In the wake of reports that a lack of water supply may have negatively impacted the work of firefighters battling the multiple blazes in Los Angeles, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for an investigation on Friday, Jan. 10. “The ongoing reports of the loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and to the community,” Newsom wrote in the letter addressed to Janisse Quiñones, CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and L.A. County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella. “While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish fires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors.” Newsom posted the letter on X (formerly Twitter), telling his followers: “We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires.” Currently, the Los Angeles Fire Department and CAL FIRE are fighting multiple blazes, the most dominant being the Palisades Fire. As of Jan. 12, at least 16 people are thought to have died, according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner's Office, thousands of homes have been destroyed, and over 40,000 acres have been decimated. Soon after the first fire sparked on Jan. 7, reports and concerns began to emerge that the fire hydrants were running dry, after being overstressed without aircraft support. On Jan. 8, Los Angeles Fire Department Public Information Officer Erik Scott, addressed the “multiple questions” he was receiving about firefighters experiencing challenges with water pressure when fighting the Palisades Fire. He posted on X about how water supply and dry conditions had negatively affected firefighting efforts, despite the fact that the L.A. Department of Water and Power filled all available water tanks in the area. “[W]ater availability was impacted at higher elevations, which affected some fire hydrants due to limited replenishment of water tanks in those areas,” he wrote. “The extreme demand caused a slower refill rate for these tanks which created a challenge for our firefighting effort.” In a news conference on Wednesday morning, both Quiñones and Pestrella discussed the struggles with water supply. “We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said. “We're fighting a wildfire with an urban water system. And that is really challenging.” On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which helps supply water in Pacific Palisades, was offline for maintenance when the Palisades fire ignited on Tuesday. The 117-million-gallon-water storage is a fundamental tool in sustaining the water system for the residential area. In a memo posted by the LADWP attempting to combat misinformation regarding water supply, they clarified that “LADWP was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir out of service to meet safe drinking water regulations,” but stated that “water supply remained strong to the area.” They also said that they are “initiating [their] own investigation about water resiliency.” Some experts have told the media that “no water system in the world” would have been able to handle the sheer magnitude of fires that have blazed over the course of the week, especially with the strong Santa Ana winds often grounding air support. According to Newsom, many of Southern California’s largest reservoirs are "currently at or above their historic average storage levels for this time of year.” And while he has ordered for an investigation “into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir,” he states on his new California fire facts website—launched on Jan. 11 with the intention of combating misinformation about the fires—that “reservoirs are full and water is available.” According to Newsom, many of Southern California’s largest reservoirs are "currently at or above their historic average storage levels for this time of year.” And while he has ordered for an investigation “into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir,” he states on his new California fire facts website—launched on Jan. 11 with the intention of combating misinformation about the fires—that “reservoirs are full and water is available.” He also reminds readers that “urban water systems are built for structure fires and fire suppression, not hurricane-force firestorms” and that the water supply was “exhausted because of the extraordinary nature of this hurricane-force firestorm.” Newsom addressed his call for an independent investigation in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, which aired on Jan. 12. He was asked what questions he’s hoping to get answered. “The same ones you’re asking…What the hell happened? What happened to the water system…Was it just overwhelmed?” Newsom said. “Did it contribute in any way to our inability to fight the fire? Or were 99 mile-an-hour winds determinative and there was really no firefight that could've been more meaningful? So I want—all of us want to know those answers, and I just don't want to wait because people are asking me. I want to know those facts. I want them objectively determined, and let the chips fall where they may. This is not about finger pointing." Throughout the week, there has also been much discussion as to whether budget cuts to the fire department have affected LAFD’s ability to fight the destructive wildfires. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times posted on X, criticizing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. “Fires in LA are sadly no surprise, yet the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M,” he claimed. “And reports of empty fire hydrants raise serious questions.” L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has also criticized the city and Bass, stating on Fox 11 that the budget “was cut, and it did impact our ability to provide service.” She said: “We are still under-staffed, we are still under-resourced, and we’re still under-funded,” and added that she was not aware that the reservoir had been closed before Tuesday. “That is something to discuss, and we’re going to look into that in regard to how we can ensure there’s going to be water when we need it,” Crowley said in the Jan. 10 interview. Newsom has denied that there were cuts to the firefighting budget. “CA did NOT cut our firefighting budget. We have nearly doubled the size of our firefighting army and built the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet,” Newsom wrote in a social media post announcing his new California fire facts website. Meanwhile, in a memo Crowley sent to Bass in Dec. 2024, she stated that the elimination of civilian positions and overtime within the department was causing “unprecedented operational challenges” and “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.” Bass, who was criticized for being out of the country when the fires broke out, has repeatedly defended her support of the fire department throughout the week, stating in a news conference on Jan. 9 that “the impact of our budget really did not impact what we’ve been going through over the last few days.” TIME has reached out to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Department of Public Works for comment.

The focus this week has been on how extreme winds have fueled the most destructive fires in Los Angeles’s history. But that’s not the only concern. On Friday, even as slowing wind speeds increased hopes that firefighters would contain the blazes, dry vegetation and steep terrain pushed the Palisades fire, the biggest, east, putting a new swath of Los Angeles under mandatory evacuation orders. The blaze was burning along the tops of the ridges of Mandeville Canyon, said Kenichi Haskett, a division chief with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, on Friday night. The fire tore through a steep area full of dry vegetation and threatened the neighborhood of Encino in the north. The spread was being driven by the landscape rather than wind, Mr. Haskett said. “We’re not getting strong winds the way we got on Tuesday and Wednesday.” The Palisades fire has now burned more than 21,000 acres in five days. The rains that usually fall in autumn and early winter did not come, leaving most of Southern California bone dry and leaving vegetation primed to burn. Most locations south of Ventura County have recorded about a quarter-inch of rain or less in the past eight months, while the Los Angeles area has received only sprinklings of rain since April. That means the Santa Ana winds, the strong, dry gusts that have driven the wildfires, have had a particularly dramatic effect. Even as they have subsided, the parched vegetation has continued to fuel the Palisades fire, experts said. Stronger winds are expected to return to Los Angeles and Ventura counties Saturday afternoon, reaching the highest speeds overnight into Sunday morning and heightening the risk of rapid wildfire spread. Wind speeds over the fire were light — under 15 miles per hour — on Friday night, said Dave Gomberg, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. In comparison, Wednesday saw wind gusts of over 90 m.p.h. “I think a big component is the fuels are exceptionally dry,” Mr. Gomberg said of Friday’s expansion. The Palisades fire was “following the terrain and the fuels,” said Craig Clements, director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University. Fires thrive in hilly terrain and move faster uphill than downhill, he said, adding, “The steeper the terrain, the faster the fire can go.” The fire chewing its way through Mandeville Canyon is a “plume-dominated fire,” that is being fueled by its own wind, said Redondo Beach Fire Chief Patrick Butler, a former assistant chief for the Los Angeles Fire Department who has led the response to many Southern California fires. Such blazes often shoot upward and then collapse, scattering embers for miles in concentric patterns, he said. On Friday evening, ash was falling in the Brentwood neighborhood to the south of the canyon. Wildfires are notoriously hard to fight in Mandeville Canyon, which has poor radio communication and an extremely narrow road, Mr. Butler said: “There’s basically one way in and one way out.”

