In December 2021, after weeks of little precipitation, a dry wind blasted through the Denver area. A fire started — the exact cause unknown — in the prairie grasslands just southeast of Boulder, and gusts up to 100 mph quickly fanned the flames into a conflagration. Called the Marshall Fire, its flames quickly incinerated more than 1,000 homes, causing $2 billion in damage.
Since then, we’ve seen similar conflagrations on nearly every continent, including blazes in Canada, Greece and Algeria. On the Hawaiian island of Maui, a firestorm claimed nearly 100 lives in August, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.