Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

by John Vaillant

*WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2023*

**AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER**

A stunning account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters.

PLEASE When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, History, Environment, Nature, Climate Change, Audiobook

Audible Audio

First published June 6, 2023

About the author

John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's and Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), was an international bestseller, and has been published in 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar's Children (Houghton Mifflin), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Canada). 

Reviews

[Yun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made.

A detailed investigation into all that transpired during the record-breaking Fort McMurray Fire, in which almost 100,000 people were forced to flee in a single afternoon, as well as a historical and scientific exploration of how we got to this point and where we will go from here, Fire Weather is as essential as it is eye-opening.

Going into this, I'd like to think I was fairly well-versed on current events, especially on anything weather-related. And of course I knew about global warming and climate change; I don't live under a rock, after all. But when it came to grasping the nitty gritty of exactly what all that entails, I admit I was a little bit hazy.

So this book is exactly what I needed to become crystal clear on this topic. It sits right at the intersection of current affairs, science, and history, all topics that interest me about our world. And I found it to be an absolutely engrossing read, one that as it went on, became harder and harder for me to put down.

We start off with a brief look into the history of fossil fuels, as well as how Fort McMurray became a petroleum boom town surrounded by boreal forest. Then the book shifts into a deep dive of the Fort McMurray Fire, and let me tell you, it is as harrowing and thrilling of a tale as any I've ever read. The mechanics of this fire were almost heretofore unseen, its destructive properties so vast and ferocious, it spawned its own weather systems and was not truly extinguished for more than a year.

The city and the surrounding landscape had become something akin to a fire planet—not a biome but a “pyrome” whose purpose was not to support life but to enable combustion.

But the irony is that Fort McMurray would not have existed as a city if not for its industry of extracting and producing fossil fuels. And while it's this industry that had made it into a boom town, it also simultaneously helped to shape the climate into one that supported and sustained the fire that eventually razed the city to the ground.

But the author doesn't just stop at reporting on the fire. He takes that event and ties it to history and science, and shows us the future in store for us if we choose to continue our destructive love affair with fossil fuels. The amount of research that went into this book must have been staggering, as is the author's vision and ability to tie it all together into a cohesive narrative that both informs and astounds.

Reading this book often left me in chills. Vaillant has a way with words that is not only illuminating in the way of nonfiction, but also evocative and emotionally resonant in the way that only the best of fiction can achieve. And the result is nothing short of remarkable and sobering.

It is almost unbearable to consider that our reckoning with industrial CO2 is only in its infancy, and that future generations will bear this burden far more heavily than we do now.

The juxtaposition of the details of a wildfire side-by-side with a study of climate change is a masterful stroke, as is the choice to go with the Fort McMurray Fire in particular. This combination, which examines climate change from both the micro and macro levels, really hits home the symbiotic relationship humankind has developed with fossil fuels and underscores the positive feedback loop we have created, through negligence at best and willful greed at worst, that is currently propelling us towards a future none of us want to see.

The message isn't all negative though. Yes, we are past the point of no return and our planet will never go back to the way it was before, but our total annihilation isn't a foregone conclusion yet. There is still hope, if we can only make the hard choices now and pivot in time. And so this book, more than anything, is a warning and a call to action.

The current moment is the greatest challenge humanity has faced since we (almost) mastered fire. This time, it is not fire we have to master, but ourselves. If we fail this test, there will be another one, and another after that, but each time the stakes will be higher and the price of failure steeper.

Every once a while, I come across a nonfiction read so profound, so staggering in its scope and so clear in its view, I feel like I'm walking away with essential knowledge of the world. And so this book does exactly that. It is timely, insightful, and surely a must-read as we approach yet another hottest year of yet another hottest decade on record.

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[Chris Harvey · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a scene in Fire Weather where a Fort McMurray woman drives past flames right on the highway in her town, and continues on to drop off her dry cleaning. The dry cleaner takes her order and confirms the date for pickup, while he calls his wife to tell her the flames are in their neighbourhood and that it's time to leave. The police chief had just wrapped up a press conference where despite overwhelming evidence of the disaster about to take place, he did not advise people to anything other than to be cautious. Keep calm and carry on. That scene is going to stick with me a long time, because I can't think of a better example of our relationship to the reality of climate change.

Fire Weather is an excellent book. Better than I had expected, and I had high expectations after reading his previous two non-fiction nature books. I plan on reading anything he writes from here on out. He writes in a very easy to read style and can create a narrative story even out of normal cycles in nature. The way he describes fire like it's a living being was a very interesting chapter.