The alert came in blaring, hot-pink, all-caps: Be prepared for a “LIFE THREATENING & DESTRUCTIVE WINDSTORM!!!” The notice on Monday was one in a series of warnings issued by the National Weather Service about the powerful Santa Ana winds that were about to blow through Southern California, which hadn’t seen serious rain in months. Officials in Los Angeles, a city that is accustomed to treacherous fire conditions, turned to a well-worn playbook. The city predeployed nine trucks in vulnerable areas and called in 90 extra firefighters. The county fire department moved 30 extra engines into the field and called up 100 off-duty firefighters. The U.S. Forest Service brought in trucks and support units, as well as bulldozers, helicopters and planes. But by Tuesday afternoon, five hours after a fire ignited high in a canyon in the oceanside Pacific Palisades neighborhood, it was clear their preparations would not be enough. As furious wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour tore through the city and propelled showers of embers that ignited entire neighborhoods, Anthony Marrone, the chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, stood at a command post on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Blasted by dust and dirt kicked up by the relentless wind, he snapped a picture with his phone of smoke obscuring the sun and looked out at a panorama of flames, smoke and debris. The fire, he thought to himself, looked unstoppable. It was moving “like a funnel, like a speedway,” he said. “I knew that if we had one start, we probably weren’t going to be able to contain it.” The conflagrations that killed at least 11 people and destroyed thousands of homes have raised questions about whether the dozens of federal, state, county and city fire departments involved in this week’s fire response deployed enough resources — and the extent to which modern firefighting tools are effective against the megafires that have become increasingly common in California over the past decade. It was only hours before a situation that bore no resemblance to an ordinary red-flag alert, the kind set off when the Santa Ana winds blow in over the Mojave Desert from the inland West, began to evolve. A second huge fire broke out in Altadena, the unincorporated area adjacent to Pasadena, destroying more than 5,000 structures. A third ignited in Sylmar, to the north, and yet another, the next day, in the Hollywood Hills.Chief Marrone quickly acknowledged that the 9,000 firefighters in the region were not enough to stay ahead of the fires.“We’re doing the very best we can, but no, we don’t have enough fire personnel,” he said at a news briefing on Wednesday afternoon. “The L.A. County Fire Department was prepared for one or two major brush fires, but not four.”The hurricane-force winds, low humidity and parched landscape created unusually perilous conditions: On the first day, when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, it was too windy by late afternoon to send up the aircraft whose drops of water and fire retardant might have helped slow the spread of the blazes. Chief Marrone said the parched terrain and the concentration of homes, surrounded by forested hillsides, also combined to create an indefensible landscape. “The next time I’m not going to do anything differently because I don’t feel that I did anything wrong this time,” he said in an interview.Los Angeles city fire officials had a similar view. “The fire chief did everything she could with the resources she had,” Patrick Leonard, a battalion chief with the Los Angeles Fire Department, said, referring to the city’s fire chief, Kristin Crowley. The question of resources will almost certainly arise in the weeks ahead as the fire response is analyzed. The Los Angeles Fire Department has said for years it is dangerously underfunded. A memo sent to city leaders in December by Chief Crowley complained that recent budget cuts had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.” But there are a host of other factors at play. Fire experts have long warned that climate change and more home-building outside of urban areas are straining firefighters’ ability to prevent and contain fires. As fires have grown in size and complexity, California has explored mitigation through thinning brush out of forests, safer power grids and shoring up home protection. But it has been far from enough, they say. The fires in Los Angeles have also raised the critical question of how departments can battle so many powerful infernos at once. After the Woolsey fire burned more than 1,600 structures in the northern part of the county in 2018 — at the same time that other major fires were raging across the state — Los Angeles County commissioned an assessment that found that the simultaneous outbreaks had slowed the ability of other fire agencies to fight the blaze because they were already busy. Lori Moore-Merrell, the head of the U.S. Fire Administration, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who flew this week to Los Angeles to inspect the firefighting efforts and damage, said she believed that the reason for the widespread devastation was not the firefighting response.“They deployed enough,” Dr. Moore-Merrell said in an interview. “This fire was so intense. There isn’t a fire department in the world that could have gotten in front of this.” The question of predeployment will almost certainly prove one of the keys to understanding the response. It nearly always involves weighing a host of unknown factors. Firefighting experts agree that having engines and firefighters very close to the site of an outbreak is essential, especially in very windy conditions; fires in those cases must be stamped out immediately, or they will very likely begin to spread out of control. “Once a wind-driven fire is well established you’re not going to put it out,” said Patrick Butler, a former assistant chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department who ran the response to many of the major fires the city has faced over the past decade. With the threat of highly destructive fires increasing, he said, fire authorities should “flood” fire-prone areas with extra fire engines and crews during times of high winds.But such predeployments are enormously costly, and fire chiefs often have a tough task convincing political leaders to repeatedly spend the money on them — especially when no fires break out. Chief Butler, who now runs the fire department in Redondo Beach, Calif., said he prepositioned firefighters on a large scale at least 30 times during heightened fire threats. Fires broke out after those threats just three times, but to him, it was worth the cost. “I’m not in the business of making decisions that are politically palatable,” he said.Chief Marrone began preparing for his own predeployments after meteorologists at the National Weather Service, on the first weekend of the new year, issued a bulletin warning of a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” — code words for a severe weather