Yet Western homeowners represented by those very Republicans are clamoring: Put the fires out, now! So federal agencies will have to borrow from funds that had been set aside for fire prevention in order to smother the fires this time. The government is expected to rush to the scene after any big natural disaster — the impulse society at work. But there is no urgency to fix, or try to prevent, the overheated planet.

The cost of not doing anything about the big picture, as numerous reports have documented, could be catastrophic in just a few years. With rising sea levels, bigger fires, and more lethal and powerful storms, you don’t need an atmospheric scientist to know which way that wind is going to blow.

We all share some of the blame; procrastination is part of our character of the moment. Still, if want to put a face on this inaction, you can look no further than the member of Congress whose district in Washington State is now choked by smoke and harassed by flames — Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

She is part of the leadership of a Republican majority that is hostile to the point of negligence on the basic science of climate change. Earlier this year, she complained that restoration work was not being done on 300,000 acres of the Colville National Forest (in her district) that are dying from beetle infestation. This is a huge problem. From Alaska to Mexico, billions of trees have died from an outbreak of bugs, “the largest and most severe in recorded history,” as the Forest Service called it.

The plague has been directly traced to climate change — with drought, stress and warmer winters making it harder for the trees’ natural defenses to fend off beetles. But the party of Cathy McMorris Rodgers will do nothing. It’s a hoax, this warming talk, until one of its manifestations is nipping at the cedar decks of her constituents.

This fall, California will burn. Already, there have been more than 1,300 fires there. And the first seven months of 2014 were the warmest ever for the Golden State. This, at a time of its worst drought in modern memory. When the fires race through that lovely landscape, with all the media attention to the here-and-now but little to the elsewhere-and-future, only a fool will be surprised.