The effects of these fires are not linear or neatly additive. It might be more accurate to say that they initiate a new set of biological cycles. Scientists warn that, even as California is baked into brush by a drier future, making inevitable more and more damaging fires, the probability of unprecedented-seeming rainfalls will grow, too—as much as a threefold increase of events like that which produced the state’s Great Flood of 1862. And mudslides are among the clearest illustrations of what new horrors that heralds;