warning, the kind the federal government issues only about two dozen times a year. Based on the conditions in Los Angeles, it was clear that fire would almost certainly ensue. The chief authorized overtime and supplemental state funding to add 100 people for duty drawn from a pool of around 2,000 off-duty firefighters so they could have more units prepositioned in areas known to be vulnerable to fire, including Santa Clarita and the Santa Monica mountains. He prepositioned four strike teams, each with five trucks, and asked the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the state fire agency known as Cal Fire, to preposition two more teams. The staffing was typical for a red-flag wind event, he said. Early on Tuesday morning, the chief ordered that 900 firefighters who were finishing their shifts stay on the job. The decision increased the number of county firefighters on duty to 1,800. And the U.S. Forest Service, which fights fires in national forests, also began mobilizing. Adrienne Freeman, an agency spokeswoman, said that on Monday, the day before the winds kicked up and the first fires started, the agency had 30 trucks from out of state and Northern California in place at four Southern California forests and at a local coordination center. On Monday night, the agency called in 50 more trucks that arrived on Tuesday, she said. The city fire department proceeded with prepositioning the nine fire trucks it was deploying on Tuesday morning, according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times, three each in Hollywood, Sunland Valley — in the northwestern part of the city — and near the city of Calabasas in the western foothills. The extra 90 firefighters the city was predeploying were called up on overtime. No extra trucks were sent to Pacific Palisades. Those extra firefighters the city of Los Angeles called on made up less than a tenth of the approximately 1,000 on duty on any given day. And the 100 additional people called up by the county added to its daily firefighting force of 900.Mr. Leonard, the city battalion chief, said the trucks were positioned based on historical patterns of fire during high-wind events. “Predicting where the fire is going to start is a scientific guess,” he said. Then the wind started, and the first embers started flying. Chief Crowley, with the city department, texted the chiefs in the counties surrounding Los Angeles at 10:35 a.m. Tuesday, five minutes after the Palisades fire was first reported, notifying them, according to an account of the messages shared with The Times. Chief Marrone responded immediately. “What do you need?” he texted. The Ventura County chief said he was sending strike teams. “They’re on the road now,” he wrote. Orange County’s chief said he could provide three strike teams of five trucks each, along with a helicopter and a crew that uses hand tools to cut firebreaks. The Los Angeles Fire Department put out a call for off-duty members to come to their stations and scoured mechanic yards for vehicles. Tens of thousands of people were being evacuated out of Pacific Palisades as the fire spread out of the foothills, leaping across the four lanes of Pacific Coast Highway and wiping out restaurants and homes along the coast. Then, at 6:18 p.m. on Tuesday, came more stunning news: the second major fire, in Altadena, had ignited. Chief Marrone put Eaton Canyon, the site of the new fire, into a navigation app and set off from the Palisades. Stuck in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic, he could see the fresh fire and its smoke swelling into the sky. Around 9 p.m., he called Brian Marshall, the chief of fire and rescue for the California Office of Emergency Services. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “I said, ‘We are out of resources, we need help,’” Chief Marrone said. He requested 50 strike teams, a total of 250 fire engines and 1,000 firefighters. At 10:29 p.m., a third major fire ignited in Sylmar, in the northernmost part of the San Fernando Valley, about 25 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, and a fourth broke out near Santa Clarita on Wednesday afternoon. Mutual aid teams from across the West, and beyond, began streaming toward Los Angeles. Firefighters tried and failed to stay ahead of the furious flames. “Resources were scarce” during the initial hours of the blazes, said Capt. Jason Rolston of the Orange County Fire Authority, who was among those who traveled to join the firefighting effort in Los Angeles. “There were too many houses to protect, and not enough fire engines.” The wind was gusting so powerfully that smoke boiled across the terrain. Firefighters said the barrage of ash and soot was so overwhelming at times that they struggled to even move through the fire zone. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “There would be times when you couldn’t see 10 feet in front of the rig,” said Capt. Shawn Stacy, another Orange County firefighter who deployed to the Palisades fire. “What went wrong is that you had 80-m.p.h. winds.”Some firefighters said there was so much demand on water systems that they ran out of water. Capt. Ryan Brumback of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said he was five hours into an all-out effort to save buildings in Altadena from the Eaton fire early Wednesday morning when the hydrants started running dry — a situation firefighters also faced in the Palisades. Suddenly, he said, “we noticed our hoses became very limp and soft.” The problem, he said, was that a power shut-off intended to prevent additional ignitions also shut off the pumps that help with water pressure in Altadena. “It was devastating, because you want to do all that you can do.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT By Friday, both initial major fires were still burning with little containment, and others that ignited later in the week also required aggressive responses, particularly in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening and in the West Hills, northwest of Los Angeles, late on Thursday. Fire officials were still focused on saving lives and homes, and said they would spend time later looking at whether their preparations had been sufficient. “It wasn’t for a lack of preparation and decision making that resulted in this catastrophe,” Chief Marrone said at a news briefing on Saturday. “It was a natural disaster.” The coming analysis, several experts said, will have to take into account that the standard guidelines that have long determined red-alert fire responses may no longer apply, as weather and fires become more virulent. “There’s going to be a real reckoning about land use, escape routes, water pressure, water supply,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former longtime Los Angeles City Council member and county supervisor. Mr. Yaroslavsky said the fire might serve as a “Pearl Harbor” moment for the city, an alarm bell that signals fundamental new questions about how the city approaches the threat of wildfires. “A lot,” he said, “will be reassessed.”

