(The Center Square) – A Wednesday headline in The New York Times above a photograph of a smoke-engulfed Interstate 90 Floating Bridge on Lake Washington reads, “Washington State Braces for ‘Inevitable’ Megafire. Climate Change May Bring It Sooner.”

Just below the headline, the author wrote, “The famously rainy state is facing longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons, raising the risk of a mammoth fire that will be nearly impossible to fight. All the state can do is prepare.”

Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the article is nonsense.

He criticized the piece in a Thursday blog in which he called the article "blatantly false."

“It's false,” Mass told The Center Square the same day. “The last megafire – and we're going to define

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