Politico and The Guardian Falsely Blame California Wildfires on Climate Change
14th January 2025
Recent reports in Politico and The Guardian make a now-familiar but false claim: California’s wildfires, particularly the devastating events around Los Angeles, are evidence of an accelerating “climate crisis.” The claims made in these stories are false. Data do not show wildfires are getting worse. The stories rely on oversimplified, headline-grabbing narratives that blame climate change without examining other critical variables. In addition, they continue to make the most basic mistake of conflating weather events with long-term climate change.
California’s landscapes have evolved alongside fire for millennia. Long before industrialization, periodic wildfires swept through these ecosystems, clearing out excess vegetation and promoting biodiversity. This is not conjecture, rather it is well-documented in history. Native American tribes understood this and used controlled burns to manage the land.
The problem today is not that California has fires—it always has. The problem is that modern fire suppression policies disrupted this natural cycle. For much of the 20th century, aggressive efforts to extinguish all fires, combined with the abandonment of Indigenous fire management techniques, allowed vegetation and underbrush to accumulate to dangerous levels. Other factors include a shift in forest management philosophy leading to decline in logging, resulting in overgrown forests with build-up of fuel, and increasing numbers of people moving to areas historically prone to wildfires. This surplus fuel creates the conditions for catastrophic fires and the increased population and all the buildings that come with them, leads to greater tragedy and cost when fires occur.