Norovirus is surging across the U.S., with case numbers higher now than they've been at the same time in more than a decade, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There is no antiviral treatment for the miserable but thankfully short-lived illness, and no vaccine—yet. But scientists at Moderna are in the late stages of testing what could be the first such shot, using mRNA technology against the virus. Here’s what to know about norovirus and where things stand with the development of a stomach-bug vaccine. Why norovirus is raging right now “Commonly known as the stomach flu, norovirus has been around forever, and has become the leading cause of gastroenteritis or inflammation of the intestinal tract that causes vomiting and diarrhea,” says Dr. Edmund Milder, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital and UC San Diego Health. There are nearly 50 different subtypes, or genotypes, of norovirus, with different ones circulating in different years. For the last decade or so, one version of the virus, called GII.4, has been responsible for most infections around the world. That changed last year when GII.17 became the dominant strain. That could partially explain the current uptick in cases, since most people who have been exposed to other types of norovirus would not have as strong immunity to this version, making them more vulnerable to disease. Branded Content XPRIZE at the 2025 TIME100 Summit: Making the Impossible, Possible By XPRIZE Norovirus symptoms For most people, the infection causes intestinal symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration. Unpleasant as they are, these symptoms don’t typically require medical care or hospitalization, and they tend to last just a few days. But older people and infants often experience worse disease, and each year in the U.S. about 100,000 people are hospitalized and nearly 1,000 people—mostly the elderly and the very young—die from the infection, mainly due to dehydration after not being able to keep down food and water, according to the CDC. Is norovirus like other viruses? No—for many reasons. First, it doesn’t take much of the virus to make someone sick. For most viruses, people would need to be infected with thousands of virus particles in order to feel ill, but it only takes as few as 10 to launch the intestinal symptoms typical of norovirus infection. To make matters worse, the virus is encased in a particularly hardy cover that allows it to survive for days on surfaces like countertops and doorknobs. Hand sanitizer isn't effective in killing norovirus—you'll need to wash your hands for 20 seconds with soap and water to remove as much virus as possible—and the it also can’t be destroyed with high heat or cold temperatures. The most effective way to kill the virus on contaminated surfaces is by using a diluted solution of bleach and water, and allowing it to sit on a surface for at least five minutes before wiping. Why isn’t there a norovirus shot yet? The nearly 50 different versions of the virus mean that “each genotype requires a different immune response to provide protection,” says Dr. Doran Fink, therapeutic head of gastrointestinal pathogens and bacterial vaccines at Moderna. So any vaccine would have to be an educated guess as to which strains are likely to circulate in a given year—similar to the strategy behind updating the flu vaccine each season. How close are we to having a norovirus vaccine? Moderna is currently enrolling 25,000 people around the world in a phase 3 trial of the shot, after earlier testing showed encouraging results. In those studies, people vaccinated with the mRNA shot generated antibodies that in lab tests effectively blocked the norovirus protein in human gut cells; those given a placebo vaccine did not show the same antibody activity. To improve the chances that the vaccine would be well-matched to circulating strains, Moderna’s vaccine candidate includes three different norovirus types. “It would be great if there were some conserved regions of the norovirus protein that could be targeted, but that’s not the case,” says Fink. Instead, their thinking goes, taking this multivalent approach should provide good protection against severe disease. It's a strategy the company is also using on its multivalent mRNA flu vaccine. And the mRNA platform allows scientists to change and update viral targets more quickly, making it ideal for pivoting if viral strains change each season. Targeting more than one viral protein has shown in the recent past to be effective: one of the mRNA COVID-19 shots was a bivalent vaccine that worked against two different strains of the virus. Fink says Moderna expects to finish signing up volunteers in the spring, and plans to follow them for at least six months. But it may take longer to get a full report on how effective the vaccine is in the real world, since that would require having a certain number of people catch the virus to evaluate how they do. Testing the vaccine in different sites around the world should provide more data, however. Would a vaccine stop me from getting norovirus? Like the COVID-19 vaccine, the mRNA norovirus vaccine candidate is not designed to prevent people from getting infected. But it would theoretically help anyone immunized—especially the very young and elderly—from getting severely ill and being hospitalized. How can I protect myself from norovirus? Since there are no antiviral treatments or vaccines yet, the best way to avoid getting sick is by practicing good hygiene. Wash your hands often and avoid touching your face and mouth. If you do get sick, stay home to avoid infecting others, since you can still shed virus for anywhere from a few days to weeks after you feel better.

A heavy mix of snow and sleet that swept across parts of the South is expected to melt and then freeze, making for slippery road conditions through Sunday, officials said. The storm on Friday struck areas unaccustomed to such winter weather, prompting flight cancellations, school closures and official warnings to stay off the roads when possible. A winter storm warning that stretched from eastern Oklahoma to Virginia was discontinued by Saturday morning, the National Weather Service said, after a mix of snow and freezing rain fell in cities including Jackson, Miss.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Atlanta. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Saturday morning, areas in the Mid-Atlantic, parts of Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania had received up to two inches of snow, according to the National Weather Service. Parts of Ohio and western Pennsylvania received up to five inches.Areas across the South, including southeastern Oklahoma and west-central Arkansas, will “have temperatures that are going to be in the 20s Sunday morning,” said Bob Oravec, a forecaster at the service. “A lot of melting is going to go on during the day, and then, as you might expect, freezing again at night,” he said. The widespread mix of wintry precipitation led to the cancellation of more than 3,000 flights in and out of airports in Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville and Charlotte, N.C., on Friday. That number had decreased to several hundred by Saturday morning. A ground stop was issued for Boston’s Logan Airport on Saturday morning, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, and multiple airports, including Dallas Fort Worth International and Cleveland Hopkins International, were undergoing de-icing procedures. At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, where nearly 60 percent of outgoing flights had been canceled or delayed, a ground stop was issued for all incoming Delta flights on Friday after an aborted takeoff led to passengers on a Delta plane being evacuated onto the snowy runway, according to the F.A.A. A Delta spokeswoman said that four people were treated for minor injuries and that there was “no indication of weather being the cause of the engine issue.”On Saturday morning, more than 300 flights in and out of the airport were canceled. On social media, the airport asked passengers to be prepared for possible delays. The icy, snowy mix made streets and highways treacherous across a wide swath of the South. A section of Interstate 22 in Mississippi and Alabama was shut because of a crash in Marshall County, in north-central Mississippi. In northern Alabama, many roads were ice covered and impassable, Jim Stefkovich, a meteorologist with the state’s Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement. “If you’re trying to get on the roads, don’t get on them,” Gov. Brian P. Kemp of Georgia said at a news conference on Friday, warning that, with temperatures remaining near the freezing mark, the mix of snow and icy rain would likely make roads hazardous through Sunday. In Atlanta, most shops and restaurants were shuttered. The city seemed to have learned its lesson after less than three inches of snow led to chaos in 2014, leaving motorists stranded, children stuck in buses and schools and government leaders scrambling to clean up the mess. The city and state seemed better prepared this time. Officials urged people to stay indoors, and highways and city streets were salted before the storm. The roads were virtually empty on Friday — save the occasional skier or sledder — as the morning’s powder melted into slush around noon.One exception to the closures was Waffle House. Benji Waugh, a customer, knew the famously resilient breakfast joint would be open for business. “Living in the South, anytime there’s a hurricane or a tornado or some kind of storm, everywhere shuts down,” he said in an interview at the Waffle House across from Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta. “But it’s just easy to go to Waffle House, because they’re always open.” Governor Kemp declared a state of emergency on Thursday in anticipation of the storm, as did his counterparts in Tennessee and Arkansas. More than seven inches of snow was reported on Saturday morning at Memphis International Airport, according to the Weather Service.

