Yes. This is due in large part to a combination of factors including climate change which has brought on higher temperatures and severe draught which in turn has dried soil, created more burnable fuel such as brush and timber, and decreased rainfall, resulting in less soil moisture. Combined with developments increasingly in and near wildfire risk areas, the potential for devastating, life threatening fires is increasing. Last year the state of California experienced, by acres burned, the worst year in the state’s modern fire history by far. The previous record had been set just two years before, in 2018, when the Camp Fire incinerated the town of Paradise and almost 2 million acres burned in total throughout the state. The 2020 season more than doubled the damage of 2018, spawning a whole new term, gigafire, to describe a single blaze burning more than a million acres — a fire the size of Rhode Island.