Earlier this week, residents of San Francisco’s Bay Area awoke to a sky that looked demonic thanks to smoke sitting high in the atmosphere and blocking out the sun. It’s just one of many ominous images yielded by the wildfires currently raging on North America’s west coast: a disaster which, at time of writing, had already burned through an astonishing 2.3 million acres, forced school closures and prison evacuations, and left nearly 200,000 without power.

With fires raging far inland and across multiple states, the worst may still lie ahead — shattering all precedent in what has already been a record-breaking season of high temperatures and dry weather conditions. Last month, the temperature in Death Valley hit 129.9 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius), which is quite possibly the highest temperature ever recorded. The fires are almost more unsettling when viewed from space, a point of view that underscores their breathtaking scale — and the potential for similar events to spread even more widely in the near future.

Seasonal blazes in California are, of course, not a new phenomenon. But an increasingly warming climate creates the conditions for weather events — like the lightning strikes which initially set off most of the current wildfires — to have more extreme implications than they otherwise would. It’s surely no coincidence that all ten of the state’s harshest fire seasons have occurred since 2003, a historical record which puts climate change very much at the center of the current crisis. A 2018 study published by none other than the environmentally nihilistic Trump administration projected that these trends will continue for decades, with California’s fire season incrementally growing in length.