Emboldening climate deniers, Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch have set our future on fire.

Blasted by 80-mile-an-hour winds that turned palm trees into giant torches, the blazes that ravaged Southern California beginning Dec. 4 are the worst veteran local firefighters could recall.

“This is kind of the new normal,” Gov. Jerry Brown told reporters Dec. 9. Record drought driven by global warming had left vegetation tinder-dry; more drought and therefore more fires are projected in the years ahead.

The fires were hardly the first preview this year of the new era of climate consequences. In August, Hurricane Harvey set a record in Houston for the most rain to fall in the shortest amount of time. Barely a week later, Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean set a separate record. In November, Northern California’s wine country endured its own wildfires, killing 43.

In an irony so obvious that fate seems to be commanding that humans pay attention, one property scorched by the L.A. fires belongs to Rupert Murdoch. As the founder and acting CEO of Fox News, a lavish donor to Republican politicians and a close confidant of climate denier-in-chief Donald Trump, Murdoch arguably has done more to spread public confusion and political gridlock about global warming than anyone. So when the local NBC News station reported that billowing gray smoke was rising from Murdoch’s $28.8 million mansion and vineyards in the Bel-Air hills, social media exploded with gleeful mockery.

One of the merriest jabs resurrected a tweet of Murdoch’s from Feb. 27, 2015 – an aerial photo of polar ice the mogul captioned, “Just flying over N Atlantic 300 miles of ice. Global warming!” Plainly relishing the irony, Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) tweeted at Murdoch, “Your house is on fire.”

And then irony struck again: Murdoch’s mansion ended up not burning down thanks to the heroic efforts of local firefighters – unionized public-sector employees.

Even had Murdoch’s mansion burned to ashes, any karmic satisfaction would dwindle in light of the misfortunes so many innocents are suffering from weather events of 2017. In Puerto Rico, for example, it turns out the death toll may be 17 times larger than originally announced – not 62 fatalities but at least 1,032.

Yet even this relentless onslaught of disasters will not prompt Murdoch, Trump, and other lords of climate darkness to reconsider the suicidal course they are imposing on the rest of us. Just last week, Senate Republicans passed a tax bill that – along with shoveling billions of dollars to corporations and the super-rich while depriving an estimated 13 million Americans of affordable health insurance – aims to accelerate the oil, gas, and coal development that fuels the climate crisis.

Which is what makes the Republican position on climate change so morally abhorrent. If they want a future of hellish misery, they can have it. But their pocketing of Big Oil’s dollars and their resulting denial of basic science drags the rest of humanity toward that same doom.

MARK HERTSGAARD, The Nation’s investigative editor at large, is the author of seven books.