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IF EVERYTHING goes to plan, by the time this is published, I will be on a beach. My family and I are heading to Pelion, on the Greek mainland.

Ah, Greece鈥� how I have missed you! I feel a bit guilty about jetting off at this difficult time, but the emissions are offset, we are all double-jabbed and will act responsibly. There鈥檚 still a lot that can go wrong, of course. Positive covid-19 tests. Sudden changes to quarantine rules. A careless failure to jump through a bureaucratic hoop. And, of course, wildfires.

The village we are staying in is directly across the water from the infernos raging on the island of Evia. It looks like our destination remains untouched, but the north coast of Evia is visible from southern Pelion, and my holiday won鈥檛 be sheltered from the fire.

Many people will be getting a similar sight and smell of the blazing world we have created. Wildfires have been sweeping across Greece, Italy and Turkey as southern Europe grapples with the worst heatwave for three decades. This follows devastating fire seasons in the Pacific Northwest, Amazon, Australia and even the Arctic. The world appears to be going up in flames. Some scientists have called this new normal the 鈥减测谤辞肠别苍别鈥�.

It now feels natural to look upon such scenes and see the infernal hand of climate change. Indeed, many newspapers illustrated their front-page stories about the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which concluded that humans are 鈥渦nequivocally鈥� to blame for global warming, with .

But we should be wary about such simplistic connections. It might seem obvious that a hotter world will also be a fierier one; scientists have been sounding that alarm for years. But there is more to the pyrocene than heat, and we ignore other factors at our peril.

鈥淔ire tornadoes are mercifully rare, but are expected to become less so as the climate really starts to bite鈥�

Last month, I attended the Ecological Society of America鈥檚 annual virtual meeting, where the climate change scientist, , spoke. He acknowledged that climate change has intensified the heat that drives wildfires, and that the fire season has lengthened across a quarter of vegetated land surface since 1979. However, attributing wildfires directly to climate change is rarely scientifically justified.

Gonzalez said only three studies 鈥� 鈥� have causally linked wildfires to human-induced warming. Recent conflagrations in the Mediterranean, Australia and Siberia can鈥檛 yet be directly attributed, and in many other places, other factors are much more important. In the Congo basin, Amazon and South-East Asia 鈥� ecosystems that rarely burned in the past, but have suffered the world鈥檚 most rapid increases in fire in recent decades 鈥� intentional burning to clear the land is the main driver. In Chile and south-east Australia, natural climate variation such as El Ni帽o is still more important than anthropogenic warming. That may change once the dust has settled on the latest fires.

This isn鈥檛 intended to downplay the growing contribution of human-induced warming to wildfires. In British Columbia鈥檚 fire season of 2017, for example, the extent of the burn was about 10 times larger than it would have been without climate change.

The fires raging in southern Europe have yet to reach such apocalyptic proportions. They are, however, helping to fuel the narrative that climate change has arrived, and may lull us into a false sense of security that we can deal with whatever it throws at us. But be warned: the full, hellish fury of the pyrocene has yet to arrive.

To get a sense of how much worse things could get, consider the devastating Loyalton fire in California last year. On the second day of the month-long blaze, firefighters encountered a monster that had rarely been seen before in the US: a 鈥渇ire tornado鈥�. Also called a pyrocumulonimbus, these occur when heat from an intense fire interacts with the atmosphere to create a flaming vortex that is a hybrid of a tornado and a wildfire.

鈥淭hey create their own weather system,鈥� says bushfire expert . 鈥淭hey burn everything, they鈥檙e really intense, they spread so quickly.鈥� Fire tornadoes are mercifully rare, but are expected to become less so as climate change really starts to bite.

That is the world we are blundering into unless we get to grips with emissions quickly. But even rapid cuts can鈥檛 free us from the flames. As Gonzalez said, fire begets fire: 鈥淢ore heat causing more wildfires, emitting more carbon, generating more heat.鈥�

When we booked to go to Pelion before the pandemic, we imagined we were planning a trip to a place where time has stood still. It now looks more likely to offer us a glimpse of a dystopian future.