About 43% of the 200 most damaging fires occurred in the last 10 years of the study. In the 1980s, the globe averaged two of these catastrophic fires a year and a few times hit four a year. “We’ve firstly got that connection that all the disasters by and large occurred during extreme weather. We’ve also got a strong trend of those conditions becoming more common as a result of climate change. But those factors are harder to quantify compared to climate change, he said.