Daniel Swain in The Guardian — California’s wildfire hell: how 2020 became the state’s worst ever fire season

2020 was the state’s worst wildfire season on record. By the end of it, the flames had killed 31 people, destroyed or damaged more than 10,000 buildings and burned a staggering 4.1m acres. “There’s almost no statistic or dimension of this fire season 2020 in California that wasn’t astonishing or horrifying,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “Everything about this year has been kind of unusual or extraordinary.”