The wildfires terrorizing Los Angeles have been like something out of a movie: vast, fast-moving, unpredictable, merciless. Their scope and nature have surprised even fire-jaded California. They are also evidence of the sort of consequences that can be expected as the planet continues to heat up, consequences for which traditional risk-management tools — like, say, home insurance — are increasingly obsolete.

The fires didn’t even exist on Tuesday morning. The only hint of what was to come were forecasts for some of the strongest and most dangerous Santa Ana winds on record to barrel out of the Great Basin and into Southern California. Those hurricane-force blasts can be destructive enough. But these coincided with drought conditions, dry vegetation, low humidity and relatively high air temperatures, leading the National Weather Service to issue an "extremely critical” fire-weather warning for the area around Los Angeles, the first-ever such warning in the lower 48 U.S. states in January.

It didn’t take long to see the results. Within hours, a serious fire was threatening the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in western Los Angeles, moving so quickly that some residents abandoned their cars on the road and fled by foot. By Wednesday morning, three out-of-control fires had spread across 4,500 acres around the city, taking at least two lives and destroying at least 100 buildings and threatening hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of homes and businesses. And the emergency had not yet peaked, with strong winds expected to continue the rest of the week.