During some of the worst hours in Camp Fire, which in 2018 burned the town of Paradise, California to the ground, the fire was growing so fast it ate up 10,000 acres within just 90 minutes.
Wildfires like the Camp Fire that intensify and spread enormously within a single day, hour, or even minutes, keep fire experts up at night. Now a new study, published Wednesday in Nature, uses a machine-learning model to show that climate change has nudged the risk of fast-spreading fires up by about 25% on average in California. That's compared to a time before humans heated up Earth's atmosphere by burning vast amounts of fossil fuels.
