Bzzzt, sorry! Can't let this one go.
Los Angeles is actually a Mediterranean climate. The northern half of the county is actual desert, though, as is the area (I think) that Raltar is fleeing from.
Here's an excerpt from
a former History professor's campaign to get the LA Times to stop promoting the myth of LA as a desert: Quote:
According to the widely used Koppen classification, Los Angeles and its coastal basin are humid, with a Mediterranean climate of winter rains and warm summers similar to its European namesake. In fact, migrants from the eastern states, arriving in the early nineteenth century, described a Los Angeles plain filled with ponds, forested, and anything but a desert. The ponds dried up and the forests disappeared, not because the climate changed but because resources were simply overused.
{snipped}
Given the city's mean annual temperature of 65 degrees, to qualify as a desert under the Koppen system Los Angeles' yearly rainfall would have to average less than 7.22 inches. That has occurred less than ten times in the past 125 years. To put it another way, with its nearly 15 inches of rain each year the city would have to have a mean annual temperature of 100 degrees to be a desert. With a temperature like that the basin's overpopulation problem would quickly disappear.
A
Koppen climate map at Wikipedia shows LA as having a "Dry-summer subtropical or Mediterranean climate". The real desert starts about 50 miles inland, from what I can tell.
So yes, it's hot, but no, this ain't the desert.