As I write this, the weather at SeaTac International Airport near Seattle, Washington is cold, cloudy and sporadically rainy. That’s quite different from 1,000 miles south in Los Angeles, which is battling an unprecedented series of fires during a time of year that used to be the rainy season.
I grew up in L.A. and vividly recall the torrential downpours that occurred beginning in November. One year it rained so much around Thanksgiving Day that we postponed a trip north to the Bay Area. The brakes on our 1957 Ford didn’t do so well after getting wet.
Another year right before Christmas, it rained so hard for so many days that the street in front of our house turned into a veritable river. As a kid I thought that was great good fun, but I would imagine that this was problematic for all of the adults who had to go to work. Back then all of the cars in our neighborhood had fashionably low ground clearance so didn’t drive through much water.
Of course, L.A. can still get lots of rain in the winter. That’s what happened over 2022-23, when major flooding resulted from what the scientists call “intense atmospheric river storms” (Purohit, 2024).
Alas, that respite from an extended drought was short lived. Records show that the soil moisture in a goodly portion of southern California is currently in the bottom 2 percent of historical records (Pan, 2025).
Musk agrees that L.A. fires are part of a ‘globalist plot’
What do L.A. fires have to do with cars? Because Tesla head Elon Musk is spreading conspiracy theories that downplay the importance of climate change. This is quite a shift for him. Musk was arguably the first auto industry executive to champion a strong response to climate change. For example, the banner image is Musk during the 2017 launch of the Tesla Model 3. The graph behind him shows the dramatic growth in greenhouse gases.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by Musk’s turn. Tycoons have a tendency to shift rightward as they age. Consider William Randolph Hearst, who in his early years was a leftist Democrat who later became quite conservative — and used his media empire to espouse his views (Wikipedia, 2025).
What makes Musk unusual for an U.S. auto industry leader is that he has become so overtly political. Top-level executives such as Robert McNamara and Charles E. Wilson may have held cabinet-level positions with the federal government, but they did not take nearly as public of a role as Musk has in recent months.
For a while Lee Iacocca weighed in on the great issues of the day and flirted with running for office, but he ultimately did not throw his hat into the ring. Henry Ford may be the auto executive who most closely matched Musk’s trajectory, but even he dabbled in politics and mass media in relatively parenthetical ways.
It remains to be seen what impact Musk ends up having as a political figure, but I suspect that he has lost his standing as a “reliable narrator” by those outside of his immediate political sphere. For example, Musk agreed with Alex Jones when he recently argued that the fires of L.A. are “part of a larger globalist plot” to destroy the United States (Verma et al., 2025). Yeah, that Alex Jones.
What scientists say about climate change and L.A. fires
I am glad to see at least some news reports acknowledge the role of climate change in the L.A. fires ( e.g., McGrath, 2025; Glasser and Jacobo, 2025; Kluger, 2025). The Yale School of the Environment summed up the scientific explanation: “As the planet heats up, rainfall is growing more erratic over much of the globe, leading to wide swings between wet and dry conditions. So-called ‘weather whiplash’ is ramping up the risk of wildfire in California, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA” (Yale Environment 360, 2025).
This is not new information. Four years ago Al Shaw and Elizabeth Weil (2020) painted an alarming picture of the future: “As California continues battling its worst wildfire season on record, new research shows that fall fire weather days — days with high temperatures, low humidity and high wind speeds — will double in parts of the state by the end of the century and will increase 40% by 2065. On these days all it takes is a spark from a downed power line, or a hammer hitting a metal stake. A small fire can grow into an inferno at startling speed.”
In other words, things are going to get worse.
I can write all this from the comfortable distance of Seattle, but the problem with climate change is that there is no “away.” For example, projections suggest that this region could suffer from rising sea levels that inundate low-lying coastal areas; hotter, drier summers that increase the chances of wildfires; and more frequent and severe flooding (Climate Impacts Group, 2025).
Whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together.
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RE:SOURCES
- Climate Impacts Group; 2025. “Future scenarios for climate change in Puget Sound.” Encyclopedia of the Puget Sound. Accessed Jan. 10.
- Glasser, Matthew and Julia Jacobo; 2025. “This is how climate change contributed to the California wildfires.” ABC News. Posted Jan. 8.
- Kluger, Jeffrey; 2025. “L.A. Fires Show the Reality of Living in a World with 1.5°C of Warming.” Time. Posted Jan. 10.
- McGrath, Matt; 2025. “Climate ‘whiplash’ linked to raging LA fires.” BBC. Posted Jan. 9.
- Pan, Ming; 2025. “Maps show how dry Southern California is, as L.A. wildfires burn.” CBS News. Posted Jan. 10.
- Purohit, Sanju; 2024. “Rainfall in California: Special Reference to 2023 Rains That Caused Floods.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Posted Sept 30: pp. 97-109.
- Shaw, Al and Elizabeth Weil; 2020. “New Maps Show How Climate Change is Making California’s ‘Fire Weather’ Worse.” ProPublica. Posted Oct. 14.
- Verma, Pranshu and Will Oremus and Trisha Thadani; 2025. “As Los Angeles burns, Elon Musk stokes partisan outrage.” Washington Post. Posted Jan. 10.
- Wikipedia; 2025. “William Randolph Hearst.” Page last edited Jan. 1.
- Yale Environment 360; 2025. “Did Climate Change Help Fuel the Los Angeles Wildfires?” Yale School of the Environment. Posted Jan. 10.
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