The catastrophic fires in Los Angeles are a stark warning to Hamiltonians that climate change is real and getting rapidly worse. Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”. It can devastate even wealthy cities, not just the global south.
It’s a lesson we should have learned with the destruction of Fort McMurray in Alberta forcing the evacuation of its more than 80,000 residents. It should have also been obvious last summer when Jasper went up in flames in a few hours.
And while we’ve so far avoided catastrophic fires here in Hamilton, we’ve tasted the smoke more than once and suffered some of the toxic air that cuts our lifespan. The 2023 wildfires across the country burned far more than any previous year, six times the average. But last year actually torched the second largest amount of forest without much media attention.
Los Angeles is a stark example that most of our homes, especially the newer ones, are a bonfire waiting to happen. Canadian journalist John Valliant, the acclaimed author of Fire Weather, a detailed account of the Fort McMurray fire, warned this week that “if you start looking around at your home, you’ll realize that petroleum and its products are everywhere. And these are really, really flammable.” He points to “vinyl siding and Formica counters and polyurethane stuffing and the rubber tires and the gas tanks in the garage”. These and other materials resulted in nothing left but the foundations in five minutes.
The extreme weather that has driven the Los Angeles fires has been felt repeatedly in southern Ontario, especially with regards to flooding. Last year, the Toronto area and parts of Burlington were inundated several times. The costs were added up at the end of December by insurance officials: “Extreme weather hit Canada hard in 2024, setting a record of $8.1 billion in insurable claims, coupled with an additional $24 billion in uninsurable damage incurred by governments, businesses and individuals.”
They went on to explain that “just over 10 years ago, insurable losses in Canada hovered around $700 million a year, less than 1/10th of this year’s claims. These more recent effects are the tail end of a longer-term trend – 40 years ago, Canada experienced 20 natural disasters a decade, which have now grown to 138.”
Climate leader Bill McKibben warns that the California fires, like the hurricanes in Florida last fall, put enormous strains on the property insurance system we all depend on. “The great casualty in the month’s ahead may be the insurance system of the world’s fifth biggest economy, which is going to buckle under the strain of these losses,” he predicted. We all will pay.
And there’s more to come. “These fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually,” says prominent American meteorologist Eric Holthaus.
Vaillant points to “a real moral cowardice” from governments, media and the corporate elite who have failed to deal with “the buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane” from the burning of oil, coal and natural gas. “This kind of blind — frankly, suicidal — loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly difficult situation and unlivable situation.”
