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There is a new normal in the north, climate scientists confirmed late last year. While average temperatures were relatively cool across the Arctic last summer, according to the Arctic Report Card, an annual compendium of peer-reviewed research on climate change and the north, the long-term trend remained the same.

Winter keeps coming North of 60, the authors report, but decade over decade it’s coming with warmer air, warmer water, less ice and, as it turns out, more fire.

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Stock images of the warming north have been drilled into our collective psyche by this point. Melting glaciers, skinny bears and mushy tundra have all become something close to cliché. But to many, the idea of more fire — in the land of ice — may be new.

What it shouldn’t be is a surprise.

The relationship between fire and climate is “strongly nonlinear” in the north, the report says. But over time, the correlation is clear. When mean temperatures in July have exceeded 13.4 degrees over the past 30 years, the odds of fire have gone up significantly.