The Arctic Ocean link to the L.A. Fires

By David Helvarg

Southern California has always been a fire-based ecosystem adapted for dry conditions including strong hot desert winds blowing from the east each winter called Santa Anas (based on an Orange County newspaper linking them to a local canyon of that name in the 1880s). Many native plants require periodic burning to germinate and historically many California Native American tribes set ‘cultural fires’ to help shape and enhance the productivity of the land. But as conditions have gotten hotter and dryer in recent decades wildfires across California have grown into mega-fires culminating in the urban firestorm Los Angeles is suffering through that will likely become the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history ($50 billion plus is being predicted).

Or mostly natural disaster. In 1999, following a two-month reporting trip I wrote an opinion for the New York Times titled – ‘Fiddling While Antarctic Burns’ suggesting that rather than focusing on the character of the President (Clinton at the time) we should focus on the threat of climate disruption which was and is occurring most rapidly at the poles, in the Arctic and Antarctic. I concluded that “environmental change will define much of the politics of the 21st century.”

Unfortunately, a quarter of the way through the 21st century the price of eggs and mild inflation seem to have had more impact on our recent U.S. elections that the loss of homes, lives and livelihoods as we’re now seeing in Los Angeles and recently witnessed in Ashville, North Carolina, Lahaina Hawaii and many other locales impacted by extreme weather events. Part of the problem was that while President-elect Trump was doubling down on “climate hoax” denial and promoting an energy policy of ‘drill baby drill,” the democratic candidate Kamala Harris was claiming she supported natural gas drilling in the swing state of Pennsylvania rather than building on President Biden’s climate record by making the case (in the wake of Western Tennessee’s hurricane floods for example) that the climate emergency is an existential threat and the transition to clean energy needs to be accelerated both to the benefit of the economy and for our survival.

So, what does this have to do with the Arctic Ocean?

Today the Arctic is warming 3 times faster than the rest of the world due to a climate phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,” linked primarily to vanishing sea ice. As the Arctic Ocean ice cover that reflects solar radiation back into space has retreated, the dark ocean waters exposed absorb ever greater amounts of heat. This has contributed to 2024 having the hottest upper ocean temperatures (down to 6,500 feet) ever recorded. And a warmer (and more acidic) ocean holds less dissolved oxygen leading to a global decline in productivity. 2024 has also been confirmed as setting a new record for the warmest surface temperature on earth going back to 1850 when accurate measurements were first taken according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This broke the record set in 2023. In fact, The ten warmest years since 1850 have all occurred in the last decade

NOAA’s ‘2024 Arctic Report Card’ states: Fueled by steady increases in temperatures, multiple unprecedented extreme events indicate major Arctic change is underway. Such new extremes include marine and terrestrial heatwaves (the oil production center of Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean hit 89 degrees this August), wildfires, enhanced carbon dioxide and methane emissions of the arctic tundra,

Also, according to NOAA’s just released ‘Arctic Vision Strategy 2025’, “Drastic changes currently occurring in the Arctic are connected with adverse weather in mid-latitudes, including California Droughts and cold winter events in the eastern and southern United States and Asia. Interactions between local Arctic temperature increases and the meandering of the jet stream and polar vortex are currently poorly understood. [But] case studies support the linkages to extreme events.” It goes on to wonder, “How will further warming and climate change in the Arctic continue to alter weather patterns in the contiguous United States and globally?” It’s strategy includes the need for more real-time research.

The alternative as set out in the Heritage Foundation’s MAGA inspired Project 2025 plan (that Trump denied any knowledge of during the campaign), calls for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized,” labeling it key to, “the climate change alarm industry.” That is to say the agency’s climate science and assessments are considered preeminent sources for U.S. and global planning for climate adaptation and response and thus anathema to the oil industry and its favored party now in power.

The fact that LA saw little to no rainfall this year (only .16 inches of rain since October) meant that foliage in the hills and neighborhoods of the nation’s second largest city became tinder dry and ready to explode in the face of exceptionally strong Santa Ana winds that set off the latest shocking but predictable climate disaster.

I began reporting on climate change in the 1980s and remain more frustrated than despairing because we know what the solutions are. What we lack is the political will to enact them. There’s no time left to wait and no place left to retreat even as the science and complexity of global warming becomes ever more apparent. The decline of Caribou populations, polar bears and sea birds linked to Arctic warming and the dead and displaced citizens of Los Angeles are all of a common pattern and a common fate. What that fate will be is still up to us.