


"The fires in California and here in Arizona are a clear example of what happens as the Earth warms, particularly as the West warms, and the warming caused by humans is making fire season longer and longer," said University of Arizona geoscientist Jonathan Overpeck. "It's certainly an example of what we'll see more of in the future."

Since 1984, the area burned by the West's largest wildfires - those of more than 1,000 acres - have increased by about 87,700 acres a year, according to an April study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. And the areas where fire has been increasing the most are areas where drought has been worsening and "certainly points to climate being a major contributor," study author Philip Dennison of the University of Utah said.

The top five years with most acres burned happened in the past decade, federal records show. From 2010 to 2013, about 6.4 million acres a year burned on average; in the 1980s it was 2.9 million acres a year.



Likewise, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in March that wildfires are on the rise in the western U.S., have killed 103 Americans in 30 years, and will likely get worse.