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Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.

One hope raised by some experts is that the current onslaught of fires and storms — the death, the destruction, the apocalyptic skies — might motivate people to unite behind calls for action. “Those orange skies — I mean, that was scary,” said Kris May, a climate scientist and coastal engineer in San Francisco, referring to the midday tangerine glow over Northern California this month, a consequence of smoke from wildfires.

Yet she wondered if they would have been even more powerful had they had struck places like Washington, D.C. Perhaps there, she said, “they’d bring about more change.”

When Lightning Strikes
The issue of climate change might have been back of mind for most Americans when a dramatic, rain-free lightning storm swept across Northern California in August. In a region that gets little rain in summer or early fall, the most destructive fires, like those that swept through Wine Country in 2017 and the town of Paradise in 2018, have come in October and November.

But one August night’s spectacular lightning show became the next day’s emerging disaster, as hundreds of fires were sparked, mostly in hard-to-reach terrain. Three of those blazes now rank among the four biggest California fires since record-keeping began in 1932 — part of the 3.6 million acres that have burned in the state so far.

And the traditional fire season is just beginning.

The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.

There was no place to escape. Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.

For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,” said Katharine Mach, an associate professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”

Recent events, she said, are a vivid reminder that “we’re all in this together.”

That notion raises a counterintuitive bit of hope: The more people who are affected, particularly the affluent and influential, the more seriously the issue gets addressed.

First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. That means cleaning up every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.

It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels. So far, the world has made only halting progress.

But experts also made a point they say is often underappreciated: Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.

“In terms of being reversible, I can only think of things in sci-fi films — Superman trying to spin the earth in the other direction so Lois Lane doesn’t die,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Seriously, it is not reversible.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.

If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years. Failure to do so doubles or triples that number. If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century. If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.

The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.

“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or two-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt,” said Dr. Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. “But in a four-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid. “We need to figure out how to put ourselves less in harm’s way,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University.

Humans are remarkably resilient. Civilizations thrive in climates as different as Saudi Arabia and Alaska.

When disaster strikes, we’ve demonstrated an ability to unite and respond. In 1970 and 1991, two major tropical cyclones hit Bangladesh, killing a half-million people. The country then built an extensive network of early-warning systems and shelters, and strengthened building codes. When another major cyclone struck in 2019, just five people died.

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