Daniel Swain in the Guardian: California’s wildfire season is starting and officials are bracing for the worst

It is difficult to predict how bad the rest of this fire season will be based on the number of fires so far, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Our worst fire years aren’t necessarily the years that we’ve had the highest number of fires,” he noted. “All it takes is one – one huge, destructive fire to ruin the whole year.”