The arrest this week of a suspect for starting the fire that led to last January’s deadly Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles came as no real surprise.
Arson was hinted at as early as February. People had previously been arrested for arson or arson has been suspected in connection with recent wildfires in New Jersey, New York, California, Hawaii, Canada, Greece and other places. So when the Department of Justice announced during its press conference this week that evidence of arson developed early in the investigation, it came as no shock.
But the first and last instinct of climate hoaxers is always to blame climate change. Sen. Bernie Sanders blamed climate change in an X post that garnered 18.5 million views on Jan 8.
The New York Times, PBS News Hour, Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and Axios soon joined the bandwagon.
Leftover Biden staffers in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the activist-researchers at World Weather Attribution, whose occupation is to blame bad weather on climate change, chimed in weeks later.
Most recently, the National Academy of Sciences used the Los Angeles wildfires as part of its pretext for attacking the Trump EPA effort to rescind the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.
But it’s been obvious for at least 150 years that climate change has nothing to do with the January wildfires. On Oct. 30, 1875, the Anaheim Gazette even warned readers of the exact same risky conditions that existed in January 2025: “The terrible conflagration that occurred in Virginia City yesterday, with all its horror of a useless fire department, because of a meager water supply, is what will happen some of these days to Anaheim.”
The paper continued: “Suppose a fire should break out in some of our many fire nests, which are too abundant now, or among closely packed wooden buildings at the inopportune time when a heavy sea breeze was blowing, or when our dreaded Santa Ana wind came upon us… what could be done?”
And that eerie warning from the past – from the failed fire hydrants to the burn-ready buildings to the Santa Ana winds – is exactly what happened to Los Angeles in 2025 once the arsonist struck.
No global warming needed. Nor is any warming even occurring in the area.
Los Angeles is actually cooler now than it was in the late 1950s per U.S. government data. Although it was unusually dry in Los Angeles County during September to December 2024, the precipitation trend during that same period has actually increased slightly since 1895, also per U.S. government data.
Blaming the Los Angeles wildfires on global warming was always a lie and not a harmless one. The stock price of Edison International, the parent company of electric utility South California Edison, took a massive hit from which it has still not recovered, despite the stock market being at record highs and electricity demand exploding.
I don’t know whether the suspect arrested for setting the Palisades fire will be found guilty. But I do know that “climate change” is not. Ahead of the Democrat primary for the 2020 election, Sanders said he wanted to criminally investigate fossil fuel executives for lying about climate change. This would be a good time for him to look in the mirror.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts at X at @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PalisadesFire_fromDowntown.png)
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