Sean Karaman, a freshman at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hadn’t always paid close attention to his credit card spending. But after taking a personal finance course on campus last fall, he said, he is much more likely to pay as he goes. “I’ve become best friends with my debit card,” said Mr. Karaman, 21, who plays on the U.N.L.V. hockey team. More than two-thirds of states require high school students to take a personal finance class before graduation, according to the Council for Economic Education. Now, personal finance courses, offered mostly as electives, are sprouting up at public and private colleges nationwide and getting a boost from a new initiative by Stanford University. While some colleges have long offered personal finance classes, the new effort to develop and promote college-level personal finance instruction carries Stanford’s academic heft. “There really is a need among all students, and society as a whole, to learn more about personal finance,” said J. Daniel Chi, chairman of the finance department at U.N.LV.’s Lee Business School. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Annamaria Lusardi, an economist and a financial literacy researcher who has directed the Stanford program since 2023, said people today were expected to shoulder more responsibility for their finances than in the past, when jobs came with fixed pensions rather than 401(k) plans that require workers to save and invest their own funds for retirement. “We have to manage our own money,” Dr. Lusardi said. “It’s too complex, to use common sense and rules of thumb.” Yet Americans have consistently shown low levels of financial literacy. On average, adults correctly answer only about half of 28 questions about concepts like earnings, savings, insurance and risk comprehension, according to an annual assessment of Americans’ working financial knowledge known as the P-Fin Index. The Stanford initiative aims to make personal finance education more accessible to more students, including first-generation college students and those from low-income families. In addition to holding an annual conference for educators, it collaborates with colleges and provides instructional materials and mentoring. It’s funded by a multimillion-dollar donation from Charles R. Schwab, the discount-brokerage pioneer, who is a Stanford alumnus; his wife, Helen; and the Charles R. Schwab Foundation for Financial Freedom, which supports financial literacy among young adults. More colleges have embraced the subject as research in the field has deepened, said John Y. Campbell, a Harvard economist who has taught a personal finance course for several years. It also helps to spark student’s interest in an economics major. “It turns out it’s a very good vehicle for teaching basic economics,” he said. The courses typically cover concepts like compound interest and the time value of money — the idea that a sum of money generally is worth more now than the same amount in the future, because of factors like inflation and the ability to invest — but details vary by institution. Because Harvard can offer generous financial aid to its students, Dr. Campbell said, they aren’t as concerned about educational debt as are some students at other colleges. Many Stanford graduates move on to careers in technology, so its introductory course covers topics like valuing stock options and the role of venture capital, said Michael Boskin, a Stanford economist who taught the course last year with Dr. Lusardi. The goal, he said, is to get students to understand how to think and reason their way through financial decisions. Dr. Boskin introduced the course with a colleague in 2020 after former students told him that they wished they had known more about evaluating pay and benefits packages when weighing job offers. Elisabeth Curtis, a senior lecturer in economics at Dartmouth, taught a personal finance course at its Hanover, N.H., campus for the first time last spring, to about two dozen students. Dr. Curtis said the course, which also explores the psychology of how and why people make decisions about money, was designed for students in non-finance majors. Terrance Odean, a finance professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said 900 students had enrolled for the spring session of his introductory personal finance management course. It covers major financial decisions like choosing a career, spending vs. saving and making investments, as well as how overconfidence and “present bias” — the tendency to value immediate benefits over long-term rewards — can affect choices. Alexandrea Coe, 19, a sophomore at Berkeley majoring in rhetoric and conservation & resource studies, took the course in her first semester. “I was aware of a lot of the things we went over, but I really didn’t understand them,” she said. One lesson that resonated, she said, was that as a young person, “your greatest asset is time,” so it pays to start saving and investing early. Stanford’s course covers basics like borrowing and credit scores, and investing principles such as diversification, or managing risk by investing in different types of assets. Students analyze various scenarios, such as choosing between investments and citing the reasons for their choice, and discuss the impact of taxes, fees and inflation on investment returns. They also learn that financial decisions often involve trade-offs, Dr. Boskin said: Your comfort with financial risk may depend on whether members of your family rely on you, and when considering job offers, you may favor a flexible schedule over a higher salary. “How do you value these things?” Dr. Boskin said. Some have criticized the notion of financial literacy as a distraction from the need to make the American financial system more equitable. Dr. Odean at Berkeley said financial instruction wasn’t a panacea. “I don’t think that people are in financial distress because they didn’t take my course,” he said. “We’re teaching them how to navigate the rules as they currently are.” Harvard’s course aims to help even wealthier students understand the financial difficulties faced by those from less affluent backgrounds, Dr. Campbell said. “I also ask students to think critically about that system,” he said. Here are some questions and answers about financial literacy instruction: Do colleges give academic credit for personal finance classes? Most colleges offer credit toward graduation for introductory courses that combine economic concepts with principles of personal money management. (Some schools may also offer noncredit financial coaching or counseling, as a student service.) Is personal finance instruction effective? An analysis of 76 studies, published in 2022 in The Journal of Financial Economics, found that financial education programs on average had “positive” effects on financial knowledge and behaviors. How can I test my own financial knowledge? Dr. Lusardi helped develop a series of questions on concepts that are fundamental to financial understanding, such as compound interest, inflation and whether it’s riskier to buy the stock of a single company or to invest in a stock mutual fund. You can take a three- or five-question version of the quiz on the website of Stanford’s Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center.

