After U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke over the weekend outrageously and falsely declared that the largest wildfires in the history of California have “nothing to do with climate change,” it was up to people who actually understand the science—and give a shit about the future of the planet—to set him straight.

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Zinke went to the pages of USA TODAY to blame the wildfires ravaging California and elsewhere on so-called “radicial environmentalists” who are somehow preventing forest management – an argument he repeated over the weekend while visiting destroyed areas in California. Of course, as real and not-at-all-radical environmentalists pointed out, what ZInke is really saying is that he wants to give the nation’s forests over to the timber industry for clear-cutting, consequences and destruction of natural habitat be damned.

Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, explained to The Hill thatZinke is just straight up wrong about the clear role that warming temperatures—now increasingly driven by human-caused global warming—are playing in creating larger and more powerful wildfires.

“Climate change creates drought, high wind conditions, low humidity. Fire creates its own weather,” Spivak said. “You can thin all you want till the cows come home but fire will overtake that … what is misleading is people like Zinke and other people who refuse to talk about climate change and how we need to tackle that.”

And as Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist and staff writer for Grist, wrote on Monday regarding Zinke’s weekend comments in California and ongoing fires in Montana’s Glacier National Park, “This summer has felt like a global warming turning point.” But in the end, he said, it does matter what people like Zinke and President Trump say about the cause and the solution.