KEY POINTS:
Standing on a hillside in Ojai, north of Los Angeles, last week, as smoke from the Magic, Ranch and Buckweed wildfires turned the setting sun blood red, it was easy to succumb to the apocalyptic tones favoured by local media.
At that time - Friday - 13 blazes,
including the huge Witch fire, which had blackened a large part of San Diego County, were still burning between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border.
Half-a-million people had been ordered from their homes, the largest US evacuation since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.
More than 180,000ha had been burned, and more than 1600 homes - although both totals may rise - and around 12 people had been killed.
As President George W. Bush, hoping to prevent a repeat of the PR debacle occasioned by Washington's tardy response to Katrina, prepared to visit California, Nasa satellite images showed smoke drifting far out over the Pacific.
Wildfires - and earthquakes - are part of California's disaster lexicon, one of the dues that some pay for living in paradise. As the state's population soars and suburbs creep into the wilderness, this risk intensifies.
"This time climate, ecology and stupid urbanisation have conspired to create the ingredients for one of the most perfect firestorms in history," wrote Mike Davis, the state's most prominent prophet of doom.
He was talking about the 2003 fires, then the state's worst.
But are the fires an ominous harbinger of the future, as climate change - which arguably helped to fuel Katrina - begins to bite? The consensus appears to be yes and no.
"Our fire crisis is deepening as the climate is warming," Daniel James Brown, author of Under a Flaming Sky, the tale of an epic 19th century wildfire, wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "It means getting serious about climate change sooner rather than later."
The US National Incident Information Centre says 3.2 million hectares have burned this year, close to the 3.6 million-hectare total for last year.
But others were less convinced.
"I don't believe this week's fires are so much a global change result, as just a product of a severe Santa Ana, lots of dry fuel and fires starting pretty close to development," said Dan Cayan, a scientist who participated in a report by the California Climate Change Centre last year on the impact of global warming. His house had just burned down.
And Tom Wordell, a National Interagency Fire Centre analyst, noted California is a "fire-prone environment, regardless of whether we are in a climate change scenario".
This is true. California is a fire-prone environment - as is much of the American West - but has climate change exacerbated already challenging conditions?
As the fires roared through Southern California, complaints emerged that the state was unprepared. Officials said hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds, gusting down canyons at up to 136km/h, had grounded fire-fighting aircraft. Others cited deep drought, which had made vegetation tinder dry.
All of this might be used as evidence to point a finger at climate change, which has exacerbated conditions worldwide.
In the California Climate Change Centre report, ordered by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and published last year, scientists looked at three scenarios. If temperatures rise between 1.7C and 3.1C, the lowest range predicted, fires would increase 11 per cent; between 3.1C and 4.4C, the medium range, fires would grow by 55 per cent ; while between 4.4C and 5.8C, the higher range, they would increase by 90 per cent .
"We can never point to any one event and say global warming is the only cause," says Amy Luers, one of the report's contributors. "But clearly if we don't do anything to stop global warming, we're going to have a future where the dry, hot conditions that brought on this wildfire will become much more common.
"Incidents like this are an immediate threat, but they're also a warning for the future."
And a report in Science last year noted that between 1987 and 2003 almost seven times as much land burned in national forests across the West as had been consumed in the previous 17 years. This was largely because of an average 0.8C temperature rise in spring and summer and an earlier snowmelt that extended the fire season. But the study said there had been no increase in Californian fires despite higher temperatures.
Nonetheless, the report this year from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts more frequent drought in the southwest, perfect for wildfires.
Reading between the lines it looks as if there is emerging agreement that, by exacerbating an epic drought throughout the West, climate change may play an indirect role in fires. During the 2006/07 rainy season, just 8.2cm fell in Los Angeles, which normally averages 38.5cm, the driest year since records began in 1877.
Climate projections show the southwest as increasingly prone to prolonged drought, even as rapid growth and water demands by cities and agriculture drain scarce supplies.
Droughts are punctuated by flash floods - my Los Angeles street was briefly flooded to more than 1m last month - which water plants that then dry out and feed fires.
There is also debate about whether climate change will intensify Santa Anas, which form in high-pressure air over Utah's Great Basin, then rapidly descend through coastal canyons. One theory is that winds will strengthen as climate change accentuates the difference between inland and coastal temperatures.
Officials in Los Angeles have only recently begun to acknowledge this looming crisis.
The city has yet to impose water restrictions, so people blithely hose down lawns during scorching temperatures.
At the same time we are paying for past mistakes. Back in the late 19th century a trio of wild fires in Wisconsin and Minnesota killed almost 3000 people. One consequence was a fire suppression policy - in which officials went to great lengths to put out fires, even parachuting smoke jumpers into inaccessible areas - that continued until recently.
By preventing natural fires, which kept ecosystems healthy, officials inadvertently created vast supplies of fuel, ensuring hotter fires. As drought deepened and more trees per hectare competed for scarce water, their immune systems collapsed. The West's immense pine forests fell prey to infestations of bark beetles, usually kept in check by sap.
Up in the San Bernardino National Forest, to the east of Los Angeles, millions of dead pines had been felled. This precaution helped save the resort community of Lake Arrowhead. But nearby Grass Lake, where many trees had not been cleared, was devastated.
Building homes in harm's way amid dense forests, or near steep, chaparral-covered hillsides, is a peculiarly American trait, another facet of the ruinous belief that nature is subservient to man's will.
If the California Climate Change Centre report is accurate, there will need to be a shift in public policy.
"Fires have always been part of the California lifestyle," says Brown. "And with global warming it's going to become a more inevitable part. Policy makers at all kinds of levels really need to start grappling with the reality of that."
Fire fighting is already evolving: pragmatic officials often choose to let fires burn in remote wilderness - one blaze in the Los Padres National Forest burned for weeks this summer - reserving their resources for populated areas. The downside is there aren't enough resources.
Back in 1993, when the Topanga fire roared towards Malibu driving people on to the beach, I watched as National Guard C-130s made hair-raising passes up steep, smoke-filled canyons to dump fire retardant.
But as Southern California burst into flames, crews tackling the Witch fire complained their air assault was restricted to ancient planes, some with bullet holes dating from the Vietnam War.
It is an echo of the false economising on levees before Katrina, or on bridges before the Minnesota bridge collapse in August. Washington has promised C-130s and helicopters.
Yet, as homes burn, there may be an upside. Katrina awakened many Americans to climate change. California's baptism of fire could reinforce this.
At the same time much fuel has been consumed, especially in beetle-ravaged forests where new policies aim at fewer pines per hectare, so that fires are less intense. It may also be harder, if not impossible, to get home insurance for high-risk areas, possibly putting a brake on development.
Last year economist Sir Nicholas Stern, in a report for the British Government, cautioned that the cost of tackling climate change now is far less than it will cost later. Californians might be wise to act on that warning.
