Climate change is making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the ‘new abnormal'

As Earth's climate continues to change from heat-trapping gases spewed into the air, ever fewer people are out of reach from the billowing and deadly fingers of wildfire smoke, scientists say. Already wildfires are consuming three times more of the United States and Canada each year than in the 1980s and studies predict fire and smoke to worsen.

Across the country, more than two-thirds of the homes and businesses destroyed by wildfires are in the "wildland urban interface," or WUI, a transitional zone between developed areas and wilderness. LX News climate storyteller Chase Cain explains why the area is more hazardous and how to see if your home is one of the 72 million facing some level of fire risk.

“A year like this could happen with or without climate change, but warming temperatures just made it a lot more probable,” said A. Park Williams, a UCLA bioclimatologist who studies fire and water. “We're seeing, especially across the West, big increases in smoke exposure and reduction in air quality that are attributable to increase in fire activity."

Wildfires in the U.S. on average now burn about 12,000 square miles yearly, about the size of Maryland. From 1983 to 1987, when the National Interagency Fire Center started keeping statistics, only about 3,300 square miles burned annually. America burned much more in the past, but that's because people didn't try to stop fires and they were less of a threat. The West used to have larger and regular fires until the mid-19th century, with more land settlement and then the U.S. government trying to douse every fire after the great 1910 Yellowstone fire, Williams said.

A new study published on June 23 links a stuck weather pattern to reduced North American snow cover in the spring.

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