Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

Long before the super-fire that has devastated whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles, climate scientists had issued dire warnings about the dangers of climate change. Really, the warnings go back decades for anyone who was listening.

I remember when I was in college in the early 1970s. I was in a seminar class titled The Literature of Expanded Consciousness and we had dinner with the West Coast poet Gary Snyder. He warned about the harm from fossil fuels, and that was more than 50 years ago. Then there was NASA scientist James Hansen, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. In considering the L.A. wildfire, it is impossible not to be struck by our climate change denialism.

Every massive environmental disaster is seen as an isolated event. There is an unwillingness to connect the dots. Donald Trump’s tweets blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom of California are a good illustration. Instead of any effort to understand the L.A. wildfire and place it in context, there is a cheap shot blaming effort. Much of the right is absurdly blaming diversity, equity and inclusion, like that had anything to do with it.

There is a climate emergency going on now. It is not something in the future. It is happening in red states and blue states. Both parties bear blame for ignoring it, and both have failed to respond. When the L.A. fire happened, I thought of the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire in Maui. Then I thought of all the other wildfires on the West Coast and western Canada in recent years.

Because we forget so fast, I would mention the summer of 2017 that was a summer of fire. In her book “On Fire,” Naomi Klein described how 1,800 square miles of forest, farm and grassland burned in British Columbia, forcing 50,000 people to evacuate their homes. Then there was the fire in November 2018 in Paradise, Calif., a town of 27,000 that was razed to the ground.

In 2020, over 8,100 fires contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of California land. About 75% of California’s most destructive wildfires measured in terms of structures burned, have occurred since 2015. Just the number of fires has been overwhelming. It is hard not to think we are trying to forget.

Historically, California experienced wildfires in June and July but climate change has increased the frequency, season length and burned area of wildfires. The combination of tinder-dry conditions, almost no rain for the last six months and very high, hot winds created the inferno in L.A. Two rainy winters promoted the growth of brush, but it was followed by near-zero rainfall for an extended period. Conditions were beyond ripe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported that evidence for dangerous fire weather conditions linked to human-caused climate change is strongest in regions like the western U.S. and southeastern Australia. The area of heightened wildfire risk has increased with higher levels of warming. It is entirely predictable that as the warmer the planet gets, the more frequent and extreme wildfires will become, and that is what we are seeing. When forests burn, they will release vast amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere, which only accelerates warming.

The California writer, the late Mike Davis, studied disasters, especially in L.A. Many years ago he made the case that the dry hills surrounding L.A., running from Pasadena to Malibu, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow. He critiqued the building of so many homes in the hills knowing what was likely to happen.

Davis wrote: “The fires are like gun violence. You always get the same mechanical repetition of action, but nothing changes at the root.”

I would say the root is our continuing failure to stop our reliance on burning fossil fuels. Every year that we fail to deliver the required reduction in emissions, the rate of future cuts required in the following year increases. But we pretend there is no climate emergency.

The problem we have is unregulated capitalism. Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change as far back as the 1970s. Bill McKibben writes that even back then, ExxonMobil scientists predicted with great accuracy how much the temperature would rise by 2020. He says they started building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea levels they knew were coming.

However, instead of explaining and publicizing the science, they hired a small army of public relations experts to sow doubt. Their mission was delay in the service of maximizing profit for themselves. This is the logic of short-term thinking and the capitalist marketplace.

Now we face a new administration where, in the face of indisputable evidence, Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax and where he repeatedly says, “Drill, baby, drill.” The insanity of that is palpable. It is like driving off a cliff. It is the equivalent of injecting poison into your body. It is worse than stupid. It is pathologically self-destructive and suicidal.

When the climate disasters start happening under his presidency, let’s see who Trump blames. Will he blame red state governors when the next mega-fire or flood happens there? Will he blame budget cuts or DEI? Will he make aid contingent on whether he won the state in 2024 in the last election? We know he will blame everyone but himself. And, of course, he won’t blame climate change.

I am persuaded that no state is safe. Look at Montpelier, Vt., or Asheville, N.C. Where is the snow cover in New Hampshire this winter? Not enough for cross country skiing from what I can see. We are fortunate to live in a northern clime, however. The L.A. fire is a likely model of what we will see more in many locales, especially in the western U.S. I expect large portions of the South will become too hot to live in. Within the next 20 years, I would expect a new exodus to the north as people seek more habitable climes. Humans cannot live in 120-degree temperatures.

We must stop sleepwalking into climate apocalypse.