As Santa Ana winds whipped sheets of embers over the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California last night, the palm trees along the beach in the Pacific Palisades ignited like torches scaled for gods. The high school was burning. Soon, the grounds around the Getty Villa were too. The climate scientist Daniel Swain went live on his YouTube channel, warning that this fire would get worse before it got better. The winds, already screaming, would speed up. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing as he spoke. Sunset Boulevard was backed up; ash rained down on drivers as they exited their cars to escape on foot. A bulldozer parted the sea of abandoned cars to let emergency vehicles pass.
The hills were ready to burn. It’s January, well past the time of year when fire season in Southern California is supposed to end. But in this part of the semi-arid chaparral called Los Angeles, fire season can now be any time.
Drought had begun to bear down by the time the fires started. A wetter season is supposed to begin around October, but no meaningful amount of rain has fallen since May. Then came a record-breaking hot summer. The land was now drier than in almost any year since recordkeeping began. Grasses and sagebrush that had previously greened in spring rains dried to a crisp and stayed that way, a perfect buffet of fuel for a blaze to feast on. As The Atlantic wrote last summer, California’s fire luck of the past two years had run out . “You’d have to go to the late 1800s to see this dry of a start to the rainy season,” Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA, told me…