Wrong, AP, Wildfires Have Always Burned at Night

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.

That framing is historically inaccurate.

Wildfires do not “go to sleep” because the clock strikes sunset. They slow when humidity rises, temperatures fall, and winds calm. When those meteorological conditions do not improve at night, fires continue to burn. That has always been true.

Both of the major fires cited by the AP were driven by extreme wind events, not by some novel nighttime warming effect.

The 2025 Eaton Fire in California was sparked by electrical power system failures during a severe windstorm event. The Palisades Fire was determined to be intentionally set by an arsonist. Ignition sources matter. Neither fire began because of climate change. Both were driven by powerful, sustained winds common to the areas during that time of year, which remained intense overnight.

When winds remain strong, fires burn. When humidity remains low, fires burn. When fuels are dry and abundant, fires burn. Day or night.

The AP acknowledges that its analysis “looked at times when conditions were ripe for fire, but that didn’t mean fires occurred during all that time.” In other words, the study measured modeled fire-weather conditions, not actual fire behavior. It created a computer model correlating atmospheric variables and fire status. That is not the same as demonstrating a causal trend in wildfire intensity.

Models are not observations.

The article also claims that U.S. wildfire area burned from 2016 to 2025 averaged 2.6 times the 1980s average. That statistic is frequently cited without context. As documented in Climate at a Glance’s review of U.S. wildfire data, the apparent increase since the 1980s largely reflects data handling changes and forest and fire management changes. Concerning the former, the National Interagency Fire Center removed large pre-1983 fires from its database and altered methodology. When those earlier fires are restored, the long-term upward trend disappears, as seen in Figure 1 below.

In fact, historical wildfire acreage in the United States was far greater in the early 1900s  than in recent decades. Before modern fire suppression, millions of acres routinely burned each year. The 1910 “Big Blowup” fire burned approximately three million acres in Idaho and Montana in a matter of days. That was well before “climate change” became the universal media boogeyman for anything abnormal or new.

Indigenous burning practices across North America sustained frequent, widespread fires for centuries. The idea that intense fires are a new nighttime phenomenon is ahistorical.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) shows no global increase in burned area attributable to climate change. AR6 states there is low confidence in long-term global trends in burned area due to inconsistent data and regional variability. See Figure 2 below.

In fact, global satellite records indicate a decline in total burned area over recent decades, largely due to agricultural expansion and land management changes.

What has changed in the American West is land management. Decades of aggressive fire suppression and reduced logging have allowed fuel loads to accumulate. Climate Realism has documented the impact of changed forest management policies on wildfires in dozens of posts. Forests are denser than they were historically. When ignitions occur under strong wind events, the resulting fires are intense. That is a fuel problem compounded by ignition sources, not proof that nights have become climatically incapable of suppressing fire.

The AP also emphasizes that nighttime temperatures have warmed slightly since 1975. But a 2-degree Fahrenheit increase over 50 years does not override wind speeds of 40, 60, or 80 miles per hour. The Lahaina fire, for example, was driven by hurricane-force downslope winds associated with a pressure gradient event. Wind shear and turbulence do not cease because the sun sets. NASA reports:

The National Weather Service reported wind gusts as high as 67 mph in the area, which helped to quickly spread the wildfire across much of Lahaina during the afternoon hours of August 8. The intense winds was further aided by a sharp pressure gradient caused by Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 hurricane approximately 500 miles south of the islands when the fire began. As Hurricane Dora exerted its influence, the gap wind persisted from August 7 to 9, creating ideal conditions for the rapid progression and expansion of a small brush fire to a wildfire that would consume much of the town of Lahaina.

Fire behavior is dominated by meteorology plus available fuel, oxygen, and heat. Wind supplies oxygen and spreads embers. When winds are strong, flames intensify. When winds persist overnight, so do fires.

The AP has taken a computer-model correlation study, stripped it of historical context, ignored ignition causes and fuel build up, downplayed wind events, and presented it as evidence that climate change has fundamentally altered fire physics. It hasn’t.

Wind-driven fires have burned at night before. They will burn at night again. That is not a new phenomenon.

The AP’s story does not represent accurate reporting. It is climate narrative reinforcement layered on top of selective data and incomplete history. The Associated Press should be ashamed to foist this sort of “junk journalism” on readers.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM