As climate change bakes forests across North America, dense smoke from dozens of out-of-control wildfires burning in northern Minnesota and adjacent portions of Ontario is blanketing tens of millions of people with hazardous pollution. …As the climate warms, fire danger increases, mostly because the atmosphere gets “thirstier” – more water vapor can evaporate into warmer air. This results in more water vapor evaporating from plants, which dries them out and creates an increased risk of large and intense fires that can generate huge smoke plumes. Most of the fires grew out of control under extreme heat conditions made up to five times more likely by climate change (Fig. 1). According to Climate Central, the heat that helped fuel these fires would have been “highly unlikely” to have occurred in a world without climate change.