Most folks can pretty easily picture an amount doubling, and even envisioning something ten or a hundred times its current size or intensity. But our imaginations often fail miserably when faced with exponential growth. Unfortunately, this inability (or unwillingness) to comprehend (or confront) rapid proportional change threatens our long-term viability as a species.

Nothing expresses this most dire human shortcoming like the apocryphal story of an ancient king who was presented with a novel gift: the game of chess. Much impressed with it, the king asked the game’s inventor what he wanted as a reward. The inventor asked for a single grain of rice to be placed on the first square of the chessboard and that the amount of rice be successively doubled for all 64 squares. Believing the inventor’s reward to be a trivial amount, the king readily agreed, and his epic failure to understand the exponential function bankrupted his kingdom.

As cautionary tales go, it’s a good one. Yet, here we are. Half of Los Angeles burned yesterday. The rest of the city and the whole of Orange County are afire today. San Diego could be ashes by tomorrow.

It’s all happened so rapidly that the fire has yet to be named. A fire that started innocuously in Griffith Park. Just north of the observatory. A fire that began small, was quickly called in, quickly responded to by firefighters. Californians take fires seriously. They just weren’t prepared to deal with a crossover event.

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In unfolding catastrophes there is always a tension between time, rate, and distance. An understood tension. But when the factors of time, rate, and distance compound exponentially, they merge with astonishing suddenness, quickly overtaking and overwhelming any disaster response being mounted. These rapidly escalating factors achieve a kind of singularity. That’s when crossover happens.

A fire fed by severe drought conditions, a lingering heat dome, furious winds, and ample, ample fuel. All well-known factors, but they accelerated, cascaded, and converged to create a firestorm, the magnitude of which is bringing swift destruction and misery on a scale never before fully imagined.

Thousands of acres of forests burning is one thing. Thousands of acres of neighborhoods, businesses, utilities, and connecting infrastructure incinerated is everything. Over ten million forced to flee, everything behind them destroyed by an inferno that we have no way to fight, from which we can only retreat.

The masses may not want to listen to someone like me in this moment of panic and despair, but because a whole new line of devastation is being crossed, we have to be able to fully conceive and capture what was once unimaginable. So words matter, names matter.

What I’m calling The Crossover Fire is all that matters. The past tense is such a safe place to be, but if we only rely on planning and responses based on past disasters, if we fail to realize how exponentially big and fast events can surge from catastrophic to apocalyptic, then it’s all over. Checkmate.