The pictures and videos I've seen are just incredible.

And when the fire seen ends, hopefully, in Australia, it will be starting up in California and other areas in the northern hemisphere. Spain and Portugal come to mind.

And the problems don't cease when the fires go out. In mountainous areas, the worry is landslides when the rains do come because there is no vegetation left to hold the soil. It looks like Australia's fires are mostly on flat land, but there will still be significant erosion in those areas not normally affected by fire.

One of the takeaways of all this that the world should acknowledge and consider is that climate change will bring fires to areas that don't normally burn. So people in, say, Oregon and Washington states may consider yearly fires to be a California thing, but those old rules no longer apply.