Before Summer Marshall headed to her bakery job on Tuesday, she dropped off her daughter at school and picked up a few supplies from Trader Joe’s in case the Santa Ana winds knocked out power. She was headed back to the mobile home she shared with her mother in Pacific Palisades when she saw a huge plume of smoke over the Santa Monica mountains. “It looked closer than I ever remember seeing — most fires start up toward Malibu,” Ms. Marshall said. Within the hour, she and her mother were frantically loading vital possessions into their car. As they crawled along Pacific Coast Highway surrounded by other cars packed with people, luggage and pets, Ms. Marshall turned to take a video with her phone. “You see all these cute little mobile homes and the sun going dark behind the smoke.” Their home, along with the entire Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates, was incinerated shortly after. “It looks like a bomb went off,” Ms. Marshall said. News media coverage of the Palisades fire has emphasized celebrities and wealthy Angelenos mourning the loss of their houses when they burned, like Adam Brody and Leighton Meester’s $6.5 million home, and heaving sighs of gratitude when they were spared, including Ben Affleck’s recently purchased $20 million spread. But amid the mansions and millionaires, there remained pockets of working-class residents, including food service workers like Ms. Marshall.She and her family are safe at an aunt’s house, but all of the mobile home park’s residents have been displaced. Overlooking Will Rogers State Beach, Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates was likely one of the most scenic mobile home parks in the United States. And many of the 500-square-foot homes were bought for a fraction of the cost of the large houses studding the surrounding hills, where the median home price topped $3 million. Perhaps most important in the real estate climate of Los Angeles, the lots were rent controlled. Ms. Marshall described the park as a close-knit mixture of retirees and working families, and the location also offered an easy commute to her job at the Petitgrain Boulangerie in nearby Santa Monica. “I need to go back to the bakery for my sanity,” Ms. Marshall said. On Tuesday, Hannah Marschall was scheduled for an afternoon shift as a server at the Santa Monica restaurant Milo & Olive. When the evacuation orders came, she was able to get her two cats and a smattering of personal items out of her two-bedroom apartment two miles from the Palisades Village that she and her boyfriend had moved into in October. If she had been working a morning shift, she never would have made it home. “I’m grateful. If I had been in Santa Monica, there would have been no way possible to get back to the Palisades to get my cats,” Ms. Marschall said. “We just got our last piece of furniture about a week and a half ago — a pullout couch my mom was supposed to stay on when visiting our apartment for the first time next weekend,” she added. On Wednesday, she found a video on X that showed the charred remains of a staircase that they recognized belonged to her building, a triplex on Sunset Boulevard. Ms. Marschall and her boyfriend moved to a rental property owned by his family in Malibu for now. For the moment, the fires make traveling to work in Santa Monica impossible. “There are only two ways through: P.C.H. and the Palisades,” she said, referring to the highway. In the Palisades mobile home park, Tony Kozlowski lived a few doors down from Summer Marshall and her mother, Virginia. A 72-year-old retiree, he had taken a job as a baker at the Pacific Palisades Vons grocery store to supplement his social security. “You start at 3 a.m. and no one’s around, it smells good and you play your music in the store,” he said. “When the store opens up, customers know your name. I do like it.” He found out about the fires as his 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. shift ended on Tuesday, and he rushed home. As he packed, planes roaring overhead scared his cat out of his arms. He searched for it, but the police told him he needed to evacuate. “I didn’t grab anything, just my brother’s ashes, and the clothes I had on my back.” Over the past two days, Mr. Kozlowski has juggled FEMA paperwork with trips to thrift stores and charities to get an outfit and a pair of shoes so he can go back to work. He starts Saturday at a nearby Santa Monica store, until the Palisades location reopens. He is not optimistic he will be able to live nearby, at least not in a place like he had, because of the expensive rents in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles. “It was rent controlled,” he said. “I had been there for 10 years in this trailer with an ocean view. I was so lucky.”

Columbia University and one of its longtime law professors, Katherine Franke, have severed ties after an investigation stemming from her advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestinian students. It was the latest fallout from student and faculty activism related to the Gaza War on a major university campus. Ms. Franke, a tenured professor known primarily for her work as founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, had been an advocate for pro-Palestinian students as protests erupted on the campus last school year. She was also one of several faculty members investigated by the university over allegations of antisemitism, after the school received complaints about comments she made about Israelis on a radio program. Describing her departure as a “termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” Ms. Franke said in a statement on Friday that she had reached an agreement with the university to leave, because Columbia had become a “toxic and hostile environment.” A Columbia University spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, said in a statement that the university was “committed to being a community that is welcoming to all and our policies prohibit discrimination and harassment.” She added that a complaint had been filed “alleging discriminatory harassment in violation of our policies. An investigation was conducted, and a finding was issued.” In a statement on Friday, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization where Ms. Franke previously served on the board, called the end of Ms. Franke’s Columbia career “an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy.” The investigation of Ms. Franke involved comments she made on the left-leaning media platform Democracy Now! after an incident in January 2024 on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library. A smelly substance had been released on pro-Palestinian students during a rally demanding the university divest from Israel. One student who was suspended in connection with the incident — and who subsequently sued the university — was identified as a former member of the Israel Defense Forces. In the Democracy Now! interview several days later, Ms. Franke said that she and other professors at Columbia had been concerned about Israeli students coming to Columbia “right out of their military service” because they had been known to harass Palestinian and other students on campus. Two Columbia colleagues filed a complaint against Ms. Franke, saying that her comments amounted to harassment of Israeli members of the Columbia community. An outside law firm hired by the university to investigate the complaint found last November that the remarks violated Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies, which Ms. Franke said she appealed. The investigator also concluded that Ms. Franke had violated policy by disclosing the name of one of the complainants against her and reposting a social media post that made disparaging comments about him. During a congressional hearing in April, Dr. Minouche Shafik, then Columbia’s president, was asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, what disciplinary actions had been taken against Ms. Franke. Ms. Stefanik misquoted Ms. Franke as having said that “all Israeli students who served in the I.D.F. are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus.” During the hearing, Dr. Shafik responded, “I agree with you that those comments are completely unacceptable and discriminatory.” Dr. Shafik’s remarks during the hearing, about Ms. Franke and others, drew sharp rebukes from faculty members as inappropriate and damaging to her relationship with the faculty. Dr. Shafik resigned several months later, becoming the third university president who appeared before the congressional committee to leave her job. In her statement on Friday, Ms. Franke called Dr. Shafik’s remarks during the hearing defamatory. “President Shafik was aware at that time that Congresswoman Stefanik’s summary of my comments was grossly inaccurate and misleading,” Ms. Franke said. She said the hearing testimony led to death threats against her, as well as other forms of harassment. After Dr. Shafik’s testimony, she wrote, colleagues had videotaped her without her consent and leaked the videos to right-wing organizations. Students, she said, had gone so far as to enroll in her class to provoke discussions that they could record and post online, then file complaints against her. “I have also come to regard Columbia University as having lost its commitment to its unique and important mission,” Ms. Franke said in her statement. Rather than fostering critical debate, research and learning, she said, the university had “demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with the very enemies of our academic mission.”

