Yes, wildfires have always happened in California, but climate change is making them worse 

As the narrative of the Southern California wildfires has shifted to identifying the causes behind what could prove to be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, a common refrain has emerged on social media that seeks to dismiss the role scientists say climate change played.“California has forest fires every year,” a commenter wrote in response to a Yahoo News story on distinguishing the singular cause of a fire from its underlying aspects.“To say California has always had wildfires, that they’ve always had extreme events, is a classic form of climate denial,” Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, told Yahoo News. “For years, those of us in the climate community have heard, ‘The climate has always changed. We’ve always had floods, droughts and heat waves.’ And that’s just totally disingenuous. Of course we’ve had those things. The question is whether climate change is making those things worse, and the answer is yes.”Several Republican lawmakers disagree, including President-elect Donald Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax,” and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who in 2017 stated, “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”“‘There have always been droughts, there have always been floods, there have always been hurricanes, there have always been wildfires.’ All of this is of course trivially correct in the sense that it’s true, but irrelevant,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said. “The question is: Are they changing in a way that increases risks as a result of this contemporary episode of human-caused climate change?”University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who regularly spars with skeptics, said in an email that climate change “is the primary reason for the increasingly widespread, damaging and deadly North American wildfires.”The scientific consensus is not that rising global temperatures are creating problems that never existed before, it’s that it is making many existing problems, such as wildfires in states like California, quantifiably worse.“Research shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions, leading to longer and more active fire seasons,” NOAA says on its website. “Increases in temperatures and the thirst of the atmosphere due to human-caused climate change have increased aridity of forest fuels during the fire season.”In a summary of that research, the American Association for the Advancement of Science wrote on its website that “human-caused climate change caused more than half the increases in forest fuel aridity (how dry and flammable vegetation is) since the 1970s and has approximately doubled the cumulative area burned in forest fires since 1984.”That dynamic has been witnessed once again in the wildfires that have ravaged the Los Angeles area. Swain pointed to “the two wet winters that preceded the fire