"We see these fires spread when it is hot and dry and windy, and right now all of those conditions are in place in southern California," Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, told AFP.
While it's not yet known what started the blazes, "human-caused climate change is intensifying the heat that drives wildfires, increasing temperatures in southern California up to two-degrees Celsius since 1895," Patrick Gonzalez, a climate change scientist at the University of California, Berkeley told AFP.
Although wildfire activity can vary greatly from year to year, short-term extreme weather conditions helped create the "perfect conditions" for the recent blazes, said wildfire scientist Maria Lucia Ferreira Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
Last year's El Nino weather system brought heavy rains that fuelled excessive vegetation growth in the first half of 2024. But the second half of the year was marked by drought across southern California, setting the stage for what scientists call "precipitation whiplash," another potential hallmark of climate change that turned the region into a tinderbox.
Small embers can also be carried by the wind to ignite new areas, explained Rory Hadden, Professor of Fire Science at the University of Edinburgh.
"The ongoing wildfires in California are unprecedented, in the sense that they are dramatic for this time of the year," said Apostolos Voulgarakis, an atmospheric scientist at Imperial College London, adding that research shows the state's fire season is "widening" as a consequence of climate change.
Attribution studies, which use statistical modelling to measure humanity's impact on climate, will be needed to determine the precise culpability of human-driven warming on the current fires. However, scientists broadly agree that rising temperatures are making such fire-prone conditions more frequent.
A recent UN Environment Programme report found a potential global increase in extreme fires by up to 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by 2050, and 50 percent by the end of the century.
2024 is set to be named the hottest year on record for both the United States and the world, capping a decade of unprecedented heat.
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