California is working on solutions to worsening climate change. Will they be enough?

In the opening chapter of "The Ministry for the Future," science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson details a calamitous heat wave that kills almost all the residents of a small town. In another chapter, he imagines a catastrophic flood that wipes out Los Angeles.

The late Octavia Butler described a Southern California reeling from years of drought in "Parable of the Sower," and Paolo Bacigalupi writes about a near-future Southwest that's also been devastated by drought.

Sci-fi writers have long conceived worlds in which extreme weather events upend the lives of its inhabitants, but with every passing, warming year, their scenarios feel more prophetic.

Last September, record-shattering temperatures nearly broke the state's power grid, and according to a Times investigation, extreme heat waves are killing more Californians than official records show. In the winter, after the driest three-year period on record that dried up wells and forced farmers to fallow fields, atmospheric river storms pummeled the state. Farms flooded. Levees failed.

For decades, scientists have warned us that human-caused climate change will produce a growing number of weather catastrophes. But as the impact of global warming unfolds across the world, events once expected to happen decades from now are already here.

A warned that burned areas in California could increase up to 52% by 2050 relative to the last several decades. But in the state scorched about 50% more land in compared with 2018, the