The book is a mix of a few different things. There is the story of the wildfire in Fort McMurray and how it affected the town and the people in it. There is the story of fire itself, how humans interact with it and how our relationship with it has changed. Then there's the final third of the book which mostly deals with climate change and the role humans have played in it. This is probably the most important section of the book, and the section I hope the people of Fort McMurray and Alberta don't skip over. This book should be required reading for anyone involved in the production or consumption of petroleum products, which is to say basically everyone.

Fire Weather will likely be on a lot of best of lists to end 2023. It's an entertaining and alarming book and I can't recommend it enough. 5 stars.

[Emmkay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horribly timely and likely to remain so, this deep dive into our new, human-created climate of petrochemical industry-driven fire took me a long time to read because I needed frequent breaks to be able to get through and process the sobering information. On breaks I’d look up for relief and see the news about fires in Europe, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, or on Maui, which reinforced the importance of Vaillant’s message. He takes the 2016-17 fire that destroyed most of Fort MacMurray as his focal event, exploring the conflagration hour by hour both from a human perspective and a scientific one. He delves into the lives and experiences of people in the city with great compassion, as well as recognition of the bravery and resourcefulness with which they responded to an entirely terrifying situation, one that he makes clear will continue to happen more and more this century. Dependent on the petrochemical industry for their livelihoods, hard workers who enjoy the modern lifestyle and gas-powered toys that their work brings them, believing like most of us do that there is an invisible divide between wilderness and city that won’t be breached, people in Fort MacMurray awoke one day in early May to smoke on the horizon and authorities suggesting vaguely and cheerfully that they go about their usual activities but ‘have a plan.’ By early afternoon neighbourhoods were burning, and the entire city was racing to get out along a single highway, while the flames were behaving in terrifying ways never experienced by the city’s firefighters.

I learned a lot. For example, I had never understood how bitumen production works before - the idea of ‘oil sands’ or ‘tar sands’ had me thinking that somehow the product just required straining or separating, but it’s so much more labour-intensive than that, and depends for its economic viability on oil being expensive and government subsidies large. I also learned about the new behaviour of fire, from the flashover caused by encountering petrochemical fuel (including from common household goods - in our sofas, chairs, tvs, food packaging), which can destroy a home in 5 minutes, to fires now creating their own weather, including pyrocumulonimbus and previously non-existent fire tornados. In the final section of the book, Vaillant shows that even in the 19th century, there were scientists who recognized how the release of carbon dioxide would affect the atmosphere, and that the petrochemical industry was receiving - and initially receptive to - this information in the 1950s. I didn’t know there was a golden age of climate science in the late 70s and early 80s when even petrochemical companies like Exxon were funding serious public research on the issues, before it became politicized and they began to encourage denial. Vaillant does point to increasing shareholder activism, divestment, and legal action as showing some way forward, but it is not a Pollyanna conclusion by any means.

So, a hard read, but an important one.

[Barbara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I added this to my TBR when it was first published last June, I didn't get around to reading it until it won the Baillie Gifford award for non-fiction last week. Let me say, I think the award committee got it right. This book is a great achievement, a dramatic recounting of a horrific few days for a community, and a detailed lesson in why we have begun to see more forest fires of unprecedented destruction, and why that situation is only going to get worse.

In May 2016, a forest fire just outside of Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, Canada, raged out of control and destroyed the city, forcing 88,000 inhabitants to evacuate in a single afternoon. Although 2,500 structures were immolated, not a single life was lost that day.

Vaillant's book is not a sensationalized accounting of the events of that week, but a deep dive into the circumstances that created a fire that multiplied 500 fold in size overnight, and then doubled every few hours for several days, reaching temperatures of 1600 F (900 C). This is the temperature at which metal melts and concrete is reduced to its constituent elements. And houses are reduced to ashes within 5 minutes of first catching fire.

The backdrop for these events makes the story a sort of painful allegory. Fort McMurray, you see, is the hub of oil sands processing, a nightmarish process that extracts a petroleum product of marginal quality from buried bitumen, using enormous quantities of natural gas to create the necessary heat for the extraction, and leaving behind huge toxic ponds of liquid residue. The costs to the environment and to many of the workers is high, but it is essential to the economy of Alberta and has a great deal of support from the province and the government in Ottawa. The irony comes from the fact that the use of fossil fuels has created a hotter, dryer planet, setting the stage for increasingly frequent and volatile fires.

