President Trump has dismissed concerns over climate change on a visit to fire-ravaged California, telling an official there it would “start getting cooler”.
Blazes in California, Oregon and Washington state have burned almost 2m hectares of land and killed at least 36 people since early August.
Climate change sceptic Mr Trump blames the crisis on poor forest management.
Earlier on Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden called Mr Trump “a climate arsonist”.
He told an event in Delaware that four more years of his opponent in the White House would see “more of America ablaze”.
During his visit to the US West Coast, Mr Trump repeated his argument that poor forest management was to blame as he met Californian officials involved in the battle against the wildfires at a stop near Sacramento, in the centre of the state.
Dismissing one official’s plea to not “ignore the science” on climate change, Mr Trump said: “It’ll start getting cooler.”
When asked by a reporter in California whether climate change was a factor in the massive wildfires, Mr Trump responded: he thinks this is more of a management situation.
He claimed that other countries had not dealt with the same level of forest fires, despite major conflagrations in Australia and the Amazon rainforest in recent years that experts attributed to the changing climate.
