Daniel Swain in the New York Times: A Climate Reckoning in Fire Stricken California

If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a year ago, today it is all too real for Californians fleeing wildfires and being smothered in a blanket of smoke, the worst year of fires on record. “It’s really shocking to see the number of fast-moving, extremely large and destructive fires simultaneously burning,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I’ve spoken to maybe two dozen fire and climate experts over the last 48 hours and pretty much everyone is at a loss of words. There’s certainly been nothing in living memory on this scale.”