The California assemblyman Jim Wood spent most of the past week in the Sacramento morgue, analyzing the charred remains of human teeth. Wood is a forensic-dentistry expert, and has worked on some of the nation’s most tragic events, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Since his election to the State Assembly, in 2014—representing an enormous district that stretches from Santa Rosa, in wine country, north to the Oregon border—his forensics work has been closer to home. In 2017, after the Tubbs Fire, in Sonoma County, which was, until now, the state’s deadliest fire, he was the sole dental-forensics expert on hand, and helped identify some of the twenty-two fatalities. For the Camp Fire, which began on November 8th and became the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history, he recruited a team of four others. “The numbers are so high, the conditions of the remains so fragmented, and the lack of before-death records is creating a real, real challenge,” he told me. “There may be some people who are never identified.” Of the eighty-five fatalities, twenty-seven have been identified, thanks in part to the work of Wood’s team. The body count will likely continue to increase; two hundred and ninety-six people are still missing. “With this one,” he told me, “the numbers of missing are not dropping as rapidly as they did in Sonoma, and I find that to be really troubling.”

Wood’s proximity to tragedy has influenced his work in the legislature. Earlier this year, he was part of a committee that crafted Senate Bill 901, which set aside a billion dollars for wildfire-prevention and safety efforts over the next five years. The money will come from California’s cap-and-trade program, which auctions off allowances to greenhouse-gas emitters each quarter. “These fires emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases,” Wood told me. “All the other efforts we do to diminish greenhouse gases through regulations for cars, trucks, and businesses get wiped out by these fires. We spend billions of dollars on those efforts. So why are we not spending even modest amounts of money on this, which is undoing all our good work?” Until the most recent budget, only about two per cent of the money from greenhouse-gas reductions was going to forestry management. Much of the rest goes to projects that are focussed on advanced technologies such as hydrogen-fuel cells, high-speed rail, and renewable-energy development. By comparison, getting funds for disaster prevention and vegetation management in rural areas is difficult. “Ninety-five per cent of the land mass is occupied by five per cent of the population,” Wood said. “So we fight hard for every dollar we can get.”

Discussions on the bill began late last year, shortly after the Sonoma wildfires were put out. The elements to get it passed all seemed present: the state is rich, and the legislature, which has a Democratic majority, largely agrees that climate change is driving the increasing rate of large wildfires. In addition to dramatically reducing carbon emissions, the state needs to help communities bear the economic burden of previous fires and better prepare for future wildfires, which will not only inevitably occur but will grow even more extreme as the climate gets warmer and drier. And yet, as the months passed, the arguments over the bill’s details only multiplied. (One legislator said that there was “no issue that was as intense.”) In order to get the prevention-and-safety funding, the bill ultimately required many legislators to make a substantial compromise that allowed the state’s utilities, specifically Pacific Gas and Electric, which dominates northern California, to shift some of their wildfire-liability costs from shareholders to ratepayers. (Wildfires are sometimes started, or exacerbated, by sparks from utility poles and wires.) The bill finally passed on August 31st, at the very end of the summer legislative session, with eleventh-hour edits and late additions that most legislators had little time to review. “I got a little impatient,” Wood said. “People are dying. I don’t want us to see, five years from now, millions and millions more acres burned and untold numbers of more people dead.”

The battle that Wood and other state legislators in California waged to pass urgently needed climate-adaptation legislation offers something like a best-case scenario for the challenges faced by the entire nation. On Friday, scientists with the federal government released a harrowing and voluminous national climate assessment. Heat waves, heavy precipitation, shrinking glaciers, rising and acidifying seas, coastal flooding, drought, and more frequent wildfires pose a rapidly increasing threat to Americans’ physical, social, and economic well-being. By the end of the century, hundreds of billions of dollars could be lost each year, shrinking the U.S. economy by ten per cent. In 2018 alone, not counting the Camp Fire, there have been eleven disaster events in the United States caused by weather and climate, each costing more than a billion dollars in losses. The annual average of billion-dollar disasters from 1980 to 2017 was six, but the annual average for the most recent five years is nearly twelve.

The climate assessment, similar to the United Nations report released last month, describes, in detail, region-specific climate impacts—including widespread crop failure in the Midwest and the threat of rising sea level to a trillion dollars’ worth of coastal real estate—that will occur if emissions are not immediately, drastically reduced and carbon dioxide is not removed from the atmosphere. But it also focusses on the failure of government to successfully adopt adaptation measures to address the devastating changes that are already locked in. (The World Meteorological Organization reported last week that heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached another new record high. But, even if all emissions ended this minute, climate change would continue to intensify, because of “long delays in the climate system’s response to those emissions.”) Adaptation is “not yet common nor uniform across the United States,” the assessment notes, “and the scale of implementation for some effects and locations is often considered inadequate to deal with the projected scale of climate-change risks.” In measured, if understated, prose, the report’s authors explain why: climate adaptation is “less familiar to some individuals and organizations in that it requires a complete reversal from the near-universal current assumption of an unchanging climate.” Policymakers can no longer use the past climate as a guide. But, by and large, they still do.

The publication of the report, which was the work of three hundred scientists and thirteen federal agencies, is particularly notable for its stark contrast with the Trump Administration’s persistent climate denialism and aggressive agenda of environmental deregulation. On Wednesday, when the East Coast was hit with a blast of below-freezing temperatures, President Trump tweeted, “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?” It’s easy to imagine the report’s authors thinking of their boss when they politely wrote, “Many factors make the reversal of this assumption”—that the climate is unchanging— “difficult,” such as unfamiliarity with basic climate science and “the need to differentiate among the timescales of weather and climate.” When asked about the climate assessment on Monday afternoon, Trump said, “I don’t believe it.”

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Trump toured the ashes of Paradise, the California city destroyed by the Camp Fire, which, during a press conference, he twice referred to as “Pleasure,” until Governor Jerry Brown and others corrected him. When a reporter asked if the devastation he had seen changed his opinion on climate change, Trump replied, “No. I have a strong opinion. I want great climate. We’re going to have that, and we’re going to have forests that are very safe.” Later, before a gray landscape of rubble and spiky, blackened trees, he announced that he had been talking with the President of Finland, “a forest nation,” where “they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things.” He waved his hand in front of his face, miming the act of cleaning a windshield, as if to suggest that nothing could be simpler, concluding, “They don’t have any problem.” (The Finnish President, Sauli Niinistö, told a reporter in Finland that he never discussed raking with Trump, and that the only place he has seen anyone raking in his country was in his own yard.) Finns mocked Trump, posting pictures and videos of themselves raking under the hashtag #MakeAmericaRakeAgain, or, simply, #haravointi (“raking” in Finnish), with captions like “Off to Perform My Civic Duty!” or “Just this afternoon I was busy meeting my raking quota.” Meanwhile, in a “Fox News Sunday” interview that aired the same day, Trump told Chris Wallace that he would give his Presidency an A-plus, asking, “Can I go higher than that?”