You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Andravis Gontas. This is a podcast that explores the space

where science and society collide. We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

This is another one of our up-to-date segments, and joining me is Adam Bristol.

Thanks for having me.

As our listeners know, we live in Northern California, and so the wildfires have been a real

problem for us over the last few months.

And I've heard a lot about, you know, people talking about climate change and its effect,

and we've been living in San Francisco, what, for how many years now?

Like 14 years.

14 years. And it definitely feels as if the last few years we've had more days of poor air quality

compared to, you know, the first few years that was here.

Absolutely.

And when you have two small children and there's a global

pandemic, having to stay indoors in your house can be particularly salient and awful. And so I wondered

whether this was just a cognitive bias of ours that we are noticing it more now because it has a

much bigger impact on our quality of life. But that doesn't seem to be the

case from kind of, you know, more than just our own anecdotal evidence. But I wanted to actually

see whether there was any science that could tell us why we seem to be having more fires.

I mean, you know, it sort of seems intuitive that, well, it's warmer, so there should be more fires.

But of course, there's lots of parts of the U.S. that are very warm that don't suffer from wildfires.

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