In California, three firefighters are fighting for their lives after a massive fire tore through their station at the Los Padres National Forest overnight. They were among 14 firefighters who deployed emergency shelters as flames overtook their position. The Dolan Fire is just one of at least 85 raging across the West Coast — with red flag warnings from San Diego to the Canadian border in Washington state.

Fires this year have burned more than 2 million acres across California — even before the start of September and October, historically the state’s worst months for fires. California Governor Gavin Newsom said Tuesday his state needed to adapt to the realities of the climate crisis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom: “But I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers. It simply follows — completely inconsistent, that point of view, with the reality on the ground, the facts as we are experiencing. You may not believe it intellectually, but your own eyes, your own experiences tell a different story.”

"We did not wish to mislead the public into thinking that scientific issues are decided by who has the longer list of scientists!"

California’s governor announced on Wednesday that there were 367 fires, and conflagrations have grown so rapidly that there are not enough firefighters to tackle them all. Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist, told us in an interview that he was watching the current fires with “incredulity”.

“It seems like every year re-ups the previous year in terms of pushing the envelope, in terms of how much fire we’re seeing in the landscape and how severe that fire is,” he said.

There were also, by the by, several fire tornadoes at the weekend. Witnessing these phenomena, another fire expert remarked that California “is the exemplar for climate change extreme events today”.

In the last decade, amid drought and searing heat, California has entered the “era of megafires”. Our new book, Fire in Paradise, tells the story of a town that was almost entirely wiped out by a fire of unheralded speed in 2018. It killed 85 people, making it the deadliest ever fire in California. Other notable blazes include a 1,000-ft wide fire tornado that churned through the town of Redding a few months before the Paradise catastrophe, and fires in California’s Wine Country that killed 44 people.

All of this is why, as we scan the headlines for the planetary shift that will mark the true arrival of the climate crisis, we risk losing sight of the fact that places like California are already experiencing it.