Aircraft battling fires raging through the Los Angeles area are dropping more than water: Hundreds of thousands of gallons of hot-pink fire suppressant ahead of the flames in a desperate effort to stop them before they destroy more neighborhoods.

The fires have killed at least 24 people, displaced thousands and destroyed more than 12,000 structures since they began last Tuesday. Four fires driven by strong Santa Ana winds have charred about 62 square miles (160 square kilometers), according to Cal Fire.

Some people across Los Angeles have worked for years to increase the number of trees that give respite from heat and air pollution.

The tree advocates have confronted increasing drought, bad trimming and objections from neighbors who resent leaves and sap. Now they wonder what this month's devastating fires have done to their efforts.

After a weekend spent blocking the explosive growth of fires that destroyed thousands of homes and killed at least 24 people in the Los Angeles area, firefighters got a slight break with calmer weather but cast a wary eye on a forecast for yet more wind.

Should that happen, already burned homes and valleys could flare anew, sending embers to unburned territory miles downwind. New fires could add to the complication.

The death toll from the wildfires ravaging the Los Angeles area rose to 16 as crews battled to cut off the spreading blazes before potentially strong winds return that could push the flames toward some of the city's most famous landmarks.

Five of the deaths were attributed to the Palisades Fire and 11 resulted from the Eaton Fire, the Los Angeles County coroner's office said in a statement Saturday evening.

Californians are demanding to know who is at fault for the vast devastation caused by the raging Los Angeles wildfires, as a strict curfew went into force to prevent looting and lawlessness.

Earth recorded its hottest year ever in 2024, with such a big jump that the planet temporarily passed a major climate threshold, several weather monitoring agencies announced Friday.

Last year's global average temperature easily passed 2023's record heat and kept pushing even higher. It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris climate pact, according to the European Commission's Copernicus Climate Service, the United Kingdom's Meteorology Office and Japan's weather agency.

Firefighters hoped for a break Friday from fierce winds that have fueled massive blazes in the Los Angeles area, killing 10 people, obliterating whole neighborhoods and setting the nation's second-largest city on edge.

The fires have burned more than 10,000 homes and other structures since Tuesday, when they first began popping up around a densely populated, 25-mile (40-kilometer) expanse north of downtown Los Angeles. No cause has been identified for the largest fires.

Firefighters battled to control a series of major fires in the Los Angeles area early Thursday that have killed five people, ravaged communities from the Pacific Coast to Pasadena and sent thousands of people frantically fleeing their homes.

Ferocious winds that drove the flames and led to chaotic evacuations have calmed somewhat and were not expected to be as powerful during the day. That could provide an opportunity for firefighters to make progress reining in blazes that have hopscotched across the sprawling region, including massive ones in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

Remote, icy and mostly pristine, Greenland plays an outsized role in the daily weather experienced by billions of people and in the climate changes taking shape all over the planet.

Greenland is where climate change, scarce resources, tense geopolitics and new trade patterns all intersect, said Ohio University security and environment professor Geoff Dabelko.

California firefighters battled wind-whipped wildfires that tore across the Los Angeles area, destroying homes, clogging roadways as tens of thousands fled and straining resources as the fires burned uncontained early Wednesday.

The flames from a fire that broke out Tuesday evening near a nature preserve in the inland foothills northeast of LA spread so rapidly that staff at a senior living center had to push dozens of residents in wheelchairs and hospital beds down the street to a parking lot. The residents — one as old as 102 — waited there in their bedclothes as the night sky glowed red from flames and embers fell around them until ambulances, buses and even construction vans arrived to take them to safety.