As if it weren’t bad enough already, wildfire season is getting worse across the western United States. Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky explains the hows and the whys of this ongoing and deadly change.
Alaska, the great northern frontier of America, is being reshaped by climate change. While rising temperatures are altering its character and landscape, they are also bringing the ravages of wildfires. In the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the country, with average temperatures up by nearly 3°F. By 2050,
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The West continues to be a fiery inferno as August starts to fade into September. Wildfires have exploded across the region this month. There have been 115 large wildfires to date including 66 large fires that are still burning. Those fires along with thousands of smaller blazes have contributed to 7.7 million acres burned in the U.S. That puts
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Sap a forest of rain — say, for three or four years — toss in seemingly endless sunshine and high temperatures, and you’ve got just the right recipe for some catastrophic wildfires. Such is the story playing out in the West, where, thanks in part to climate change, drought-fueled infernos are incinerating forests at a record pace from Alaska to
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Scientific progress and more than a century of living with wildfire have boosted Western resilience to the threat. But improvements in how wildfire dangers have been managed have fallen far short of the reimaginations of landscapes that are needed. “We’ve made good progress, but not good enough,” Jan van Wagtendonk, a retired Yosemite National Par
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