By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy — ideal to spark extreme wildfires — has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.

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And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated.

What this means is that as the world warms, more places across the globe are prone to go up in flames at the same time because of increasingly synchronous fire weather, which is when multiple places have the right conditions to go up in smoke. Countries may not have enough resources to put out all the fires popping up and help won’t be as likely to come from neighbors busy with their own flames, according to the authors of a study in Wednesday’s Science Advances.

In 1979 and for the next 15 years, the world averaged 22 synchronous fire weather days a year for flames that stayed within large global regions, the study found. In 2023 and 2024, it was up to more than 60 days a year.

“These sorts of changes that we have seen increase the likelihood in a lot of areas that there will be fires that are going to be very challenging to suppress,” said study co-author John Abatzoglou, a fire scientist at the University of California, Merced.

FILE – A person walks on the beach next to homes damaged by the Palisades Fire, Jan. 16, 2025, in Malibu, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

The researchers didn’t look at actual fires, but the weather conditions: warm, with strong winds and dry air and ground.

“It increases the likelihood of widespread fire outbreaks, but the weather is one dimension,” said study lead author Cong Yin, a fire researcher at University of California, Merced. The other big ingredients to fires are oxygen, fuel such as trees and brush, and ignition such as lightning or arson or human accidents.

This study is important because extreme fire weather is the primary — but not only — factor in increasing fire impacts across the globe, said fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in Canada, who wasn’t part of the study. And it’s also important because regions that used to have fire seasons at different times and could share resources are now overlapping, he said.

FILE – A helicopter drops water on the Pickett Fire as it burns into the Aetna Springs area of Napa County, Calif., Aug. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

Abatzoglou said: “And that’s where things begin to break.”

More than 60% of the global increase in synchronous fire weather days can be attributed to climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Yin said. He and his colleagues know this because they used computer simulations to compare what’s happened in the last 45 years to a fictional world without the increased greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

FILE – Cars line the streets near wildfire-burned homes in Tome, Chile, Jan. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Javier Torres, FIle)

The continental United States, from 1979 to 1988, averaged 7.7 synchronous fire weather days a year. But in the last 10 years that average was up to 38 days a year, according to Yin.

But that is nothing compared to the southern half of South America. That region averaged 5.5 synchronous fire weather days a year from 1979 to 1988; over the last decade, that’s risen to 70.6 days a year, including 118 days in 2023.

FILE – A wildfire burns near Concepcion, Chile, Jan. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Javier Torres, File)

Of 14 global regions, only Southeast Asia saw a decrease in synchronous fire weather, probably because it is getting more humid there, Yin said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s top economist on Wednesday urged that Federal Reserve economists be punished for research last week that showed American companies and consumers paying for nearly all the new tariffs imposed by the White House last year.

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“The paper is an embarrassment,” Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council said in an interview on CNBC. “It’s the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system. The people associated with this paper should presumably be disciplined.”

Hassett’s comments represent the latest attack from the Trump administration on the Fed, which has traditionally been independent of day-to-day politics. It also suggests the White House remains sensitive to concerns about rising costs for groceries, housing, and big-ticket items such as furniture and cars, as surveys show Americans remain disgruntled about the economy.

Several other studies have reached similar conclusions as the New York Fed, including one by economists at Harvard and the University of Chicago; a separate report by the Kiel Institut, a German think tank; and a report last week by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s study, published last week, found U.S. businesses and consumers are paying nearly 90% of the tariffs that Trump has imposed. Average tariffs on imports have risen from 2.6% at the beginning of last year to 13% at the end of the year, the economists found.

Since U.S. importers pay the tariffs directly to the Treasury, the main way overseas companies would bear the burden of the costs — as the Trump administration has said they do — would be if they reduced their prices to offset the tariff costs. The New York Fed research found that foreign exporters have only slightly lowered their prices, by much less than the tariff increase.

This isn’t the first time the White House has attacked economists for concluding that Americans are paying the tariffs or will soon do so. Last August, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs projected that Americans would pay an increasing share of the tariffs over time. Trump responded by calling on David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, to fire the economist.

U2 is the latest musical act to release a song about Minneapolis and the record surge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the state.

Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, is the topic of the opening track on the band’s newly issued six-song EP “Days of Ash.”

In an interview U2 published in an online magazine Wednesday, lead singer Bono said the track, “American Obituary,” is “a song of fury … but more than that a song of grief. Not just for Renee, but for the death of an America that at the very least would have had an inquiry into her killing. … Everyone knows the border has to be managed better, but at what cost … the disfiguring of American justice?”

Set to a musical bed that recalls both the band’s early punk days and the swagger of their “Achtung Baby” era, Bono sings about Good being “born to die free, American mother of three … Renee the domestic terrorist? What you can’t kill can’t die, America will rise.”

“Days of Ash,” which was released on Ash Wednesday, features five other politically charged songs including a track about 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, one of thousands of Iranian schoolgirls who took to the streets as part of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 and another written for Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian father of three and nonviolent activist who was killed in his village on the West Bank in 2025.

“Going way back to our earliest days, working with Amnesty (International) or Greenpeace, we’ve never shied away from taking a position and sometimes that can get a bit messy, there’s always some sort of blowback, but it’s a big side of who we are and why we still exist,” drummer Larry Mullen Jr. said in a news release.

The band has been working on a new album, their first since 2017’s “Songs of Experience,” but in a news release Bono said these six tracks won’t appear on that record: “These songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation.”

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U2 follows Bruce Springsteen as a worldwide, massively successful act to issue a protest song about the ICE occupation. The Boss followed up his folk song “Streets of Minneapolis” with a surprise three-song performance at a benefit concert at First Avenue last month. Tuesday, he announced he’s kicking off a 20-city tour at Target Center in Minneapolis that will then hit Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles, two other cities that have endured ICE operations.

There’s no word yet whether U2 will also perform a surprise concert at First Avenue, the downtown Minneapolis venue where they made their local live debut in 1981, when the club was known as Uncle Sam’s.

In 2023 and 2024, U2 performed a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Prior to that, the band’s most recent North American tour was in 2017. That outing included a local stop that September where they drew more than 43,000 fans to U.S. Bank Stadium.

DULUTH, Minn. — Heavy snow and fierce winds hit the North Shore on Wednesday, causing road and school closings and extensive power outages.

Snowfall amounts of 7 to 26 inches were measured by midday along Lake Superior, with accumulations increasing farther up the shore.

The Twin Cities were also seeing snowfall Wednesday following a record-breaking stretch of five days in the 50s, including the warmest Valentine’s Day since 1882 when the high reached 54 degrees. The National Weather Service in Chanhassen was expecting metro accumulations of 2 to 5 inches through Wednesday evening.

The National Weather Service in Duluth reported winds of nearly 70 mph Wednesday morning, with visibility less than a quarter mile. U.S. 61 was closed from Duluth to the Canadian border before being reopened by 7 a.m. as the winds began to ebb. However, travel is expected to remain hazardous through Thursday morning due to the blizzard conditions.

Difficult traveling conditions may also lead to extended power restoration times, according to Minnesota Power.

High winds could blow trees and tree branches onto power lines. Officials warned to stay away from downed power lines and not to attempt to remove branches that may have fallen on them.

“Always assume that downed wires are energized and can cause injury or death,” Minnesota Power said.

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