Reader Q&A: Has climate change really made wildfires and storms worse and more frequent?

This is part of a monthly series answering readers’ climate-related questions and highlighting Arizona’s unsung climate leaders. The stories aim to help connect and inspire Arizonans who care about protecting a livable climate and may be struggling to find hope in that effort. You can ask a question or nominate an unsung Arizona climate leader by filling out this form at https://forms.gle/QCCxBPSHGy1bUJQ99.

Throughout July, Arizonans and Arizona-lovers watched, helpless and dismayed, as the Dragon Bravo Fire surged beyond control, torched beloved landscapes and structures at the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and just kept going — defying urgent prayers and on-the-ground efforts to contain it. By the morning of Aug. 2, the blaze was threatening the historic Kaibab Lodge and had surpassed an astonishing 112,000 acres with little progress on containment.

Speculation has swirled as fast as the flames about what fueled this disaster and who or what is to blame. Certainly, recent forest management played a role, with overgrowth due to limited funding and staffing for thinning and preventative burning efforts leaving too-dense tree stands that helped spur sparks faster than firefighters could anticipate or respond.

A history of fire suppression in western forests also didn’t help. Past governments’ policies to extinguish all flames by 10 a.m. contradicted more modern, science-informed guidance to implement controlled burns in fire-adapted landscapes that evolved under conditions of more regular, but smaller and less destructive, conflagrations.

Then there’s the looming, less tangible, but clearly present influence of climate change. For a litany of reasons, this scientifically proven central contributor has been harder to surface in conversations about fire.

From our Executive Editor: The Grand Canyon Lodge opened Arizona wilderness to anyone who made the journey

This year, we’re running a series in The Arizona Republic directly answering reader’s climate questions (see above for link to submit). One question, from reader Frank Copple, who is in his 80s and an Arizona resident for 13 years, stood out as the right one to address as the fires reshaping northern Arizona continue to burn:

“Is the dramatic change in the number of wildfires and other storms attributable to climate change?”

On the one hand, the answer to this — an easy “yes”— feels obvious and repetitive for readers following our ongoing fire and climate coverage. On the other hand, politics and emotions often obfuscate such things.

The fact that wildfires are more likely to burn out of control in a part of the world that has become consistently drier and hotter in recent decades as a result of atmospheric warming shifting rainfall patterns and boosting temperatures is one of the most straightforward signatures of climate change that could exist.

More: Trump plan for states to oversee national parks could lead to more Grand Canyon damage

It’s not only common sense, in that if you know anything about fire, you know it involves heat and lack of moisture. It’s also backed by a Grand Canyon-sized expanse of evidence collected via the scientific method by very smart people.

That climate change worsens wildfires and other storms is so undeniable that, remarkably, this conclusion is still featured on a website hosted by NASA.gov at a time when publicly funded climate change research is being canceled, taxpayer-owned climate data deleted and federal efforts to calculate climate costs discontinued.

“As the climate changes, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are increasing,” the NASA website read as of July 30, 2025.

Defunded: NAU researcher outlines new risks of warming, warns of faltering US science leadership

The human and economic costs of this climate outcome are also undeniably high.

A website hosted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration features peer-reviewed and inflation-adjusted calculations made by scientists with the National Centers for Environmental Information, previously the National Climatic Data Center. It displays the cost of climate-intensified weather events up through last year — under a banner announcing the effort has been discontinued “in alignment with evolving priorities.”

“The U.S. sustained 403 weather and climate disasters from 1980–2024 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. The total cost of these 403 events exceeds $2.915 trillion,” it states.

That total is about 8% of the current national debt. Between 1980 and 1989, 33 major weather disasters resulted in about $22 billion in economic damage and 302 deaths per year. Between 2022 and 2024, extreme weather in the U.S. caused $154 billion in costs and 511 deaths per year.

More in Reader Climate Q&A Series: How can I protect my kids from climate pollution and advocate for clean air?

So why, again, is the influence of climate on wildfires still a question?

It might be because the emotionally and politically charged discourse about fire behavior and blame overshadows the slower, less dramatic drumbeat of climate messaging.

When urban conflagrations in Los Angeles took 30 lives and cost upward of $50 billion in real estate losses in January, much of the news cycle focused on sparring between LA’s mayor and its fire chief and between California’s governor and the nation’s president. Scientists’ repeated conclusions about climate change raising the risk of devastating fires barely registered. (I covered this for The Arizona Republic, then observed anger online that it wasn’t being covered.)

“These are climate change fires,” Don Falk, a wildfire expert and professor at the University of Arizona, told me in January about the Los Angeles fires. “The scientific literature on this is unambiguous.”

More recently, Falk also told me about research from 2022 that found higher nighttime temperatures, a clear result of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions preventing the atmosphere from cooling as quickly after sunset, are preventing fires from “laying down” overnight — a key expectation firefighters have had that both they and the flames would take a little break after dark.

“Other than being in a multiyear drought, which has been exacerbated by human-driven climate change, the thing that is a real climate signature for this fire is the nighttime behavior,” Falk said, speaking about the North Rim. “In the past, firefighters have always been able to rely on that nighttime recovery of fuel moisture to slow things down.”

“We all know that fire seasons are getting longer and more intense,” he continued. “But that’s kind of the month-to-month seasonal cycle. This is the daily, 24-hour cycle. And what’s been happening now is the nighttime temperatures don’t drop as much. It stays hot, and that is very undeniably a climate change impact.”

More: ‘These are climate change fires’: As Arizona lends help to LA, experts assess the blame

And yet, as the tragedy of the Dragon Bravo Fire has unfolded through setback after setback, Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs called for investigations into the federal response while Republican Rep. Paul Gosar cast blame on Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as well as policies put in place by former President Joe Biden.

Aside from Hobbs mentioning the disaster taking place “during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer,” little attention was paid to the weather and climate context.

One Arizona Republic reader went so far as to submit an inflammatory op-ed asserting that “it’s not President Donald Trump’s fault, nor is climate change responsible for these fires. It’s poor decisions by people who no longer understand their roles and responsibilities.”

Scientists are not pitching the message that climate change is solely responsible for these fires. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a clear and relevant contributor.

Part of the reason this message doesn’t seem to sink in may be that psychologists have found humans struggle to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in their heads at the same time. We like a simple answer, and we love a fall guy. Add in politicians’ rhetoric, the fact that most people’s eyes glaze over when climate models enter the chat and the emotional component of torched homes and national treasures like the Grand Canyon Lodge and you have a perfect storm of misunderstanding.

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But many others, who have not ignored the role of climate warming, are tired of watching beloved places burn bigger, faster and hotter than they otherwise would have because society can’t be bothered to address the evidence that we’re changing our atmosphere, which controls the conditions human society has been built around.

Climate scientists and communicators tire of trying to cut through the noise to explain the scientific reality that burning fossil fuels for energy and transportation increases the chance that everything else on Earth will burn.

Frank Copple, who submitted this question to me — likely already knowing the answer but hoping to highlight it for readers lost in the fray — got tired of the climate risks in Arizona. He replied to my email, telling me I’d be addressing his question in the paper next month by telling me he’d given up and moved to Minnesota.

“So (I) am now in a state that takes climate actions as well as its citizens’ health and welfare seriously,” he wrote.

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles, on Bluesky @joanmeiners.bsky.social or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com.