Fire has always played a crucial role in Southern California’s ecosystem, which features dry conditions and strong, hot desert winds called the Santa Anas, which blow from the east each winter. Many native plants require periodic burning to germinate, which is why, historically, many Native American tribes in California set “cultural fires” to help shape and enhance the productivity of the land.

But in recent decades, as climatic conditions have gotten hotter, drier and more variable due to more intense rains and droughts, wildfires across California have grown into historic mega-fires. The most recent of these, an urban firestorm that has raged across Los Angeles for over a week now, will likely become the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Or, mostly natural.

In the end, it all comes back to the Arctic Ocean.

Today the Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the world due to a phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,” linked primarily to vanishing sea ice. As the Arctic Ocean ice cover that reflects solar radiation back into space retreats, the dark ocean waters exposed by its absence absorb ever greater amounts of heat.

This has contributed to 2024 having the hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded, even as deep as 6,500-foot below the surface. Last year also set a new record for the warmest land surface temperature on Earth since at least 1850, when accurate measurements were first taken, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Earth’s ten hottest years have all occurred in the last decade; 2024 broke the all-time record, set in 2023.

“Drastic changes currently occurring in the Arctic are connected with adverse weather in mid-latitudes, including California droughts,” states NOAA’s recent Arctic Vision Strategy 2025 report. “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.”

The report poses the question of how Arctic climate change will alter weather patterns around the world, and calls for more real-time research, among other measures.

It’s not at all clear if that will happen. The Heritage Foundation’s MAGA-inspired Project 2025 agenda, from which the second Trump Administration has taken many cues, calls for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized” so that it stops contributing to “the climate change alarm industry.” The agency’s climate science and assessments, considered preeminent sources for U.S. and global planning, are anathema to the oil industry and the Republican Party — which is now blaming racial diversity programs for the inferno in Los Angeles.

The recent drought-like conditions in Los Angeles, linked in part to the loss of reflected heat in the Arctic, helped provide the tinder-like fuel of natural foliage that spread to built structures including homes, schools, businesses and places of worship. Even the world’s bravest and best firefighters could not contain these blazes in the face of historically fierce Santa Ana winds.

I began reporting on climate change in the 1980s, including a recent trip to Alaska’s thawing tundra. It has long been apparent that what we lack is not the science to inform us on what the solutions are, but the political will to enact them.

As the rapid tracking of climate change becomes more accurate and robust, we’re able to see how the decline of caribou, polar bears and the erosion of Alaska native villages is tied not only to Arctic warming but to today’s dead and displaced fire victims in Los Angeles. We are all now inexorably linked by our energy choices and their global and local impacts.

The question is: After seeing the costs we all share, what will we do about it?

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David Helvarg is an author, executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group and co-host of the Rising Tide Ocean Podcast. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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