My eyes, for the past eleven days, from afar, have been peeled on the city of Los Angeles. I am not a resident but have tasked myself with looking at the planet from above for Daily Overview for the last decade. I’ve always been focused on how humanity shapes the planet, but more and more, it feels like we’re seeing monumental responses from the environment. When a volatile climate wreaks havoc on our fragile civilization, I’ve always found aerial imagery to be the best medium to understand an event’s widespread impact. With everything I’ve observed from this perspective over the last decade, I’ve never seen anything on the scale of the fires in Los Angeles.

I’m going to try to keep my thoughts here big picture and stay out of the politics of an event that, from the first spark, had both sides of the American political system throwing punches. To me, regardless of where you stand, this feels like the most substantial climate-related event of the 21st century. Despite the heroic efforts of firefighters and first responders, the death toll currently stands at 25. The fires are still only partially contained after more than a week, and I’ve seen unfathomable figures, with economic losses estimated to be between $250 billion and $275 billion. To put that figure into perspective, if every single American (332 million people) was taxed to cover the damage, each person would owe around $750. This staggering total is roughly the combined costs from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy combined, which brought unprecedented damage to New Orleans ($186 billion) and New York City ($70 billion).

Beyond the economic loss, the sheer devastation from wildfires of entire neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, home to more than 23,000, or Altadena, home to more than 42,000, is not something we have really seen before in a major US city. There is some powerful symbolism in these being the two hardest-hit communities— one on the coast known for its celebrities and wealth, the other a historically working-class enclave on the other side of the city. Perhaps there is no more glaring reminder that the climate crisis can affect anyone and, when it does, those who are most in need will have a significantly greater challenge finding a new place to live and getting back on their feet. I have one friend who has a separate unit of their house for rent in the town of Ojai, located about an hour away from Los Angeles. They have received more than 1,000 applications from LA fire refugees in the past week. Not everyone will have the luxury of an easy move, and even those who do will carry the unbelievably heavy burden knowing their irreplaceable items—perhaps none more precious than family photos—have turned to ash.

My work with Daily Overview over the past decade and my subsequent immersion in climate change research did, in some way, help me process what took place this past week. One book in particular, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, has a chapter about wildfires that has shaped how I think about these blazes in our modern world. In it, he stressed that today’s fires are a different beast:

"The fires we are seeing today are not like those of the past—not just bigger or more frequent, but of a different kind entirely, raging with a heat and intensity that often makes them impossible to contain."

Taking the longer view, he made it clear that each and every fire—whether or not they burn a forest or a home—adds fuel to the already perilous crisis we’re in:

"Each year, the fires burn bigger and hotter, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere, which in turn makes future fires even more intense, feeding the cycle of devastation."

Lastly, he shared some staggering statistics about the behavior of these new fires, that make the hair on your arm stand up when you begin to imagine what it is like to find yourself in or near one of these events. When describing the Camp Fire of 2018, which destroyed Paradise, California, and killed 85 people, he notes:

"The fire moved at a speed of eighty football fields a minute."

The flames ripping through Paradise, CA, were moving at roughly 273 miles per hour. That’s faster than most commercial airplanes at takeoff — truly inescapable. I haven’t seen speed estimates for the Palisades or Eaton fires yet, but I have seen footage from doorbell cameras on homes that make it clear how shockingly fast these fires went from spark to serious problem.

Perhaps the images I created of the fast-moving Camp Fire in 2018 or the destruction seen across a section of Santa Rosa, CA only a year before could have prepared me for what I’d see this past week in Los Angeles. Or maybe Overview's chronicling of the destruction of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian Island of Maui, only sixteen months ago might do it. But there are just so many more houses gone this time. Seeing any home turned to rubble is gut-wrenching, and yet the erasure of homes from these images feels less and less like an anomaly and instead part of a scary, regular trend. It’s easy to forget this already, but two years ago, California had another record-setting fire season when, at one moment in time, there were 625 fires burning across the state. Or have we already forgotten about the Australian bushfires of 2019, when the country had an unprecedented 46 million acres burn? Europe, particularly in countries on the Mediterranean Sea, and Turkey had more land burn in 2022 than in any other year on record. Canadian forests lost 37 million acres in 2023. The Amazon rainforest lost 37 million more this past year. I could go on and on. With all this acreage adding up, Wallace-Wells reminds us that a fire anywhere is cause for future fires, everywhere. His book was released in early 2020, and it already feels painfully prophetic.

In my most recent book Overview Timelapse, which was released a few months after The Uninhabitable Earth in 2020, I wrote:

"While extreme weather anomalies have always occurred to some extent, it is becoming frighteningly clear that our activity has influenced their intensity and frequency… The evidence of this warming has been most obvious in the behavior of our most important resource: water. Warmer air temperatures also cause clouds to retain more moisture, leading to more dramatic rainfall events and storms, then subsequent floods and landslides. Warmer air, on the other hand, also leads to droughts that pose a threat to our health, food supplies, and the most vital systems of our civilization. The planet’s ecosystems and animals, us included, are incredibly resilient, but there is not enough time for natural adaptation to keep up with the pace at which we are currently transforming the planet and its climate. We need to rapidly and drastically decrease our impact and dedicate more resources to the technologies that emit less carbon or remove it from the air. As we continue to forecast or debate just how serious the repercussions of our actions will be, the planet will continue to react."

Here’s another climate event that seems to have slipped from most people’s memory this past week: Nearly one year ago, Los Angeles experienced highly unusual flooding due to an atmospheric river that deluged the city with rains so heavy, they amounted to the second wettest three-day period in LA’s record books. This led the city to have its fourth wettest February in history. The climate crisis is nuanced—it can’t just be understood as a warmer planet. We have entered a new era in which the climate is more volatile. One year your city can flood, and soon thereafter, conditions have shifted so much that it is vulnerable to go up in flames. For LA, this only took one year. Across the planet, many places are going to see either too much or too little water, and both pose very serious threats to what has been constructed there.

Regardless of what started these fires, or how quickly the firefighters were there to attempt to put out the first flames with the resources they had at their disposal, here is what I find indisputable: It hadn’t rained in most parts of Los Angeles since April, nine months ago, when it rained half an inch. That’s one brief but heavy downpour or a steady, light rainfall over a few hours. Combine this parched landscape with an unusually strong burst of the Santa Ana Winds (not related to climate change) that blow through Los Angeles from high up in the nearby deserts, and you have the recipe for the perfect firestorm. All you needed was the spark.

I’ll continue to keep my eyes on the city and hope the fires are contained and extinguished soon. This is a moment to decide whether we see these fires as an isolated incident, preventable with a few more working fire hydrants or helicopters, or as part of a larger pattern. With 2024 recently declared the hottest year on record, it is clear that events like these will only become more frequent and more devastating in an ever-warmer, ever-more-unpredictable climate. Recognizing this reality is the first step toward addressing both the immediate needs and the systemic challenges we face on this planet, the one that we all call home.