It is hard to ignore the fact that wildfires are getting worse across North America. Even those who haven’t seen them up close or lost their homes have probably inhaled the smoke. This report shares new findings from Deep Sky Research and its Wildfire Risk Model on how wildfire risk is changing due to climate change.

New research from Deep Sky uses a novel approach for predicting the impact of climate change and finds current climate models could be underestimating the risks we face.

The sweltering temperatures in the spring and summer of 2012 contributed to devastating crop failure causing $41 billion in losses nationally. The past 20 years of carbon emissions have caused the risk of similar extreme heat waves to skyrocket. Heat waves like this used to occur once every 100 years. Deep Sky’s research found they will now happen once every five. Our carbon emissions have caused the risk of an extreme heat wave to increase 20-fold.

Deep Sky Research analyzes the latest climate data and applies novel modeling techniques to understand and model our changing climate in a way that accurately represents the extreme climate we’re in.