A major wildfire has burned more than 15-thousand acres northwest of Los Angeles, forcing evacuations and closing Pyramid Lake.

It’s the first big blaze of the 2024 fire season, with another, smaller wildfire igniting near Lancaster, which has since been contained. It’s only mid- June, with the peak of fire season far off, but we’ve already had a couple of brief heat waves and after a wet winter and early spring, the late spring has brought record-breaking heat across the West. What does that portend for this year’s wildfire season? El Niño is on the wane, it looks like a La Niña is coming, what could that all mean? 

For more on all of this, KCBS Radio anchor Patti Reising and KCBS Insider Doug Sovern were joined by Noah Diffenbaugh, the noted climate scientist who is a professor at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.