LONDON — "How are our children going to survive in a land that is dead?" asked a survivor of the wildfires that seared much of southern Greece during the last week of August.

Six thousand homes and 4 million olive trees burned, half the forests of Greece gone, and 64 people dead is a huge loss, and in the carbonized landscapes of the Peloponnese, it is hard to imagine that people will ever live there again.

But what nobody saw coming was the political fallout: This may be the first time that a government falls because of climate change.