The climate crisis will continue making lightning-sparked wildfires more frequent for decades to come, which could produce cascading effects and worsen public safety and public health, new research suggest. Lightning-caused fires tend to burn in more remote areas and therefore usually grow into larger fires than human-caused fires. That means a trend toward more lightning-caused fires is also probably making wildfires more deadly by producing more wildfire smoke. …Over the last 40 years, thunderstorms and other weather conditions favoring lightning have been happening more often across many parts of the US west, including western Washington, western Oregon, the California Central valley, and higher elevations throughout the Rocky Mountains….Dmitri Kalashnikov, at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and the study’s lead author… found future increases in the number of lightning-caused wildfires across a robust 98% of the western US “due to more lightning, or more fire weather, or both”, he said.