It used to be that a wildfire was just a wildfire – now it’s a symptom, like a flutter of the heart. We read it for what it might indicate about some wider ailment, for what it says about the change in the climate.

It can feel, right now, as the photographs come thick and fast of a New York sky shrouded in an eerie peach smog, or of flames ripping through the Highlands, as if the whole world – our house, as Greta Thunberg might put it - is on fire. We are reading the planet’s pulse and fretting.

But, of course, the fraction of the surface of the Earth currently burning is still small, and, as many climate down-players and minimisers will tell you these wildfires have always happened. Scorched earth and humans have been fellow-travellers in history. Some academics, as Bjorn Lomborg has in recent years, will even tell you that the area burned by wildfires is less than it was a century ago.

As New York hazes over with smoke, more than four million hectares of Canada burns, and the inhabitants of Daviot, near Inverness, are told to stay inside their homes, away from the smoke, it seems worth looking again at the degree to which wildfires are linked to climate – and whether the climate anxiety they are now provoking is merited. Should we be as alarmed as many of us, including myself, are becoming?

Among those who have argued against such panic is Lomborg, author of False Alarm, who has charted how in the US, wildfire area has decreased since the start of the last century. Often quoted, by Net Zero critics, this is a graph the economist published a few years ago of the area of the United States burned, yearly, between 1926 and 2017. It shows the 2017 total to be less than a fifth of the astonishing area burnt in 1930.

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But, look closely and what you see is that the area burnt in the most recent decade is more than that burned in any of the decades of the previous half-century. That rise chimes with research into wildfire frequency and intensity in more recent years. One report, for instance, found that in the UK, during the period between 2014 and 2020, there has been a near-consistent increase in the number of wildfires recorded each year.

What fire experts are telling us is that it's getting worse. For instance, Professor Guillermo Rein, a professor of fire science at Imperial College London, has said: “I don’t know one single fire scientist who is not concerned about what is coming. We are bracing ourselves for more frequent, larger fires, more evacuations, more damage, for lives lost, more ecosystems damaged, and more emissions, and the fire service very stressed".

And what do we blame? A recently-published study from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 19.8 million acres of burned forest —37 percent of the total area scorched by such fires in the western United States and southwest Canada since 1986—could be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions produced by the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.

Meanwhile, in the UK, climate models predict that summers will continue to become hotter, creating conditions in the southeast of England more like those in Southern Europe, and, with that, more wildfires - though not so much in Scotland, where the increase in wildfires is predicted to be more modest.

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READ MORE: Daviot wildifre: Firefighters enter third day of tackling blaze

Only a month ago we were told that April’s wildfire in Glenuig was estimated to be the second biggest in the UK in more than a decade. Then along came the Cannich fire, blazing through 7,400 hectares, including parts of the Corrimony nature reserve, and estimated to be the biggest on record in Scotland. And, let’s not forget the six-day fire that raged across the Flow Country in 2019, and was estimated to double Scotland’s carbon emissions for the period over which it raged.

It’s been said that the haze over New York has brought climate home to the city. These latest fires, along with water scarcity, in Scotland bring something home to us too.

But does the world need any more vivid reminders that this crisis is real?

It seems so, for here in the UK, it feels like the impetus to meet Net Zero targets is stalling. The bold £28bn green prosperity plan by the UK Labour Party is already being delayed, in a bid, we are told, to prove fiscal credibility.

Such a mood of delay is worrying. Meanwhile, it’s not just current wildfires that are causing concern. Weekly, we are delivered some new possible symptom – like the news, only just this week that it is now too late for summer Arctic sea ice, and that if emissions decline only slowly, we should see the first ice-free summer next decade.

Another warning bell rings. Another note of alarm. Are we going to continue our glacial movement to the emergency exit, or act with the urgency this deserves?