This week our columnist Ruth Wishart writes about the devastation of the wildfires in California - and her own experiences of wild weather at home.

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It wasn’t 30 years ago, more like half a dozen. And the gales blew into the west of Scotland in earnest.

One of the strangest and spookiest sights came the next morning when the bright green of April’s early foliage was turned brown overnight with windburn, turning spring to autumn in 12 hours.

Trees were felled by the blast all over the shop – one on our shore road still bravely goes into leaf every year despite having been flattened with barely a handful of roots still in the soil.

The power was cut, my greenhouse became a pile of glass and the stanchions on my decking snapped like matchsticks.

So when the folks at the Met Office started posting techni-coloured pictures of Ophelia hurtling across the Atlantic, bound for Ireland and Scotland, the memories were still fresh.

Fresh enough to buy more candles, and a new torch. Fresh enough to set the wood burning stove in case that became the default heating source.

But come Tuesday morning the folks who’d been devastated – in a few cases bereaved – were all in the Irish Republic which bore the brunt of the hostilities. I felt for them, and for the people in Portugal, mourning multiple deaths from raging fires.

And then a California-based friend posted a film of her local fire team, who’d been dispatched up country to tackle the horrendous blazes there.

They’d gone expecting to pour water on hillsides and create firebreaks around roads. Instead the shocked firecrew drove through suburbs where all that remained standing of family homes were chimney stacks and charred bricks.

To lose everything precious to you between one night and the next must be utterly heartbreaking. Not the replaceables like cars, but the pictorial and video memories built up over years of weddings, and christenings and happy gatherings.

Meanwhile, the cretin in the White House and his team of saboteurs picked that very moment to try to kill off Obama’s laws designed to cut carbon emissions - having just pulled out of a global climate change accord which had been decades in the making.

They knew better than the scientists – they knew climate change was all a hoax, probably dreamt up by the Chinese to damage the US economy.

Truly they know nothing. Except how to make a buck whilst ruining their country. It’s still beyond belief that Donald Trump should be sitting in the White House tweeting out his paranoia.

We can only pray, alongside the victims of hurricanes, fire and flood, that the country which has spawned many fine leaders finds the means to dethrone this ghastly anomaly.