New York Times - An orange sky

Smoke from wildfires turned the sky orange over San Francisco.

The West, ablaze

In Oregon, wildfires have incinerated several communities this week, and thousands of people have evacuated their homes. In Washington State, a fire hit the town of Malden so quickly that deputies drove through the streets screaming for residents to leave. In Colorado, a 100,000-acre blaze was slowed only by a rare September snowstorm.

And in California, residents are coping with the worst wildfires on record. Smoke blotted out the sun yesterday in San Francisco, and ash fluttered down from the sky. “The sky had a faint orange glow that some said evoked a nuclear winter,” Thomas Fuller, The Times’s San Francisco bureau chief, told us. Jill Cowan, a Times reporter in Los Angeles, said, “The smoke and the poor air quality are just oppressive.”

Life across much of the American West is pretty miserable right now — and global warming is at least partly to blame. Climate change has increased the frequency of very hot days, droughts and, by extension, wildfires.

Charlie Warzel, a Times Opinion writer based in Montana, has argued that this extreme weather would receive even more attention if it were happening on the East Coast, where the nation’s capital is and much of the media is based. “I’ve wondered what coverage of climate would be like if the East really experienced how apocalyptic these feel,” he wrote. (He has also written a piece explaining what it’s like to live through a wildfire.)