The Los Angeles wildfires are already among the worst ever

Devastating wildfires have now been burning in greater Los Angeles for over a week, and the scale of the disaster is hard to overstate. Whether measured by number of deaths, number of structures destroyed or the total cost of the damages, the Los Angeles fires already look like they are among the worst on record — and, unfortunately, those numbers are likely to keep rising as the fires continue to burn.

Of the various fires that have ignited around Los Angeles since last Tuesday, the two biggest have been the Palisades Fire, centered on the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on the west side of the city, and the Eaton Fire, centered on the northeastern suburb of Altadena. Together, they have so far killed 25 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures. That already places these two fires alone among the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history.

Only the 2018 Camp Fire was more catastrophic than the current rash of fires. That fire in Northern California's Butte County killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 19,000 structures.

However, it's likely that the Los Angeles fires are already the costliest wildfires in history — not only in California, but in all of the U.S. These fires are unique in that they are tearing through one of the most densely populated cities in the country with some of the highest home values. Moody's and insurance broker Aon PLC have already said that they believe the fires will wind up being the most expensive in U.S. history.

They could even end up ranking as one of the most expensive natural disasters of any kind — a shocking fact considering that wildfires are not typically as costly as other disasters, like hurricanes. For instance, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S.'s costliest natural disaster since 1980 was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which caused $201.3 billion in damages in today's dollars; the most expensive wildfire event was the series of California wildfires in 2018 that included the Camp Fire, which cost "only" $30.0 billion in today's money.

AccuWeather has already issued an eye-popping preliminary estimate that the current fires will cost $250-275 billion. However, that isn't directly comparable to the numbers in the table above. AccuWeather's estimates include the costs of evacuations, government expenditures to clean up from the disaster and long-term impacts on industries such as tourism; as a result, their numbers are often much higher than official estimates. For instance, AccuWeather estimated damages from 2024's Hurricane Helene at $225-250 billion, while NOAA's estimate is lower at $78.7 billion. Still, if the final official cost of the Los Angeles wildfires comes in at around $80 million, that would make them the seventh-costliest American natural disaster of the last 45 years.

As you can tell from the table, the majority of the most expensive natural disasters have come in just the last 13 years — even adjusting for population growth. One frequently cited factor for this is that human-caused climate change is making natural disasters more severe and more frequent. Indeed, studies have found a link between climate change and the increased number of wildfires specifically. Wildfires thrive in droughts and high temperatures, and climate change has made these things more common.

While it's difficult to directly attribute any one fire to climate change — the most common causes of wildfires are lightning strikes, arson and sparking power lines, and the cause of the current fires is still under investigation — Los Angeles County has received virtually no rain since the summer, which was its hottest in 130 years. That has kept local vegetation bone-dry and highly flammable well into what is supposed to be the rainy season. (That said, there is no evidence that the high winds that have spread these fires have gotten worse due to climate change.)

Accordingly, many Americans blame the changing climate for the disaster, at least in part. According to a YouGov poll from Jan. 10, 65 percent of Americans believed that climate change was at least somewhat responsible for the extent of recent wildfires — including 24 percent who thought it was mostly responsible for them and 11 percent who thought it was entirely responsible for them. Unsurprisingly, there was a partisan split on the question, with 88 percent of Democrats believing climate change was at least somewhat responsible, but only 46 percent of Republicans. An Emerson College poll from Jan. 10-11 found something similar: 58 percent of registered voters told the pollster that they thought climate change had contributed to the wildfires, including 85 percent of Democrats but 36 percent of Republicans.

And for many Americans, these wildfires might just be the latest thing convincing them that climate change is having real, and disastrous, consequences. According to regular polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, the share of American adults who believe people in the U.S. are being harmed by climate change "right now" has risen gradually over the last 15 years.

Similarly, the share of Americans who say they've personally experienced the effects of climate change has risen from 23 percent in January 2010 to 49 percent in April 2024. As climate change becomes less conceptual and more immediate to an increasing number of Americans with every passing disaster, it's possible that pressure could build on the government to take more drastic action to address it.