icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook x goodreads bluesky threads tiktok question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

Fire Weather
February 12, 2025
 
As the old year ended, we celebrated part of the holiday season with close-by daughter and grandchildren and intermittently spent time online with more far-flung offspring. The new year began quietly, our Wisconsin and Florida daughters and their families settled into post-holiday employment and pre- and post-graduate schooling. Our son in California left home for a short Asian holiday, enjoyed wrestling events in Japan and wandered briefly in Taiwan. I didn't hear from them often but, as usual, I calmly checked up occasionally on whatever localities they were experiencing. It didn't take long to raise my continental anxiety level.
 
Big storms were predicted for coastal Florida—we'd experienced some in our most recent autumn visits there—and I scanned the news daily, mostly to relief. But then, barely a week into January, alarming news about fierce fires in familiar California locales sent me online several times a day to locate where they were emerging and how they were expanding. The fires were widespread, though when I found our son's neighborhood on whatever telecast maps I located, I was at least briefly reassured. I couldn't know how much he learned in Asia about the Los Angeles fires, which were still raging when he soon returned home, but he then reported that his neighborhood was safe. Until the fires were finally subdued, and rainstorms eventually reassured us of their unlikely resurgence, I still checked in daily, mostly calming whenever he told us what conditions were like nearer to him. His neighborhood avoided the most ferocious blazes of the multiple fires surrounding it, but even after he was confirmed safe, I couldn't stop thinking about them.
 
By chance, among end-of-year birthday/Christmas giftbooks, I'd received John Vaillant's recent Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. Reviewer Robert Macfarlane describes it as "a landmark in nonfiction reportage on the Anthropocene, or what Vaillant here calls 'the Petrocene'—that epoch defined primarily by humanly enhanced combustion." In a recent book of my own, I'd tried to replace the familiar term 'Holocene' with the more appropriate 'Anthropocene' but Fire Weather soon convinced me that 'Petrocene' should be the more accurate term. I quickly became deeply immersed in the book.
 
For me, Fire Weather was a long read: 359 pages of text in small print in three parts, with nearly fifty additional pages of Notes and Bibliography. The narrative's primary setting is Fort McMurray, a once thriving oil industry community in Alberta Province, due north of Montana between British Columbia and Saskatchewan, In May 2015 a tremendous fire devastated the area, sweeping over a vast portion of Alberta and some of Saskatchewan for several days. Vaillant sets up the background of the oil industry there in Part One, provides a deeply detailed account of the fires throughout Part Two, and in Part Three gives us an expansive overview of the future the oil industry and Canada's climate will have to face. I confess I was alarmed throughout the book's first two sections, continually in suspense over the fire's expanding growth and consequences, and then, in the third section, constantly distressed over implications regarding the future we all face because of the approach to climate that we've been engineering throughout the Anthropocene Epoch we're living in.
 
In the past, I suspect, most of us who decided to read about some calamity or another tended to approach the event as something occurring distantly, something one-of-a-kind, notable for its power and its scale but essentially remote from the rest of the world—from the daily living most of us experience. Vaillant acknowledges that, until recently, such stories were seen "as glimpses of a frightening and aberrant event outside normal time, in a place safely far away." He now suggests that they were—and are—"in fact . . . messages from the near future and from very close to home" and asserts that "extraordinary changes have taken place across the entire climate file": atmosphere, energy, forestry, and especially "fire itself". He reports that "a host of states and countries"—he specifically names 32 places from South Africa to North America, from Europe to Australia—where people would find themselves living in a landscape susceptible to fire. "Since 2016, even places we never considered capable of burning"—he mentions the Arctic, the Amazon, the moors of Britain, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Boulder, Colorado—have caught fire and burned.
 
Reporting on the history of the "kind of disruption" occurring "in the context of drought and rainfall," Vaillant informs us that it is "now referred to as a 'phase shift': a dramatic, effectively irreversible change in a region's climate regime. There is abundant evidence that phase shifts are now under way across much of the planet." The example of fire behavior he offers comes from California: "in the 1950s, the state's fire season lasted about four months; today, it is effectively year-round, and the acreage burned during the most severe seasons (1950 versus 2020) has increased eightfold (to say nothing of lives and property lost)." "In New Mexico," he adds, "fire weather days have increased by 120 percent since 1973." His book was published before the January 2025 fires in California.
 
The most discouraging aspect of fire's increasing presence and possibility is that, from a historical perspective, there was a time when fire at such a scale did not take place and only the intervention of human industry and the exploitation of natural resources have brought us to a time in history when reversing the climate change that we persist in keeping in motion may be impossible. Even if we stopped the relentless development of industry, we've likely gone too far to change its potential impact. The Anthropocene, the period of Earth history overwhelmed by human exploitation of natural resources, has probably actually become the Petrocene; the chemical impact on the climate everywhere has overwhelmed the period when people had charge and could have made better choices. In America, as confirmation, the current president has vowed to concentrate on industry and has thoroughly dismissed climatology.
 