These are fires that burn so hotly and, if you will allow me the term, violently, that they create their own weather, including "fire tornados". The impact on the atmosphere can be dramatic and widespread, as those living in the Midwest and Northeast of the US learned last summer as they coped with weeks of severely reduced air quality stemming from this year's Canadian forest fires.

Vaillant details the connection between humans' increased use of fire, in the form of consumed fossil fuels, on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He carefully explains how that increased carbon dioxide has caused the planet to become warmer via the "greenhouse effect". And he makes it very clear that scientists have been trying to get the attention of politicians and the oil and gas industry about this since the middle of the 20th century, but that their efforts have been ignored. Indeed, the industry has not only hidden the results of their own investigations, but done their best to invalidate the work of environmentalists around the globe who have argued for the conversion to sustainable energy.

Vaillant has done a ton of research on multiple fronts: the science of climate change, the science of how fires work, and an hour-by-hour recounting of the events in Fort McMurray. The hundreds of interviews he did with individuals on the scene during that week made the stark facts of the coming climate apocalypse extremely vivid. That human face that he put on the science made for an excellent reading experience.

(BTW, I didn't realize originally that Vaillant was the author of another non-fiction book I read last year and enjoyed enormously, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrifying and humbling. So well-written I could smell the smoke.

This was one of my favorite nonfiction books of the year.

Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wildfires live and die by the weather, but “the weather” doesn’t mean the same thing it did in 1990, or even a decade ago, and the reason the Fort McMurray Fire trended on newsfeeds around the world in May 2016 was not only because of its terrifying size and ferocity, but also because it was a direct hit — like Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans — on the epicenter of Canada’s multibillion-dollar petroleum industry. That industry and this fire represent supercharged expressions of two trends that have been marching in lockstep for the past century and a half. Together, they embody the spiraling synergy between the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs and the corresponding increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases that is altering our atmosphere in real time. In the spring of 2016, halfway through the hottest year of the hottest decade in recorded history, a new kind of fire introduced itself to the world.

I’ve read John Vaillant before — I thought that The Tiger was the perfection of a multidisciplinary approach to nonfiction storytelling — and when I began Fire Weather and realised it was about the Fort Mac wildfire of 2016 (a national tragedy that mesmerised and horrified Canadians as it unfolded), I was 100% enthralled. As the human side of this fire was revealed — riveting and emotional stories from the firefighters and the city’s evacuees that display an amazing level of research and interviews on Vaillant’s part — my engagement was ramped up. And when the next section of the book turned to the science behind wildfires and discussed the undeniable evidence that human activity has caused the Earth to get hotter — that we have gone past the tipping point and entered feedback loops that will see hotter temperatures and more extreme wildfires worldwide going forward — I was dead horrified. But when the third section of the book went on to discuss bigger wildfires around the world — notably in Australia and California — that saw greater damage and loss of life, I had to wonder why Vaillant chose the relatively less impactful Canadian story to focus on. And then it dawned on me that it was because, as revealed in that opening quote, Vaillant was able to use the Fort McMurray tragedy as a rhetorical device to equate the greed and rapacity of a wildfire to the greed and rapacity of resource extraction — with the undeniable irony of “the epicenter of Canada’s petroleum industry” being ground zero for a disaster caused by the effects of that very industry — and although he stops short of writing that the tens of thousands of petrochemical workers who came to Fort Mac from across the country and around the world who lost everything in that fire had it coming, he does point out that these workers had a particular penchant for large pickup trucks and other gas-burning toys. And this realisation rubbed me the wrong way. Fire Weather is both an incredible cross-disciplinary account of our warming world and a timely warning about our future of untamable wildfires — interspersed with engaging human stories of how these infernos are experienced on the ground — but I found something off-putting about Vaillant’s use of the Fort-McMurray-Fire-as-rhetorical-device that I can’t help but remove half a star, and find myself further wanting to round down to four. I still think everyone should read this well-researched, eye-opening work. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

A photo taken from an airplane window late on the night of May 3 shows a vast and luminous smoke cloud where the city had been while, high above, the northern lights blaze across the sky. In another age, this might have been an omen worthy of formal record, but that night, it was just one more illumination from the twenty-first century, captured in this smartphone-crowdsourced record of apocalyptic visions.

