up to 9in of snow expected in Arkansas and Tennessee as climate crisis leads to more frequent extreme weather cases

More than 80 million people across southern US states were on alert on Friday as a powerful winter storm that dumped heavy snow and glazed roads with ice across much of Texas and Oklahoma lumbered eastward.

Some governors have declared a state of emergency as the weather forced school closures across the region and unleashed havoc for traffic.