Despite how troubled I am by what it portends, Fire Weather is a book everyone should read. As my grandchildren set out into the world of grownups—one will graduate from university this year, one will become a college sophomore, one become a freshman in the fall—I try not to cast my imagination too often into the future of the world they—and their children and their grandchildren—will be living in. For a while still, that's where, attentively, I'll be also be living.
 
Notes:
O'Connor, M. R., "Line of Fire," The New Yorker February 3, 2025: 12-16. An Annals of Disaster essay.
 
Vaillant, John. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024: 252, 354-355.
 
 
 

Weather's World

 

Wherever something potentially problematic happens in the country or in the world, our internet weather site posts plentiful links to reportage. Looking for news about torrential rainfall and potential flooding in Wisconsin (where I live) and Florida (where I'm visiting), I learned about flooding elsewhere in America—i.e., historic flooding in eastern Kentucky causing over 40 deaths; extensive flooding in Mississippi; severe coastal flooding in Alaska—and powerful flooding elsewhere in the world—floods in Italy causing 14 deaths; horrendous flooding in Pakistan causing 1,500 deaths; a historic typhoon in Japan causing millions of evacuations; a hurricane devastating Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Videos from cellphones and drones display a wide variety of inundations: communities underwater, roads washed out, homes deluged, people wading through viscous waters, rivers and lakes reaching ever higher levels and ever fiercer surges.

 

Everywhere I look, every part of the world is undergoing a wide range of climate problems. I follow the west coast weather frequently, to see what it's like where my son lives. In the southwest the challenge to the climate and to the lives lived there are the opposite of what my midwestern and southern relatives have been facing. They are confronted by the problem of drought. I've long been noticing the shrinking water levels in Lake Powell (the second largest reservoir in the US, now at its lowest level since it was first filled sixty years ago), and in Lake Mead, the Colorado River, the Great Salt Lake, all the most prominent locations that a massive population depends upon for electrical power and agricultural irrigation. Drought's impact on California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Kansas, and Oklahoma has challenged crop production everywhere

 

We're not alone. The European Union has reported that the drought in Europe is "the worst the continent has experienced in 500 years." One source listed the Rhine, the Danube, the Tiber, the Po, the Elbe, and the Volga as rivers that are drying up and disrupting shipping. Another source reported that, due to extreme heat and as much as 60% less rainfall than customary, the Yangtze, China's biggest river, is so considerably lower that it makes commercial navigation impossible. News footage often shows freighters everywhere unable to carry cargo further than their initial entry port. The internet often shows side-by-side images taken a couple years apart that demonstrate how shrunken certain waterways have become, how much certain shorelines have lowered, how historic discoveries surprisingly occur because previously unknown ancient dwellings and long-hidden community sites (as well as more recent criminal activities) have been revealed at exposed lake and river bottoms. Some of that news, in itself interesting or intriguing, would seem more positive if not for the circumstances that brought it to light.

 

The extensive heatwaves contributing to the drought also set the stage for massively destructive consequences, particularly abundant and devastating wildfires. On September 19, the National Interagency Fire Center claimed that, in the United States, "ninety-five large fires and complexes have burned 902,574 acres in 9 states." Idaho had 38 large fires burning, Montana 27 large fires. Smaller fires abound everywhere, especially in the northwest and the southwest. The NIFC's 2022 year-to-date chart listed 51,169 fires consuming 6,789,438 acres—so far.

 

Wikipedia lists nineteen countries in Europe and around the Mediterranean battling wildfires, the most extensively affected principally Algeria, France, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, but including the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, and others. The range of countries named suggests how persistent and widespread the fires have been. Heat waves contributing to the aridity and potential for wildfire have set record temperatures—115 degrees, 129 degrees—in many countries and caused major melting of previously impervious glaciers and mountaintop snowpacks. Antarctica, the Arctic Circle, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Dolomites—most of the locations we think of as permanently icebound all have appeared in videos of glacier loss and destruction, and melting ice contributes to rising sea levels everywhere. HT Tech reports online that NASA has displayed a view of the eastern hemisphere (Asia, Africa, Europe) showing what it calls a "HORRIFIC [the capital letters are theirs] heatwave on Earth as humans suffer unbearable conditions." It quotes Stephen Pawson, chief of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, asserting that "this large area of extreme (and record breaking) heat is another clear indicator that emissions of greenhouse gases by human activity are causing weather extremes that impact our living conditions."

 

Based on what I scroll past on Facebook or news sites, everyone's overwhelming preoccupation is on efforts to deepen our self-absorption. But recognizing the expanding impact of weather and climate change would locate us more solidly on the actual planet, in the actual climate, and make us more aware of the future our world races toward, the one we pretend we can't change.

 

 

Notes: NASA shows HORRIFIC heatwave on Earth as humans suffer unbearable conditions

 

NPR Morning Edition: Where the Colorado River Crisis is Hitting Home (9/22/22)

 

 

Be the first to comment