The frightening implications of California's first million-acre fire
It was mid-August and California was experiencing yet another bout of extreme weather.
In Death Valley, the thermometer at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center displayed one of the hottest - if not the hottest - temperatures ever recorded on Earth: 130 degrees.
Up in Northern California, an unusually fierce lightning storm lit up the skies and ignited numerous wildfires stretching from the Salinas Valley and the Santa Cruz Mountains north into the Mendocino National Forest and beyond.
More than 12,000 lightning strikes were recorded over the next 96 hours, and in the weeks that followed, 37 of those small fires morphed and merged into what has become the largest wildfire California has ever seen: the August Complex.
On Monday, it reached "gigafire" status, burning more than 1 million acres, setting a new record for the state and offering what experts say is a terrifying window into how climate change and
