The modern age of burning has been ignited by human hands.

Though wildfires are natural and necessary in many ecosystems, their expanding path of destruction in recent years has been worsened by all the different ways humanity has reshaped the environment. Cities have sprawled out farther, populations have grown, the global economy has expanded, natural fires have been suppressed, and the climate has warmed.

Now, the pace of destruction from massive wildfires is accelerating. In a new study published today in the journal Science, researchers have pulled apart these drivers and found that rising average temperatures are contributing to the gargantuan price tags of these blazes, with a major spike in just the past decade.

Just earlier this year, the Los Angeles fires led to estimated losses between $28 billion and $75 billion, likely the costliest fire disaster in history.

And since then, fires have continued to rage around the world. The European Union this year suffered its worst wildfire season since tracking began in 2006, with more than 2 million acres burned across countries like Spain and Portugal. A major wildfire in Namibia is currently burning through one of Africa’s largest wildlife parks. Firefighters only recently contained the Dragon Bravo fire that ignited in Arizona in July and torched 140,000 acres near the Grand Canyon.

When a major fire ignites, the news coverage tends to center on the number of charred acres, but for many people, that can be hard to interpret. And the size of the blaze doesn’t always translate directly to the amount of suffering caused. “We wanted to move beyond quantifying fire by burned area to fire defined by human impacts,” said John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at the University of California Merced and a co-author of the new study.

And so, Abatzoglou and his collaborators looked at fires that did the greatest harm to people in terms of lives lost and property burned to see what trends emerged. They found that the number of extraordinarily devastating wildfires has risen dramatically in just the past few years, driven by some of the hottest, driest conditions ever recorded.

It’s an alarming result that shows........

© Vox