California is working on solutions to worsening climate change. Will they be enough?

In the opening chapter of "The Ministry for the Future," science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson details a calamitous heat wave that kills almost all the residents of a small town. In another chapter, he imagines a catastrophic flood that wipes out Los Angeles. The late Octavia Butler described a Southern California reeling from years of drought in "Parable of the Sower," and Paolo Bacigalupi writes about a near-future Southwest that's also been devastated by drought. Sci-fi writers have long conceived worlds in which extreme weather events upend the lives of its inhabitants, but with every passing, warming year, their scenarios feel more prophetic. Last September, record-shattering temperatures nearly broke the state's power grid, and according to a Times investigation, extreme heat waves are killing more Californians than official records show.