From the beginning I was wondering why Vaillant (born in the US but living and writing in Canada; opening here with a Canadian disaster and the efforts of this country’s first responders) was talking in miles and degrees Fahrenheit. When he writes that the “blue chip” outfits to work at in Fort McMurray were Syncrude and Suncor and then translates,“Working for these companies is the boreal equivalent to working for Exxon or Shell”, I had to wonder, “Who is he explaining this to? I don’t exactly know how cool 40°F is, but I know who Syncrude is.” When Vaillant gets to the second section, however, and the climate science (terrifying and undeniable) is followed by the discouraging history of alarm-ringing scientists appearing before (American) Congressional committees since the 1950s (turns out that the petrochemical industry has always known about the greenhouse effect and its world-burning endgame, but, money), I had to acknowledge that Fire Weather was meant for a larger (American) audience and our localised disaster was merely the opening rhetorical salvo. (And I suppose I would have been less annoyed if Vaillant hadn’t started this book with named individuals crying and praying in their Ford F150s as they attempted to flee Fort Mac at a crawl through a literal tunnel of flames; don’t humanise only to generalise.)

The science of wildfires is fascinating and it was definitely frightening to learn that they are evolving in ways so unprecedented — as in the “fire tornado”, a phenomenon witnessed for the first time ever, outside Canberra in 2003 that was three miles high, one mile wide, and so hot that it literally vapourized houses as it moved over them — that we have no tools for fighting or containing them. Every country in Europe — including ice-covered Greenland — experienced a wildfire in 2022 (a phenomenon recorded for the first time ever); as the tundra melts and long-covered peat reserves begin to burn uncontrollably, Canada’s vast boreal forest can no longer be considered a net carbon sink; every time we live through the “hottest August ever recorded”, we should be acknowledging that it’s probably also the coolest August any of us will experience for the rest of our lives — and this hot air mixed with low humidity is a wildfire waiting to happen.

Factoids that blew my mind:

Fire, as far as we know, is unique to our planet.

If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator.

“Artist, inventor, citizen scientist and early suffragist” Eunice Newton Foote performed some simple experiments in 1856 that demonstrated the greenhouse effect; facts she then shared with the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany, NY. A hundred years later, director Frank Capra collaborated with Bell Telephone on some educational films and made The Unchained Goddess — about the links between pollution and climate change — which was shown in schools to millions of young baby boomers. We can’t say that we weren’t warned.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know what to make of the following:

By the early 1990s, Republican attitudes toward environmental action of virtually any kind had turned decidedly negative. Meanwhile, energy producers and manufacturers used this extraordinary turnabout as an opportunity to promote even more carbon-intensive products, including plastics (recall the sudden explosion of bottled water in the early 1990s, simultaneous with the first Gulf War).

Was the explosion of the bottled water industry really driven more by the petrochemical industry than by Nestle and Coca-Cola seeing a profit opportunity? Questioning that made me wonder about this: Near the end, Vaillant explains the many ways that the fossil fuel industry is under critical pressure — large insurers are dropping worksites and pipelines as customers; blue chip investment funds are divesting themselves of petrochemical companies; many class action lawsuits are being brought against specific companies for knowingly destroying the planet — and while that may seem like we are at the beginning of the end of burning greenhouse-gas-causing-fuels, and although Vaillant quotes Vaclav Smil (the world-leading expert on energy) several times throughout Fire Weather, Vaillant does not quote from Smil’s latest book (How the World Really Works), in which Smil explains why we simply cannot stop burning fossil fuels in the foreseeable future (or forego plastics; one of Smil’s “four pillars of the modern world”). Without in any way denying that burning fossil fuels has caused our current warming world — and acknowledging that we are in for ever longer and more intense “fire seasons” in the future — if we can’t stop releasing CO2, what should we actually be focussing on? Exploiting the Alberta oil sands might be an energy-intensive, environment-contaminating, low-return industry that has no business being in the centre of the increasingly-more-flammable boreal north, but is shipping Saudi oil across the oceans the better option? (Is carbon capture viable? Please?)

In 2016, people who raised the question of climate change in the context of Fort McMurray, or its fire, were ignored, accused of exploiting a tragedy or, worse, kicking a man when he was down. The province’s brief and contentious dalliance with a slightly more liberal government happened to overlap with the fire and ended abruptly afterward with a return to, and hardening of, the industry-friendly United Conservative Party, among whose devotees Donald Trump is considered an ally and, increasingly, a role model.

