Since late April, wildfires have been burning across Canada, blanketing the country and parts of the U.S. in unhealthy and sometimes dangerous smoke, in what Canadian wildfire officials have called the worst wildfire season ever recorded.

In a new study, scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) Initiative examined the conditions that lead to the record series of wildfires and concluded that they were at least twice as probable due to human-caused climate change.

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“This year, high temperatures led to the rapid thawing and disappearance of snow during May, particularly in eastern Québec, resulting in unusually early wildfires,” said Philippe Gachon, a researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal, as reported by The Guardian.

Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at the UK’s Grantham Institute and co-founder of WWA, said the influence of climate change on this year’s Canadian wildfire season may be even greater than the figures in the report demonstrate because the estimates used by the researchers were conservative, CNN reported.

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