The Associated Press (AP) claims in “Wildfires Used To ‘Go To Sleep’ At Night. Climate Change Has Them Burning Overtime” that human-caused climate change is causing fires to burn later into the night and earlier in the morning. Dozens of media outlets picked up the story. This is false. Wind-driven wildfires have burned intensely at night throughout recorded history, and the article relies on selective data, model correlation, and climate framing rather than historical context and fire science.
The AP asserts that “burning time for North American wildfires is going into overtime” and that the number of hours favorable for wildfire is 36 percent higher than 50 years ago. It ties this to warmer nighttime temperatures and implies that fires “used to die down or even die out at night” but now persist because of climate change.