Again: I’m left feeling like Vaillant exploited the Fort McMurray tragedy here for rhetorical reasons — weirdly branding all Alberta conservatives as Trump fans for political reasons — and I found it off-putting. On the other hand: The writing — the science, the history, the human element — was so well done that this is closer to a five star read, would likely not be off-putting to most readers, and the message is so important that I hope it is widely read upon release.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite enjoyed this.

I was in Fort McMurray in 2016 when the fire happened and he captures the moment-by-moment of it quite well, to the point that when I doubted him I went back and checked my the journal I'd kept throughout the fire and realized he'd got it dead on more often than not. Interesting to go back to that time and revisit it from different angles.

The science and environmental aspects are a good fit and much-needed, given how, as he points out, talk of climate change during the disaster became verboten, on the misguided notion that it was 'punching down.' That said, sometimes the poetic license he takes is a bit much. Don't get me wrong, I like Beowulf or whatever just fine but it's not really relevant to the topic. I've heard good things about his other book, The Golden Spruce, so I'll probably check that out eventually.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fire tornados and forests exploding from heat… so, this is… not good? Hmmm

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hard-hitting book on our current environmental crisis. Part of the book concentrates on the cataclysmic forest fire that destroyed Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in early May of 2016. Most of the 90,000 residents were forced to flee and many homes were incinerated.

Fort McMurray is located in Northern Alberta. There is only one road in-and-out to Edmonton, Alberta’s capital. The terrain around Fort McMurray has one of the world’s largest supplies of oil. The problem is this petroleum is embedded in tar (bituminous sand) making extraction very difficult. In fact, natural gas must be used for the purifying process, which adds to the expense (the author explains this much better!). Fort McMurray is a one resource boomtown.

Due to climate change (global warming) the mean temperature at Fort McMurray and the surrounding boreal forest has risen in recent decades (as it has in all parts of our world). The vast surrounding forests have become drier, and coupled with a lowering humidity, contributed in creating a vast forest fire that converged onto Fort McMurray. Years back, a forest fire in early May would have been inconceivable, but global warming has changed all this. It took two days for the residents of Fort McMurray to realize this fire, which they could see combusting on the horizon, was going to impact their lives. It forced them to evacuate and leave behind their homes and worldly possessions. The strength and extreme heat of the fire was with such force that within a few minutes, homes were completely engulfed in flames and nothing left but ashes in the basement.

Page 171-72 my book

Combustive energy had drawn people to Fort McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon.

Page 353

Many of those who stayed and fought for Fort McMurray suffer from persistent respiratory problems…. This was the costliest disaster in Canadian history.

The author links this fire to all the other fires occurring on our planet – like those in California and Australia. Our planet is drying up and warming up because of increasing CO₂ emissions over the last century.

The author discusses the history of petroleum use (coal, oil, and gas) alongside that of the invention of the internal combustion engine – allowing us to “control” fire.

There have been many warnings on the effects of the increasing combustion and increase of CO₂ on our planet. Even the petroleum companies acknowledged the effects of petroleum use on the environment. It was only during the 1980s that they went into denial and obfuscation on global warming. Was this, in part, due to the deregulations brought on by the Reagan era?

There are dire warnings from the author. The Fort McMurray fire and many other fires are the direct result of our addiction to petroleum. We have been told several times of what is now occurring.

Page 248-49 Roger Revelle in 1956

“Human beings during the next few decades may, almost in spite of themselves, be doing something that will have a major effect on the climate of the earth. I refer to the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas by our worldwide civilization, which adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In this way we are returning to the air and the sea the carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. From the standpoint of meteorologists and oceanographers we are carrying out a tremendous geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past or be reproduced in the future. If all this carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere, it will certainly affect the climate of the earth, and this may have a very large effect. The slight general warming that has occurred in northern latitudes during recent decades may be greatly intensified.”

Other scientists, at the time, had observed the reduction of glaciers. We have repeatedly ignored these warnings, much to our detriment, and we are now experiencing the consequences; like the residents of Fort McMurray ignored the vast fires and smoke clouds as they approached their town.

The poignancy of the author’s writing contributes to the powerful and appalling message in this book.

Page 302

Our fire-powered civilization is now in the early stages of replicating that “once-in-a-lifetime” extinction event. It is widely understood in the scientific community that a sixth major extinction is underway, and that it is wholly due to human activity… billions of large, industrious primates whose evolving behavior is almost entirely dependent on the universal burning of hydrocarbons.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I’ll want to read again. Working in the energy field, I’m fascinated by the push/pull of the ethics where consumerism and environmentalism meet. I’m also moved by the strength and resilience of the human spirit and our glorious but burdened planet. Even more so, I'm inspired by how this blue marble continues to rotate and revolve and knows how to self-correct and will do whatever it needs to survive, even when people get in the way of it. This book hit the spot for me.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Home is our memory palace, and there is an existential cruelty in the razing of it."

