Cliff Mass doesn’t think the California wildfires had much to do with climate change

On Thursday, firefighters continued to battle a series of major wildfires in the Los Angeles area of Southern California that have killed at least five people, ravaged communities from the Pacific Coast to Pasadena and sent thousands of people frantically fleeing their homes.

Ferocious winds that drove the flames and led to chaotic evacuations have calmed somewhat and were not expected to be as powerful during the day. That could allow firefighters to make progress reining in blazes that have hopscotched across the sprawling region, including massive ones in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

During an appearance on “The Jason Rantz Show” on KTTH Thursday, University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Cliff Mass discussed multiple aspects of the fires, including the failures leading up to them taking off and what’s to come next week. 

Starting off the conversation, Jason noted some media outlets and politicians were blaming climate change for these wildfires despite that not being the case.

“Climate change did not cause this fire,” Jason said. “In fact, they knew ahead of time how bad things were going to be as far as the winds were concerned.”

Saying the National Weather Service put a catastrophic forecast out, Mass agreed with Jason’s assessment speaking directly to the strength of the Santa Ana winds in that area.

“Everybody was looking at the models, knew that there was going to be strong Santa Ana winds, very unusually strong that we’re going to descend down the mountains there with very strong winds, dry air,” Mass said. “All you needed was ignition. So that was very, very clear. So the authorities in the region had the warning and the steps they should have taken, which I suspect they did not take, at least not sufficiently.”

Previous coverage: Wildfires burn out of control across Los Angeles area and kill 5 as thousands flee homes

California wildfires: What should have been done before the winds arrived

From there, Mass spoke to three steps that should have been taken that were not before the arrival of the winds.

“De-energize the region” — Citing photos taken by people as they flew into regional airports, Mass noted fires burning and lights in homes also being on next to them.

“The first thing they should have done was completely de-energize the region that was vulnerable, and they clearly did not do that,” Mass said. “They were talking about taking power down. They did to some neighborhoods, but they didn’t go far enough.”

“Make sure all those fires were out” — Mass went on to discuss the campfires that get set up in Southern California by homeless people who are in the area.

“No. 2 is there are a lot of homeless around there and some of them have fires,” he said. “So the No. 2 thing would be to make sure that there were none of those fires. I mean, you could spot them with infrared. It wouldn’t be hard to see where they were but to make sure all those fires were out, that would be definitely the second thing I’d want to do.”

“Messed up … evacuation plans” — Looking at traffic specifically, Mass spoke about the mistakes made in the plans to get people out of the affected area.

“The No. 3 thing that they definitely messed up was their evacuation plans,” he explained. “They told border areas that they had to evacuate immediately. Well, that caused traffic jams and that completely locked up. It finally got so bad on on one of the roads that they told people as the fire was coming down the hill to abandon their cars, to run to the water.
So, they had all these abandoned cars and they finally had to use bulldozers to push the cars out of the way. I mean, it was not well done.”

As to why the ineffectiveness has existed in the past, Mass didn’t speak to the why, but he did identify a pattern of sorts.

“This has happened time and time again,” Mass said. “Just seems a lot of cities and municipalities are completely ineffective dealing with this kind of threat.”

‘I don’t think this had much to do with climate change’

Mass went on to say during his appearance on “The Jason Rantz Show” he doesn’t think these wildfires had much to do with climate change, citing that there’s no real trend here.

“Well, in fact, I don’t think this had much to do with climate change,” Mass said. “From a meteorological viewpoint, and in fact, one way I can show that is I plotted up at Los Angeles precipitation during the fall over the last 50 years. Well, there’s no trend. If climate change was the key, that would have been a trend. But there wasn’t a trend.”

From there, Mass circled back to the lack of planning municipalities undertake to prepare for these weather events.

“But even if climate change was involved, these kind of conditions, you have to do the planning and the execution that will minimize the problem and they clearly did not do that,” Mass added.

Related news: WA firefighters heading to Southern CA to help fight devestating wildfires

What will happen next in California?

Mass told Jason that while the fires are still going strong as of Thursday night, they aren’t what they were previously when the fire first spread. However, by Tuesday those winds are going to strengthen again, underscoring the need to get this under control soon.

“It’s going to rev up again next week, next Tuesday, it’s going to get strong again,” Mass said. “So they have to work very hard to get the fires out during the next several days and then be ready to make sure they de-energize and do things properly for the Tuesday event. So, it’s the Tuesday events could be a little bit different location a little bit further to the north, but they have to get ready for that one.”

When Jason asked if it was feasible to get these fires under control, Mass struck an optimistic tone but added that getting ready for what’s to come next week in California is vital.

“Oh, I think it’s quite feasible,” he said. “I mean, a lot of resources are coming in, from even up here, going down there. So they have all these firefighters, they have the aircraft that can, that can drop materials that suppress fires so they can hit this very hard right now and probably get it under control, but they need to get ready for next week.”

Head here or click on the player below to listen to additional analysis from Cliff Mass about the California wildfires and the winter in the Pacific Northwest.

Contributing: The Associated Press

Steve Coogan is the lead editor of MyNorthwest. You can read more of his stories here. Follow Steve on X, or email him here.

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