Swaths of neighborhoods now remain in ashes along Bashford Street in the Pacific Palisades community in Los Angeles on Feb. 3, three weeks after flames from the Palisades fire ripped through the Pacific Palisades community, destroying over 6,000 structures and killing 12 people.

With its uniquely vulnerable landscape, California has always had a turbulent history with fire. 

From the Santiago Canyon fire in 1889, which burned 300,000 acres across Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties, to the Camp Fire in 2018, which killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures in the town of Paradise, generations of Californians have watched flames devour businesses, homes and lives. 

But as we mark the one-year anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton fires, the unsettling reality is that climate change is making conditions in our already fire-prone state even worse. Higher temperatures, which result in higher evaporation rates that dry out plants, have resulted in historic fire records being regularly broken. Of the 20 most destructive wildfires in state’s history, nine have occurred in the past five years, according to CalMatters. 

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Thanks to rising temperatures born of greenhouse gas emissions, fire season across the Western U.S. is now more than a month longer than it was 35 years........

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