Climate Point: As California burns, residents stay put in danger zones.

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. From wildfire-ravaged southern California, I'm Janet Wilson. As I write, air tankers and helicopters loaded with water are making repeated drops on the rugged flanks of the mountainous Cleveland National Forest a few miles above my house. My bags are packed and my husband, beloved mutt and I are braced to evacuate if necessary.

An estimated 105,000 acres in and around three southern California national forests have been charred or are aflame in the Airport, Line and Bridge Fires. Nearly 100,000 people have been ordered out or are on evacuation warnings. At least eight people have been injured. Scores of homes have been destroyed, though a ski resort and major communications towers survived. The Airport Fire above me was unintentionally started by a well-meaning public works crew moving boulders in 104 degree heat to block off access to tinder dry scrub brush.

So fire prevention sparked a huge wildfire. It's one of many tragic contradictions here.

When I moved here from New England a quarter century ago, it seemed both odd and wonderful that greater Los Angeles sprawls inland from the Pacific Ocean right up against spectacular mountains and foothills - the "wildlands urban interface" as it's called by overtaxed firefighters and now departed insurance companies. Mountain lions and bears roam across our freeways and in our backyards. That incongruity has grown ever more pressing as climate change has ratcheted up fiercer rainfall, more brutal heat and way more forest fires across the West and elsewhere.

Should I stay or should I go?

And yet we stay. A new UC Irvine study out this week says hundreds of people they surveyed in previous southern California burn and flood zones - including right where new fires are now ablaze - are more likely to be aware of the risks of major disasters, including wildfires and the floods and mudslides that often follow. Makes sense.

But being exposed doesn't increase our sense of urgency about our own personal safety or threats to our own property - what one author calls a "concerning tendency" to discount major hazards nearby. "Spatial optimism" is the research term. I'm living proof. Traditional fire season is just underway here, and already three times as much of California has burned as did last year, yet my neighbors and I are hunkered down, our gutters cleaned and cars pointed outward, but not leaving.

"The bottom line is that a resident's experience with a wildfire makes them more aware of other hazards (mudslides and flooding, in particular) - and this is good for hazard preparedness," said co-author Brett Sanders in an email. "However ... survey results show that residents feel that the risk at their home is always less than the risk of the region as a whole." The same cognitive dissonance might apply to climate change as a whole. The good news here is that temperatures are cooling and firefighters are slowly containing the huge blazes. But to the south, a continent is ablaze, from the Brazilian rain forest to Bolivia, with satellite data registering 346,112 fires so far this year in all 13 countries of South America, topping the earlier 2007 record of 345,322 hotspots.

Lights out. In the southeastern U.S., powerful Hurricane Francine muscled its way inland Thursday , reports USA Today, its winds ratcheted down to tropical depression status but still a dangerous storm pounding heavy rain across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle.

Over 400,000 homes and businesses were without power earlier Thursday, hours after the center of the storm crashed ashore in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, as a Category 2 storm driving 100-mph winds. The winds diminished, but the unrelenting downpours turned streets into rivers as Francine lashed New Orleans. Waters began to recede in some areas, while others could see a foot of rain by the weekend, the National Hurricane Center warned.

Hurricane Francine isn't the only storm on the map: Forecasters are tracking four other disturbances across the Atlantic, which now appears to have fully woken up from its slumber , after possibly stalling due to an abnormally sodden Saharan desert . That isn't surprising: This week is the typical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season.

if the drumbeat of gloomy climate news has got you down, you're not alone. As Erica Van Buren writes for the Augusta Chronicle, experts say unpredictable events like record-breaking heat waves and heavy rainfall associated with climate change can have a negative impact on mental health .

“Any individual may experience psychological distress related to the climate crisis in a form that is unique to them,” said Emily Schutzenhofer, a board certified psychiatrist with Climate Psychiatry Alliance.

Schutzenhofer said examples include climate anxiety about the future; anger or a sense of guilt about human-driven climate change, and grief about the loss of natural settings and homes due to climate disasters. For some, that can mean heightened depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Especially at risk are lower income communities who face higher risks, and have fewer resources to recover or rebuild.

Remember, if you or someone you know is feeling overwhelmed, you can call 988, a separate national emergency line dedicated to individuals who are feeling suicidal or experiencing any type of mental health crisis.

Schutzenhofer said turning distress into fruitful action is healing for most.

“For the vast majority of people, climate distress of various forms is not pathological,” she said. “It doesn’t always represent a mental disorder or impair someone's ability to function in the world. Some discomfort about climate change can actually be helpful to us by motivating action, motivating us to act as a community, to protect our environment and to advocate for climate solutions.”

How about that debate? As the presidential race heats up, viewers of all political stripes heard Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris boast during Wednesday night's debate about the Biden administration's increased oil production, and heard her pledge repeatedly not to ban controversial, dangerous hydraulic fracking. Her home state of California has gone a different route .

Fracking takes place across the United States in popular campaign areas , making it a hot topic during the 2024 presidential debate. Former Pres. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, said Harris was lying about her pledge and would ban it. He has historically pushed for major increases in the dangerous fossil fuels, proclaiming "drill, baby drill" in the past, and ridiculed the science behind urgent warnings to stave off damage from climate change by cutting fossil fuel emissions.

Swimming freely? In a bit of bright news, Arizona's state fish, the Apache trout, has recovered so much that it was removed from threatened species status by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday during a ceremony at a Bass Pro Shops store in Mesa.

It marks the first trout species and the first sport fish removed from Endangered Species Act protection, a success credited to a 50-year-long partnership between federal, state, tribal and nonprofit organizations, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

"One of my favorite parts of this job is getting to see fish and wildlife in their natural habitat," she said.

As she spoke, seven of the golden-scaled trout swam on display in a temporary tank nearby. Perhaps not the natural habitat they'd prefer. One more irony in a week full of them.

Read on for more including how cities make it rain, and a terrific series on of Arizonans cope with record heat, from an ER burn center to a 93-year-old woman surviving each day. Some stories below may require a subscription. Sign up and get access to eNewspapers in the USA TODAY Network. If someone forwarded you this email and you'd like to receive Climate Point in your inbox for free once a week, sign up here .

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Climate Point: As California burns, residents stay put in danger zones.