Daniel Swain in Inside Climate News: California and Colorado Fires May Be Part of a Climate-Driven Transformation of Wildfires Around the Globe

The wildfires that exploded over the past few days in California and Colorado show clear influences of global warming, climate scientists say, and evidence of how a warming and drying climate is increasing the size and severity of fires from the California coast to the high Rocky Mountains. Despite what may look like a new world of wildfire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of California, Los Angeles, said few climatologists and fire scientists have been surprised by the severity of the fires across the West this year.