Continuing the fire discussion – it’s worth clarifying that climate is indeed, despite recently amplified disinformation, expanding the threat of wildfires.
Of particular concern is the expansion of wildfires from the more arid western areas we have grown accustomed to, eastward toward larger populations.
Over the next few weeks, there’s little relief in the form of rain on the horizon for Nebraska. Another big surge of wind is expected Thursday and will be preceded by record heat on Wednesday. A recently updated seasonal outlook from the Climate Prediction Center expects more drought through June.
he same goes for places such as New Mexico, Wyoming, Florida, Texas, South Dakota and parts of Arizona, said Casperson. It reached 84 degrees in Flagstaff, Arizona, on Thursday — a temperature that had never previously been reached in the city before May 2, considering records dating to 1898.
But the state Casperson is watching the most closely?
“Colorado is where I’m looking,” he said.
The state has a history of powerful, explosive blazes that can rip through dry grasslands and forests and have only been getting worse — 17 of the 20 largest wildfires occurred in the last 10 years. In 2020, three wildfires shattered records with how much land they burned, damaging large parts of state parks. A year later, the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in the suburbs outside Boulder.
And now, a historically low snowpack in the state has enabled small fires to grow faster than they would normally in March. According to the Colorado climate center at Colorado State University, “essentially all of Colorado is in a snow drought.” Mountain ranges that would usually be covered in white this time of year have large patches of dirt exposed, and the amount of water stored in snow is the lowest it’s been since 1987, the Climate Center reported last month.
One blaze called the 24 Fire currently burning near Fort Carson by Colorado Springs more than doubled in size in about 24 hours: Growing from 1,927 acres Saturday evening to 4,607 by Sunday afternoon, according to updates from the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.Firefighters in Eagle County, home to the world-class ski resort Vail, are preparing for their “worst wildfire season ever” due to the extremely dry state of the timber, the Daily Vail reported.
Recently, some commentators have tried to dismiss recent increases in the areas burnt by fires in the US, claiming that fires were much worse in the early part of the century. To do this, they are ignoring clear guidance by scientists that the data should not be used to make comparisons with earlier periods.
The US National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), which maintains the database in question, tells Carbon Brief that people should not “put any stock” in numbers prior to 1960 and that comparing the modern fire area to earlier estimates is “not accurate or appropriate”.
Here, Carbon Brief takes a look at the links between climate change and wildfires, both in the US and across the globe. As with any environmental issue, there are many different contributing factors, but it is clear that in the western US climate change has made – and will continue to make – fires larger and more destructive.
As one scientist tells Carbon Brief: “There is no question whatsoever that climate plays a role in the increase in fires.”
According to data from the NIFC, there has been a clear trend in increased area burned by wildfires in the US since the 1980s, when reliable US-wide estimates based on fire situation reports from federal and state agencies became available.
Today, wildfires are burning more than twice the area than in the 1980s and 1990s. These figures include all wildland fires in both forested and non-forested areas. Most of the area burned today is in the western US, where drier conditions tend to allow for large, quickly-spreading wildfires.
The black bars in the top panel of the figure below show the annual area burned (in acres) by wildfires since 1983 when reliable data became available. The blue line shows the linear trend in fires over the same period. The bottom panel shows all of the data in their database, including pre-1983 values where the data is of poorer quality.
The NIFC explicitly warns users on its website: “Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result, the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”
Those sceptical about the role of climate change in the recent increase in fires have pointed to the full dataset, trying to argue that the fire area has decreased by around 80% over the past century.
This is not an accurate comparison, according to Randy Eardley, a spokesman at the NIFC. As he tells Carbon Brief:
I wouldn’t put any stock in those numbers. To try and compare any of the more modern data to that earlier data is not accurate or appropriate, because we didn’t have a good way to measure [earlier data]. Back then we didn’t have a reliable reporting system; for all I know those came from a variety of different sources that often double-counted figures. When you look at some of those years that add up to 60 or 70 million acres burned a lot of those acres have to be double counted two or three times. We didn’t have a system to estimate area burned until 1960, but it was really refined in 1983.
If 50m acres had actually burned in the early 20th century, it would amount to an area of land equal to the entire state of Nebraska going up in flames every year.
Eardley suggests that earlier records were inflated by including areas where fires were purposefully set to clear forests for agriculture, or where rangelands were torched to get rid of sagebrush to improve grazing conditions. Other federal reports suggest that most of the area burned between 1930 and 1950 was in southeastern US and were primarily intentionally set fires for clearing land.
Like fires in the West, wildfires in the eastern and southeastern U.S. are increasing. Over the past 40 years, the region has seen a 10-fold jump in the frequency of large burns. (Many risk factors contribute to wildfires, including but not limited to climate change.)
..the wildland-urban interface — that is, the high-fire-risk communities that abut tracts of undeveloped land — is more extensive in the East than in the West, with up to 72% of the land in some states qualifying as WUI. The region is also much more densely populated, meaning practically every wildfire that ignites has the potential to threaten human property and life.
It’s this density combined with the prevalent WUI that most significantly distinguishes Eastern fires from those in the comparatively rural West. One fire manager warned Smithwick that a worst-case-scenario wildfire could run across the entirety of New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the nation, in just 48 hours.
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Of increasing concern in the Northern Great Lakes region, large amounts of dead trees and woody trash in forested areas impacted by recent severe spring ice storms, in 2025 and 26.
Petoskey Michigan News – Review:
Officials have also expressed serious concerns that the amount of debris drying out on forest floors will significantly increase wildfire danger across the region.
“One of the things that we’re taking away from this is I think we’re still seeing some of the devastation up in the northern parts of the county. Lots of trees down,” said Emmet County Sheriff Matt Leirstein. “In the next few years, a lot of that is going to dry out and I think that’s going to create a huge fire hazard.”