Prolonged drought and those powerful Santa Ana winds set up extreme conditions that have fueled those devastating Los Angeles area wildfires, conditions compounded by climate change.

And today, researchers from NOAA and NASA underlined that point, releasing analysis showing that 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, dating back almost 200 years.

The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred in the past decade, according to those agencies.

To break down the report and its implications, we're joined by Gavin Schmidt.

He's the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA.

Thanks for being with us.

Thank you very much.

Let's talk first about the wildfires, because wildfires are uncommon in the winter months.

So help us understand the conditions, the factors that came together that contributed to these

devastating wildfires out in Los Angeles.

So fires need a number of ingredients.

So you need to have fuel that's going to burn.

You need to have what's called fire weather.

That's the dry air and the strong winds that are most conducive to allowing wildfires to spread.

And of course, you need an ignition source.

And the climate aspect of this is very much in the, both in the fuel load and in the fire weather aspects.

So in southern California, we used to think of the late fall as being fire season.

Well, now fire season stretches out all year because the temperatures and the evaporative

draw, the drying out of the land surface has been increasing as temperatures have increased.

And so the other part of that is the fuel load.

One of the things that we've been seeing in California is this kind of whiplash between

extreme wet events like multiple atmospheric rivers at the beginning of last year and then

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