Heartbreaking images are pouring in from wine country, north of San Francisco, where fires continue to rage. At least 21 people have died in the blazes so far, and in one county alone, 670 people are listed as missing.

The devastating wildfires in Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties have reached historic proportions: More than 3,500 structures had been destroyed as of Wednesday morning. That surpasses the damage of the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm, previously the worst wildfire disaster in state history. Nationally, this week’s fires rank as the most destructive wildfire complex since at least 1980.

Although California’s epic five-year-drought has largely ended, it led to diseased and weakened trees that have fed the flames of the current fires. Plus, last winter’s heavy rains spurred the growth of grasses and shrubs which have since dried out during a record-warm summer — leading to a whole lot of dead things available to burn. Tack on the exceptionally strong “Diablo Winds” and a few stray sparks, and we’re seeing the horrific consequences.

Altogether, the fires have burned more than 170,000 acres, an area more than one-fifth the size of the state of Rhode Island. The National Weather Service forecasts strong winds and low humidity on Wednesday, which could cause the fires to grow even more in the next day or two.

As climate change continues to make droughts longer and more severe, conditions like these will become more and more common.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump nominated Kathleen Hartnett White to run the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office in charge of promoting the improvement of the environment.

Like many Trump picks who came before her, Hartnett White is an outspoken climate skeptic. In an interview with the Washington Post last fall, she said, “Carbon dioxide has none of the characteristics of a pollutant that could harm human health.”

That’s not the only bonkers thing Trump’s nominee has said about climate change. Previously chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Hartnett White was a candidate for head of the EPA before the position went to another climate skeptic, Scott Pruitt.

In a column published in Townhall in 2015, Hartnett White wrote that “industrialized nations that utterly depend on the consumption of fossil fuels have not amplified environmental degradation of the natural world.”

And in an op-ed last year, she suggested that CO2 “may not be the cause of warming but instead a symptom of it.”

As for what does impact our climate, Hartnett White has a theory: “What role does our sun play? The sun is the source of over 99 percent of the energy in the earth’s climate.”

Good point?

In late September, the Pentagon included a Bloomberg News climate reporter Christopher Flavelle on a series of emails meant for Pentagon employees.

The emails detail talking points for convincing the public that the White House’s response to Puerto Rico was going well. Just one minor problem: It so wasn’t. Many Puerto Ricans have gone without power, clean water, and adequate food ever since Hurricane Maria hit last month.

Flavelle pointed out some highlights from the messages, which he received between Sept. 28 and Oct. 2.

When San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz criticized the White House’s self-congratulatory statements about its Puerto Rico relief — which Cruz called a “people-are-dying story” — officials from the Defense Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were instructed to ignore Cruz and say that “the federal government’s full attention is on Hurricane Maria response.”

In response to news of these emails, Mayor Cruz wrote on Twitter:

So much for the White House’s attempts to turn the corner on their PR problem. As Department of Defense staff admitted in a later email, the public perception of the government’s response “continues to be negative.” Sometimes, perception is reality.

On Wednesday, Iceland flipped the switch on the first project that will remove more CO2 than it produces. The plant is operated by Climeworks, which also opened the first commercial carbon-capture plant in Switzerland earlier this year.

Here’s how direct-air carbon capture works: Giant turbines pull in huge quantities of air, hoovering up molecules of carbon dioxide so we can store it somewhere that’s NOT the atmosphere.

The Icelandic pilot program can remove an estimated 50 metric tons of CO2 from the air in a year. It pumps the collected gas deep into the island’s volcanic bedrock, where it reacts with basalt and essentially turns into limestone. Voilà! No massive reservoirs to manage for millennia — just a lot of rock.

If all this sounds too good to be true, there’s a reason. Ambitious “clean coal” plants have been engaged in a very public struggle with the economic reality of carbon capture in recent years, and direct-air capture is an even tougher sell.

But it’s getting more affordable. Today, companies estimate it would cost between $50 and $100 to capture a single metric ton of carbon. Iceland’s plant has already achieved $30 per metric ton. It will never work as a substitute for action to reduce emissions, but carbon capture could be a crucial part of keeping global temperatures in check this century.

In a memo leaked last week, Department of Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert recommended White House staff pivot to a “theme of stabilizing” with regard to messaging around the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.

President Trump, however, appears to have missed that particular update. On Thursday morning, he threatened to pull federal relief workers from the devastated island just three weeks after Maria made landfall.

Meanwhile, most of Puerto Rico is still without power, hospitals are running out of medical supplies, and clean water remains scarce.

Trump isn’t the only prominent Republican refusing to recognize the severity of the crisis. In an interview with CNN on Thursday morning, Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, accused host Chris Cuomo of fabricating reports of the severity of the disaster.

“Mr. Cuomo, you’re simply just making this stuff up,” Perry said. “If half the country didn’t have food or water, those people would be dying, and they’re not.”

45 Puerto Rican deaths have been officially confirmed so far, and reports from the ground indicate the unofficial number of deaths due to the storm is higher.

Three weeks after Hurricane Maria struck, 36 percent of Puerto Ricans — more than a million people — still lack access to clean water. That’s a slight improvement from 1.5 million two weeks ago, but still.

In desperation, people are getting their water from contaminated creeks, sewers, and maybe wells at Superfund sites, those polluted areas often contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals. Quietly tucked away in an EPA news release from Tuesday:

There are reports of residents obtaining, or trying to obtain, drinking water from wells at hazardous waste “Superfund” sites in Puerto Rico. EPA advises against tampering with sealed and locked wells or drinking from these wells, as it may be dangerous to people’s health.

Puerto Rico has more than its share of Superfund sites, a legacy of industrial pollution, toxic landfills, and bomb testing by the U.S. military. Eighteen such sites, to be precise.

These toxic sites aren’t the only danger. There’s also risk in getting water from rivers and streams. People are already dying from diseases caused by contaminated water, and health experts warn that Puerto Rico could see “significant epidemics.”

Keep that in mind next time you hear someone from the White House say the relief effort is going well.

While we’re all talking about IQ tests, here’s a math problem: Imagine you’re a tree with 56 apples to take care of. One day, a massive storm comes and knocks out about four of those apples. They’re all on the ground now, kind of smushed.

But one of those apples didn’t have the same advantages as the other ones — too many pesticides growing up, let’s say — and it’s extra-smushed. It is also $74 billion in debt. (You may ask: Who loaned an apple $74 billion? Hedge funds have long embraced predatory lending practices, but that’s a math problem for another time.)

Anyway — as the tree, it’s your job to get those apples back in shape. You decide to allocate $36.5 billion in fallen-apple assistance. But only $5 billion specifically goes to that extra-smushed, indebted apple, and then that apple has to pay it back. It has to share about $14 billion with the other less-indebted and -smushed apples.

Surprise! This isn’t really a math problem — it’s an ethics problem. The tree is the United States government, the apples are all of its states and territories, the smushed apples are Florida, Texas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the extra-smushed apple is Puerto Rico. Donald Trump’s self-lauded aid plan for the ailing and indebted territory is a loan.