I’ve watched the California fires over the last few days with the same horror as everyone else; we’re watching major parts of one of the nation’s major cities burn in real-time, in an event that’s best described as a fire-hurricane, an event all-but unthinkable not that long ago but one that is increasingly common as decades of misguided fire-management policies collide with expanding population in the so-called “wildland–urban interface,” all accelerated by changing, hotter, drier climate conditions. It is a literal recipe for epic disaster.

Unfortunately, California’s fires are a harbinger of what’s to come in a world where we increasingly feel the effects of climate change—but it’s also a warning about HOW our world is going to change in the years and decades ahead. I don’t pretend to be a climate scientist or to understand the precise feedback loops that may, for instance, cause the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or the melting of Greenland. However, I have in recent years spent a lot of time thinking about climate as a political threat.

Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

In that time tackling this as a tech and economic challenge, we’ve actually made substantial progress on a lot of these problems and have, so far, fundamentally altered the arc of our planet’s climate. As one leading climate thinker I spoke with last fall told me, “We were on a course to four-and-a-half to six degrees of warming. That is not a world that is livable. Today, maybe we’re on a path for two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half degrees of warming—still bad, but better. That trajectory is headed in the right direction.”

But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis.