Why Misinformation About the L.A. Fires Keeps Spreading

Almost no city in the country is destroyed more often than Los Angeles. America’s second-biggest city has been flattened, shaken, invaded, subsumed by lava, and calved off into the sea dozens of times on screen over the years; as the filmmaker and critic Thom Andersen has said, “Hollywood destroys Los Angeles because it’s there.”

But, understandably, when this destruction leaps from Netflix to a newscast, it’s an entirely different horror to behold. The L.A. County fires have now collectively burned an area more than twice the size of Manhattan; more than 10,000 businesses and homes that were standing last weekend are now ash. Officially, 10 people have died, but emergency managers have warned the public to brace for more. “It looks like an atomic bomb dropped in these areas. I don’t expect good news, and we’re not looking forward to those numbers,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said in a late Thursday press conference.

The mind gropes for an explanation for this horror — and lands in bizarre places. Much has been made in the past few days of the rampant proliferation of conspiracy theories and rumors about the fires, ranging from the believable to the totally absurd. Alex Jones has claimed the fires are part of a “globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the U.S.” (a theory incoming government official Elon Musk endorsed as “true”). Libs of TikTok and others have said that the Los Angeles Fire Department’s hiring practices emphasizing diversity have left it strapped for personnel to fight the wildfires (Musk endorsed this one, too). President-elect Donald Trump has blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the well-publicized occurrence of dry fire hydrants, citing a “water declaration resolution” that supposedly limited firefighters’ access to water, even though such a thing doesn’t exist. Still others have taken to TikTok to spread claims that the fires were intentionally started to burn rapper and producer Sean “Diddy” Combs’ property and hide criminal evidence that could be used to support sex trafficking and racketeering charges against him (another lie). Mel Gibson even used the disaster as an opportunity to share his thoughts about climate change on The Joe Rogan Podcast (spoiler alert: he doesn’t think it’s real), even as his house in Malibu burned to the ground.

“We need some kind of explanation psychologically, especially if you’re not accustomed to that kind of thing happening,” Margaret Orr Hoeflich, a misinformation scholar, told me of how conspiracy theories spring up during disasters. She added that much of the rhetoric she’s seen — like that some cabal set the fires intentionally — has been used to “explain” other similar disasters, including the wildfire in Lahaina in 2023. (“The Diddy one is really unique,” she allowed.)

It’s convenient to call this the coping mechanism of loons, bad actors, the far right, or people who want to promote a political agenda disingenuously, but left-leaning thinkers aren’t exempt. Posts blaming ChatGPT make important points about AI technologies’ energy and water use, but the fires aren’t “because” of ChatGPT.

I’ve also seen the fires blamed on “forest management,” although the landscape around L.A. isn’t trees; it’s shrubland. “This kind of environment isn’t typically exposed to low intensity, deep, frequent fires creeping through the understory, like many dry forests of the Sierra Nevadas or even Eastern Oregon and Washington,” where the U.S. Forest Service’s history of fire has created the conditions for the high-intensity megafires of today, Max Moritz, a cooperative extension wildfire specialist at U.C. Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, told me earlier this week. The shrublands around L.A., rather, “naturally have long-interval, high-intensity, stand-replacing fires” — that is, fires that level almost all vegetation in an area before new growth begins.

The fires in L.A. are extreme not so much because the landscape hasn’t been managed properly (not to mention that prescribed burns in the steep hillsides and suburbs are challenging and huge liabilities), but rather because we’ve built neighborhoods into a wildland that has burned before and will burn again. But unless your algorithm is tuned to the frequency of climate and weather models, you won’t necessarily find this more complicated narrative on social media.

We should also be precise in how we talk about climate change in relation to the fires. It’s true the fires have an excess of dry vegetative fuels after a wet winter and spring, which germinated lots of new green shoots, followed by a hot, dry summer and delayed start to the rainy season, which burned them to a crisp — classic “see-sawing” between extremes that you can expect to see as the planet warms. But droughts don’t always have a strong climate change signal, and wildfires can be tricky to attribute to global warming definitively. Were the Los Angeles fires exacerbated by our decades of burning fossil fuels? It is pretty safe to say so! But right-wing narratives aren’t the only ones that benefit from an exaggerated posture of certainty.

To state what is hopefully obvious: Being overly confident in attributing a disaster to climate change is not equivalent to denying the reality of climate change, the latter being very much more wrong and destructive than the former. But it’s also true overall that humans, as a species, don’t like ambiguity. Though the careful work of uncovering causes and attributing them can take years, it’s natural to look for simple answers that confirm our worldviews or give us people to blame — especially in the face of a disaster that is so unbelievably awful and doesn’t have a clear end. If there’s a role for the creative mind during all of this, it’s not in jumping to logical extremes; it’s in looking forward, ambitiously and aggressively, to how we can rebuild and live better.

“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going around, and I would just try to emphasize that this is a really complex problem,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me this week. “We have lots of different responsible parties. To me, what has happened requires more of a rethink than a blame game.”