No, the LA inferno is not Mother Nature’s revenge

When the Great Fire swept through London in 1666, the fleeing citizens were convinced God was punishing them. ‘The dreadful judgement’, they called it. London’s been set alight for its ‘deadly sin of gluttony’, they wailed. A plaque put on the smoky ruins of the bakery where the fire started said: ‘Here by permission of Heaven, Hell broke loose…’ Fast forward 350 years and this view of fire as retribution, as the hellish judgement of sinning humanity, still holds. Only now the fire is set not by God, but by Gaia.

Witness the pained discussion of the LA inferno. Even as the city still burns, already the culprit has been found: it was us, hubristic mankind. This ‘tinderbox’ is ‘fuelled by global warming’, says one climate activist. This is ‘the climate crisis in action’, says another, the scorching byproduct of our ‘burning [of] coal, oil and gas’. Bernie Sanders hopes the dystopic vision of LA being consumed by the orange glow of lethal flames will stir our species from its denialism and make us believe that climate change ‘is real, not “a hoax”’. This is an ‘existential crisis’, he cries, which sounds to me like fancy talk for ‘dreadful judgement’.

The fires are terrible. The affluent suburb of Pacific Palisades has been hardest hit. Homes and schools and businesses have been turned to ash. It has leapt to other suburbs too, including Altadena, where entire streets are now blackened ruins. At the time of writing, five people are dead, a thousand structures lie destroyed, and 150,000 Los Angeleans have been forced to flee their homes. The footage feels unreal – ‘like a Hollywood disaster movie with a difference’, says Ross Clark, ‘it really is happening close to Hollywood’.

The Independent reports that some on the lunatic right are welcoming this fiery assault on America’s most liberal, licentious state. They ‘cheer the disaster’, it says, with some sharing fake pics of the Hollywood sign on fire alongside the sick taunt: ‘Everyone say bye bye to Pedowood.’ Such a medieval celebration of fire as a purifying retribution for sin – in this case the sin of paedophilia rather than gluttony – is clearly nuts. No decent person has time for such cruel superstition. And yet the idea that this fire, and fire more broadly, is a kind of punishment has gone scarily mainstream – only it’s seen as a punishment less for interfering with children than for interfering with nature.

When climate activists draw a direct line between the LA inferno and humanity’s ‘burning [of] coal, oil and gas’, it’s clear what they’re saying: these deadly flames are the wages of modernity, the blowback of our industrial revolutions. Everywhere one looks, the fire is being pinned on ‘manmade climate change’. The LA fire is ‘emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster’, says a writer for the Guardian. If anyone asks you who’s responsible for this calamity, he says, the ‘short answer’ is that it’s being fuelled by the ‘greenhouse gases humans continue to emit’. Anyone else feel like they need a longer answer?

The sin of gluttony has been replaced by the sin of pollution. Where once it was our avarice that invited fiery judgement, now it’s our emissions. The Los Angeles Times is clear about what has caused its city to be engulfed by flames – ‘human-caused climate change’. All our ‘fossil-fuel burning’ is making infernos like this one more common, it says. Yellow Dot Studios, the climate-awareness group founded by Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay, says ‘the fires in Los Angeles are the result of years of cascading extreme weather conditions, created by carbon pollution from burning oil, gas and coal’.

‘The result of…’ – is this really science, or moralism? The idea that our burning of oil to propel vehicles and heat buildings leads directly to an inferno of human habitats – is this rationalism or delusion? If someone can explain to me the difference between the old belief that London caught fire because of its gluttony and the new belief that LA is on fire because of modern man’s dirty habits, I would be most grateful. It seems to me that in both cases fire is treated as the inevitable consequence of the voracious behaviour of the human species.

You don’t need a PhD in climatology to know that things are more complicated. There have been natural fires on Earth forever, ‘well before the emergence of humans’ – what caused them? And there’s actually less wildfire in America today than there was in the past. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that between 1926 and 1935, an average of 41.5million acres of land were lost to flames every year. From 2013 to 2023, it was 7.02million acres a year. That ‘weather of mass destruction’ we hear so much about doesn’t seem all that destructive. ‘Climate change hasn’t set the world on fire’, says Bjorn Lomborg. On the contrary, the amount of the world’s land consumed by fire has been trending downwards for more than 20 years.

We seem to be in the grip of the medieval imagination. Every unsettling weather event, every flood, storm and fire, is now chalked up to our filthy emissions, our hubristic antics. There’s a neo-religious feel to the contemporary discussion of weather. Manmade climate change is ‘creating hell on Earth’, said the LA Times a few years back. All Earth’s recent ‘wildfires, floods and pandemics’ have the feel of ‘End Times’, says a writer for the Hill, ‘and it’s our damned fault’. In short, we brought this fiery admonishment upon ourselves, just like the sinners of 17th-century London did. The planet is burning and it’s humanity’s doing, says the Guardian – we’re ‘guilty as hell’.

You can call that ‘science’ if you like, but to me it smacks of primitive moralism, a pious damning of man. When even hot weather is referred to as a ‘hound-from-hell heatwave’ and named after Cerberus – the three-headed beast in Dante’s Inferno who torments sinners by tearing them apart – you know we have well and truly left the realm of cool analysis for the pulpit of judgementalism. One consequence of this imbuing of weather with almost sentient power, this transformation of nature’s whims into nature’s retribution, is that it lets our rulers off the hook. There seems to have been a lack of preparedness in LA, with some pointing out that the city’s infrastructure ‘struggled to meet firefighting demands’. Fixing that is surely a better way to guard against future death and destruction rather than demanding the scaling back of modernity itself.

Climate change is real, but it’s a metaphor, too. It’s become a metaphor for what the elites view as the disastrous project of industrialisation and growth. They marshal acts of weather to chide humanity and our greed – one might say our gluttony. This bonfire of reason worries me as much as the wildfires that will always be a feature of life on Earth.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy