Climate change has ratcheted up the risk of explosive wildfire growth in California by 25% and will continue to drive extreme fire behavior for decades to come, even if planet-warming emissions are reduced, a new study has found. "Emissions reductions have a minimal impact on wildfire danger in the near term -- the next several decades," said author Patrick T. Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, a Berkeley-based think tank. "So it's important to look at more direct on-the-ground solutions to the problem like fuel reduction." Although previous studies have looked at the impact of climate change on broader metrics like annual area burned, as well on conditions that are conducive to wildfires, like aridity, the research published Wednesday in Nature drills down on how rising temperatures affected individual fires, and how they might continue to do so in the future. The researchers analyzed nearly 18,000 fires that ignited in California between 2003 and 2020.

Smoke from a 2019 Northern California wildfire could be seen by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Research by scientists from UCLA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount of land in the western U.S. that has been destroyed by large wildfires over the past two decades. Rong Fu, a UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and the study's corresponding author, said the trend is likely to worsen in the years ahead. "I am afraid that the record fire seasons in recent years are only the beginning of what will come, due to climate change, and our society is not prepared for the rapid increase of weather contributing to wildfires in the American West." The dramatic increase in destruction caused by wildfires is borne out by U.S. Geological Survey data.