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OUTSIDE my window, the skies are brown and the sun is a deep reddish-orange. Unfortunately, that isn’t because I’ve moved off-world to a beautiful alien planet orbiting a red dwarf star.

This is simply what “outside” looks like in San Francisco when vast swathes of the western US are on fire. Even the light itself is alarming. Its Mordor-esque gloom makes everything seem like it is the wrong colour. (For a striking image of California’s Bidwell Bar Bridge against the backdrop of the state’s wildfires,  (see “Wildfire nightmare captured in harrowing image of California burning“.)

It has been a bad year for California. After years of drought, we started getting record high temperatures that were coupled with fierce winds.

Back in 2018, our doddering old power lines, mismanaged and neglected, sparked a deadly fire that was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime Armageddon. It turns out that was merely a beta test.

This year, the southern California desert reached 54.4°C. If verified, this is the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. Then a rare lightning storm zapped the coast. The resulting wildfires have already burned more land than they did in all of 2018 – and the fire season has only just started.

All this devastation comes on top of the coronavirus pandemic, which means that people fleeing the heat and fires can’t huddle in shelters together without risking a superspreader event. So, the future here is looking a little uncertain.

At times like this, I find myself contemplating something I call a hope horizon, or how many years it might take before everything becomes alright again. My definition is deliberately open-ended. It raises questions like “What is ‘alright’?” and “What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

That’s the point. Teasing out the answers reminds us of two important facts. The first is that nothing is ever “alright” for everyone. The second is that “everything” is actually a bunch of unrelated stuff, some of which matters to you and some of which matters to me, and the sum of which cannot be fixed by either of us, ever.

It is a useful way to put our problems into perspective and it is also a good method for figuring out what to tackle next. For example, looking into the hellish light of my smoky city, my hope horizon is set at roughly 10,000 years. That’s because I’m thinking about climate change and how long it might take before we see an end to these intense heatwaves and lightning storms.

“I’m contemplating something I call a hope horizon, or how many years it might take before everything becomes alright again”

At the same time, I see another hope horizon of 10 to 20 years, which is about how long I think it will take for California to deploy fire-reduction strategies like controlled burns and housing codes that mandate firebreaks around cities and houses.

That’s something policy-makers could actually work on right now, and fixing it will help to improve the outlook on the 10,000-year problem too. Which brings me to a more important question: “Alright for whom?”

Plenty of people have never been “alright”, if by that we mean having some meaningful degree of autonomy and control over their lives. Maybe they grew up in war-torn regions or in devastatingly poor families. Or perhaps their futures have been blighted by systemic prejudice, xenophobia or genocide. We can imagine a million reasons – some of them political, some of them personal – why one person’s idea of “alright” might be the opposite of another’s.

As we face a terrifying future, we have to keep in mind that our problems won’t be solved all at once. We might stabilise our imperilled democracies just in time to watch places like California burn so catastrophically that it is no longer possible for people to live in them anymore.

Or we might finally have enough tests and protective equipment to cope with the next coronavirus pandemic, but only because we are vastly underpaying the workers who make all of that stuff. What good is a face mask if you cannot actually afford to buy one?

The best strategy is to pick the problems whose hope horizons are within reach, while also keeping the rudder steering us towards those distant millennia when humans might be able to bring our planet’s runaway carbon cycle back under control. Most importantly, we need to remember who could be harmed by such efforts as well as who they could benefit.

Every single catastrophe I am watching unfold in front of my eyes was caused by a combination of natural disaster and political failure. That’s why we are going to need more than science and technology to fix this. We are going to need better political systems, too.