The climate community has to get better at combating skeptics' exploitation of uncertainty to cast doubt on the connection between global warming and wildfires.
But can we really say that climate change is behind all this devastation? After all, wildfires have been a perennial summertime occurrence since time immemorial.
Well, yes, we can definitively say that global warming made these fires more likely and their impact more intense. But notice that this is different from saying “climate change caused the fires.” More on that distinction later. For now, suffice to say that fire conditions are different now from what we have known historically and that these differences are exactly what we would expect to happen as the planet heats up.
Not that the obviousness of the link between these fires and the climate has kept conspiracy theorists and doubt merchants from spreading misinformation about them.
Two narratives in particular are making the rounds in the post and reply cycles. Here’s an example of the first one, found in the wild on our very own Ingmar Rentzhog’s LinkedIn:
The insinuation is that if these fires were started by people, climate change cannot have played a role. This, however, is a non sequitur. Global warming doesn’t start fires. Global warming is not an arsonist or a naughty child or a careless smoker or a bolt of lightning or any of the other proximate causes of wildfires.
The question is whether these fires, once ignited, are more likely to burn out of control. Climate change means the answer is increasingly “yes.”
The second narrative, which is so predictable you could set your watch by it, claims that there's nothing to see here at all. This is the "it's just summer" crowd, who'll tell you that fires (or heatwaves or hurricanes or droughts or floods) have always happened, this latest example is nothing new, it’s just media hysteria pandering for clicks or (more nefariously) the shadowy “climate agenda” at work. Take, for example, this tweet from the Trump-appointed director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Matthew Wielicki:
The graph Wielicki shares shows the cumulative area burned by wildfires in 2026 on track to be the lowest in the past 14 years. That would refute the idea that climate change is driving more frequent, more intense wildfires, wouldn’t it?
Wielicki isn’t making anything up whole cloth, but he is being misleading. Global wildfire activity is at its lowest point on satellite record, but look closer, and you find that these numbers are being used deceptively.
It turns out that global burned-area totals are dominated not by the kind of fire currently torching France and Spain, but by the seasonal burning of savanna and grassland across Africa and Asia. Such blazes are mostly set deliberately to clear land for agriculture and account for most of the world's fire footprint in any given year. But that kind of burning was never a product of global warming and has been declining for decades for reasons unrelated to climate. Wielicki and others have similarly produced charts showing a below average fire year for Europe. Again, this would seem to refute a climate-driven increase in wildfires until you learn that these charts are based on data that includes all of Russia as part of Europe. Russia, of course, has most of its landmass in Asia and is nearly three times as large as the rest of Europe. What’s more, the amount of summer wildfires seen on the vast forests and plains of Siberia varies dramatically from year to year. This year happens to be a quiet one so far, cancelling out the very real uptick we see in Western Europe when taken together. Attributing specific, real-world events to climate change is tricky business. And climate skeptics know it. They exploit the public's discomfort with uncertainty, turning honest scientific caution into an opening for doubt, and filling that space with conspiracy theories and cynicism.
Which brings us back to the distinction I raised earlier. Climate impacts can only be accounted for probabilistically. It is inaccurate to point to any wildfire and say, categorically, "climate change did this." What we can say is that, according to World Weather Attribution, the hot, dry conditions behind Spain's fires were made roughly 20 times more likely by human-caused warming, and the conditions in France roughly twice as likely. Understanding and communicating that nuance is crucial. Lies spread like wildfire. Half-truths spread faster still. Those of us working to raise awareness and build support for climate action cannot rely on merely being louder than the skeptics. We have to help the public get comfortable in the space of uncertainties.