There are many ways of framing the scale of the dislocation in Los Angeles this week. As the ferocious ring of five wildfires roared across the region in a multi-day blaze that began Jan. 7., some 180,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes—the equivalent of pitching the entire population of Little Rock, Ark., out into the streets or filling Los Angeles’s massive So-Fi stadium to more than double its capacity and not letting anyone go home again. The Southern California blaze was a special kind of hell. At least 10 people lost their lives and officials expect more deaths to come to light before the multiple infernos are tamed. Thousands of homes and a sprawl of entire neighborhoods were transformed into outdoor charnel houses. Nursing home residents in Altadena, Calif., were evacuated into the night—riding in wheelchairs and pushing walkers, many in their night clothes, as a stinging snow of orange embers descended around them. Fire fighters watched helplessly as houses burned, their hoses at the ready but the hydrants to which they were connected producing no water or merely a low-pressure trickle. “Wildfires do not care about jurisdictional boundaries,” said Kathryn Barger, the chair of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, at a Jan. 9 news conference. Meanwhile, the sextet of localized blazes—the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire, the Hurst fire, the Sunset fire, the Lidia fire, and the Kenneth fire—blurred in the public mind and in the sprawl of destruction into one great undifferentiated inferno. President-Elect Donald Trump laid blame for the disaster at the feet of Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden. “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” Trump wrote in a Jan. 8 Truth Social post. As for Newsom, Trump faulted the governor for allegedly refusing “to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California.” Biden ignored Trump’s broadside. Newsom’s office hit back, posting on X: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration—that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.” Trump was wrong about FEMA, which released funds to fight the fires on Jan. 7; he was not wrong about the feeble water system, though it’s possible there is nothing the city could have done to keep it supplied sufficiently. The hydrants are fed by three one-million gallon tanks in the Pacific Palisades hills. Those were not meant to work alone, however, but rather to be supplemented by water from firefighting aircraft that, in this case, couldn’t fly in the cyclonic Santa Ana winds. At a news conference, Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the demand for water was four times greater “than we’ve ever seen in the system.” But there are bigger—far bigger—factors at play in the disaster, factors that have less to do with local politics and institutional preparedness and more to do with the existential matter of a planet grown sickly from climate change. A crisis that is feeding more and bigger storms and causing more and greater destruction—destruction that lawmakers and other leaders, here and around the world, still seem unable to muster the will to address. Here is the reality: The very metabolism of the Earth has been thrown off by an atmosphere choking on greenhouse gasses, and it will take more than political bickering to set things right. Another reality: Fixing the problem first requires understanding—and, even more fundamentally, accepting—the science. Only then can we implement policies and put in place protocols that help us both reduce the likelihood of more such crises and minimize the death and destruction when they ultimately do occur. It’s long been established that climate change turbocharges wildfires, with droughts, persistent heat, dried vegetation, and lightning storms all worsening in a warming world and all contributing to out-of-control blazes. That’s just one reason a new report from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Climate Change Service—a report that landed on Jan. 10, while L.A. still burned—arrived as such bad news. According to the release, 2024 was the first year global mean temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.6°C (2.88°F). That blows past the benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which sought to limit future warming to well below 2°C in the 21st century, with a preferred target no higher than 1.5°C. Doing so would help limit the impact of a hotter planet. In Southern California, the report could be read by the light of a burning city where, at one point, the rapidly moving fire incinerated the equivalent of five football fields per minute. Those blazes came not long after a bad year for wildfires in the U.S. overall. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, a clearinghouse for fire information and logistical resources, by mid-September 2024 alone, more than 38,000 wildfires had incinerated more than 7.8 million American acres—a pace slightly ahead of the annual U.S. average of more than 45,000 wildfires per year. While it’s still unclear what sparked the L.A. fires, the underlying cause goes back decades—if not centuries. Fire is one of the most primal expressions of a planet in upheaval; the Earth was born in molten violence and, under the right conditions—say, after hundreds of years of emissions released from burning fossil fuels—it still has an exceedingly fiery temperament. “As our planet continues to heat up, droughts are getting more intense in some regions of the world,” says Peter Kalmus, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The droughts, combined with higher temperatures, cause more frequent and intense fires in those regions.” Southern California is not remotely the only tinderbox part of the world, but it’s an especially flammable one—not just because of the droughts Kalmus speaks of, but because of their persistence. “The Southwest U.S. has been in megadrought since 1999,” says Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the school for climate and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “This is the primary reason we’re seeing so much more wildfire in the region, and all across the U.S. West up into Canada.” Then there is the tornadic power of the winds—most notably Southern California’s Santa Ana. Those ferocious atmospheric rapids get their power, explains Frank Marsik, associate research scientist in the college of engineering at the University of Michigan, by being forced to move through narrow channels in the mountains of northern Mexico and Southern California, “resulting in an increase in the speed of the winds. A good analogy for what happens with the Santa Ana winds would be the way that you can increase the speed of water flowing out of a garden hose by putting your thumb over the end, causing the water to flow through a much smaller area.” Wildfires are hardly the only sign of our warming world—or the dangerous mile-marker we passed in 2024 when we crossed the 1.5°C excess warming documented in the Copernicus report. Everywhere, the planet showed signs of heat swoon last year, with record high levels of water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; record low expanses of sea