• Climate change is making North America warmer and drier, creating more favorable conditions for wildfires – this is well-established at a continental scale, but a new paper added strong evidence at a regional scale.
• A new study found that human-driven climate change was the main driver of worsening ‘fire weather’ – hot, dry, and windy conditions that help wildfires start and spread – in Western North America over the last 50 years.
• The contributions from human-driven climate change are given as a range; most of that range suggests human-driven climate change is entirely responsible, but even the lowest end of the range shows it’s mostly responsible (81% or more).
• According to scientists we interviewed, these results may suggest that in the absence of human-driven climate change, natural atmospheric conditions would have decreased fire weather in the region over that 50 year period.
• This new paper adds to a growing body of evidence showing that climate change is worsening wildfires – and the conditions driving them – in Western North America.