Giving Compass' Take:

• Noah Diffenbaugh explains why wildfires become more frequent during increasingly intense weather as a result of climate change.

• Why might wildfires continue to become more frequent without addressing climate change? What can you do to draw awareness of the impact of extreme weather on the increased prevalence of wildfires and other natural disasters?

• As wildfires become more frequent every year, learn about how you can help respond this summer.

The unusual lightning strikes that sparked the massive wildfires burning across California likely foreshadow increasingly frequent extreme weather’s role in natural disasters, experts argue.

Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, studies climate change’s role in increasing the risk of extreme weather. Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, studies climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, with a focus on disaster risk reduction, especially from wildfires.

Here, the two discuss extreme weather’s role in current and future wildfires.

Q: What do the current wildfires tell us about the future in terms of extreme weather, fire risk, and fire intensity?

Diffenbaugh: The same research that shows that global warming has increased the frequency of extreme wildfire weather historically also suggests that continued global warming will intensify those conditions further.

In particular, further warming is likely to continue increasing the simultaneous occurrence of extreme wildfire conditions over disparate areas of California, which has placed so much stress on firefighting resources in recent years, including this week.

Q: What role, if any, does climate change have in exacerbating bad air quality over large areas of the state during wildfires?

Diffenbaugh: By increasing the area burned by wildfire and the frequency of extreme wildfire conditions, global warming is increasing the risk of the wildfires that produce harmful smoke conditions.

Field: As is the case with all disasters, we need to think about effective interventions at all stages—prepare, respond, and recover. For preparation, there is so much to do, from reducing unsafe accumulations of ladder fuels to improving defensible space around homes, to repairing the aging infrastructure that causes some of the worst fires, to chemical treatments that prevent fires from taking off.

Read the full interview with Noah Diffenbaugh about why wildfires become more extreme by Rob Jordan at Futurity.