ice around Antarctica; and record oceanic temperatures in the North Atlantic, Indian, and western Pacific Oceans. July 22, 2024, went into the books as the hottest single day ever recorded worldwide, with the global average thermometer popping its top at a comparative fever level of 62.8°F (17.16°C). The 13 months that preceded that day were blistering too, with each one from June 2023 to June 2024 clocking in hotter than the same month in any previous year. “All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus’s European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in a statement that accompanied the release of the report. Human-generated greenhouse emissions were not the only factors that made 2024 so punishing. From May 2023 to May 2024, an El Niño current prevailed in the tropical Pacific, helping to drive average sea surface temperatures to a record-high 20.87°C (69.56°F), or more than half a degree celsius warmer than the 1991 to 2020 average. But even after El Niño ended and a more moderate La Niña cycle took over, the oceans stayed hot, with sea surface temperatures from July to December 2024 entering the record books second only to the same period in 2023. From June to October, sea ice around Antarctica reached its second lowest extent ever, also behind 2023. The Arctic, at its annual minimum sea ice in September, was its fifth lowest on record. High sea surface temperatures always lead to accelerated evaporation. In 2024, that meant record levels of water vapor in the atmosphere, with concentrations exceeding the 1991 to 2020 average by 5%. Not only does water vapor itself have a greenhouse effect, it also leads to extreme rainfall events, and 2024 saw plenty of them. They included catastrophic flooding in the northeast U.S. in August; in Spain in October; and in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Germany in September. Europe as a whole was hit especially hard by 2024’s record heat. The year was the warmest ever for the continent, with average temperatures 0.28°C (0.47°F) hotter than the previous record, set in 2020. Spring and summer were more than one and a half degrees celsius warmer than the seasonal average from 1991 to 2020. Human health worldwide was affected by the soaring temperatures. When the body cannot cool itself off sufficiently, symptoms of heat stress—including nausea, vomiting, loss of coordination, shortness of breath, dizziness and more—can occur. So-called strong heat stress commonly happens when outdoor temperatures reach or exceed 38°C (100.4°F); extreme heat stress, with more severe symptoms including brain swelling and vital organ damage, happens at 46°C (114.8°F). On July 10, 2024, Copernicus reports that 44% of the globe was affected by either strong or extreme heat stress—5% more than the average annual maximum. “These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapor levels…meant unprecedented heat waves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people,” said Samantha Burgess, the ECMWF’s strategic lead for climate, in a statement. That rainfall, interspersed with droughts is one more mechanism that leads to wildfires. Such a boom and bust cycle means a lot of lush greenery that grows in the rainy times, and a lot of dead leaves, trees and other tinder that gets left behind when things dry. “This is a perfect storm of fire weather: a combination of plentiful and extremely dry fuel,” says Kalmus. As earth’s temperature crossed new and troubling thresholds in 2024, so too did the chemistry of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide reached a record of 422 parts per million, or 2.9 parts per million higher than it was in 2023. Once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide—and its ability to warm our planet—remains there for hundreds of years. Methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas which does its damage at much lower concentrations, reached 1,897 parts per billion, or three parts per billion higher than in 2023. Said Laurence Rouil, director of the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service, in a statement: “Our data points clearly to a steady global increase of greenhouse gas emissions and these remain the main agent of climate change.” Persistent wildfires across the Americas were not only a result of global warming, but a cause of even more future heat, as Bolivia and Venezuela released record levels of wildfire-related carbon dioxide; also due to fires, Canada reached its second highest annual output. The Los Angeles fires are similarly pouring smoke and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the local topography—mountains that trap haze in the Los Angeles Basin—keeping the mess around. Nothing in the short term is going to ensure Southern California does not see a repeat of this week’s devastation, though the construction of more million-gallon water tanks can help prevent the hydrants from running dry again. The industrial-era greenhouse gas output that created the conditions that fed the fires was centuries in the making and it will, ultimately, be generations in the fixing. If there was any good news in the Copernicus report it is that a single year that exceeds pre-industrial temperatures by 1.5°C or more is not the end of the story. The Paris agreement considers the 1.5°C threshold breached only if that is the average temperature increase over a 20-year stretch. And so, as the Los Angeles blaze rages, as fire-ravaged communities take stock of the destruction, as families mourn—as we collectively struggle and grieve and pick up the pieces—the disaster is at once a warning and an admonition: There is still time for aggressive climate action to lower emissions and bring temperatures to heel in the process. “Humanity is in charge of its own destiny…how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence,” said Buontempo. “The future is in our hands. Swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate.”

The authorities in Louisiana on Wednesday closed a 100-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that spans nearly half the state, as a powerful winter storm brought record snowfall to the Gulf Coast and triggered the state’s first-ever blizzard warning. The announcement shortly after midnight meant that 200 miles of the highway in Louisiana were closed because of deteriorating conditions. The authorities had previously closed a 50-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and Lafayette, and another 50 miles in and around New Orleans since early Tuesday. The eight inches of snow that fell at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport on Tuesday beat a record of 2.7 inches set in 1963, according to the National Weather Service. Interstate 10 is one of three highways that run coast-to-coast in the United States and a crucial east-west link for the southern Louisiana cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Its span in Louisiana is just under 275 miles, and connects the state with Mississippi and Texas. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most of the stills posted by the Louisiana traffic department from cameras along Interstate 10 at around 2 a.m. local time showed deserted, snow-covered stretches of the highway.