This book reads like a dystopian history of the present and future. We are past the point of no return, yet there is some hope. Not much, but some.

That said, read this if you're interested in climate science, the conflagration of Fort McMurray and an overall history of the region.

I did learn that I've been pronouncing bitumen incorrectly my whole life. Needless to say I've maybe only used the term once, so I didn't feel so bad.

Vaillant's writing is erudite, concise and easy to read. I took a long time to read this, yet wouldn't classify it as a slog. Really interesting and harrowing, yet informative material.

[Lauren Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This astonishing, and beautifully written, book is to non-fiction what Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD is to fiction.

Essential reading.

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A more accurate title might have been 'Fire Climate' as the story of the Fort McMurray wildfire of May 2016 was mainly a vehicle for an extended diatribe on the existential threat of climate change. I had hoped for more on the actual meteorology of the event and perhaps even some interviews with Environment Canada forecasters or other meteorological experts. He trots out a few stats about temps, RH (down to 12% on May 3!) and winds attendant to the event and mentions ongoing drought but a systematic fire weather analysis is not really the focus.

The story of the Fort McMurray fire itself and the human reactions and response is fascinating and it remains a miracle how the city was evacuated that May day with very little lead time with not a single fatality or even serious injury and basically only one highway out! The background on the history and development of the Athabasca tar-sands industry and the description of the equipment and mining methods required to extract usable petroleum products from the bitumen was also interesting though somewhat horrifying. The sections on boreal forest fire climatology and fire behavior were also interesting. The trends are not good, that is undeniable and the record Canadian boreal wildfire summer of 2023 does little to dispel that notion. On the other hand there is no mention whatsoever of decades of forest fire fighting policy (i.e. suppression) which may have contributed to the worsening fire situation today. It is clearly a factor in parts of the U.S.

As to the underlying climate 'crisis' no stone is left unturned in his efforts to find someone to blame (and hopefully sue) for the 'crimes' of climate change and also colonialism since he seems to conflate two frequently. I guess he thinks making a lot of lawyers very rich will save planet earth from the greedy petro-cabal. And in a book that is nearly panic-stricken about climate change he does not mention Chinese or Indian emissions one time that I can recall. The West could stop all GHG emissions tomorrow and it would do little to stem the tide of CO2 increase built into the industrialization of the '3rd World'. Unfortunately, this is a global problem and suing Shell or Exxon into bankruptcy will be something of a pyrrhic victory (but good for the lawyers). He makes a big deal of the fact that the oil companies 'knew' about the greenhouse effects of petro-burning as early as the 1950s or 60s but did nothing and some of the documents he unearthed are certainly interesting (see: https://www.climatefiles.com/). The 'politicization' of this debate has obviously been detrimental to both getting at the truth and realistic solutions. It is unfortunate but not super surprising. I guess he forgot about the famous Upton Sinclair quote--"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this case it is an entire civilization and planet in fact that has depended upon not understanding. We are all complicit to some degree in the Petro-economy. The Chinese and other 'non-'colonial' powers have had the benefit of decades observing and learning about the effects of GHG emissions but have also studiously avoided doing much about it and continue to increase coal burning. China currently emits almost a third of all man-made greenhouse gases — more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined (NYT - 11/22/22). Guess he thinks the lawyers can sue them too. Other frequently named 'enemies' of Mr. Vaillant are evangelical Christians, capitalists and conservative Republicans--he spares no opportunity in skewering them where possible and implicating them in this great crime. Because Atheists, Democrats and Socialists never drove cars, heated their house or ran AC. I am sure his x-million $ place in Vancouver (average home-$1.3 million) uses no energy whatsoever or uses pure solar with all that sun. This 'find someone to blame' (and sue) thread really detracts from the book which is too bad because there is a lot of really good and interesting material in 'Fire Weather'. The books is well-footnoted with some very useful references. 3.5 stars rounded down.

[theliterateleprechaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read, both in informative content and in writing style. I felt like I was having a chat with the author.

Fire Weather examines the events that caused the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, the Fort McMurray fire in May 2016.

So, Fort McMurray, where is it and why the spotlight on it?

😯It’s 600mi North of the USA border and 600mi South of the Arctic circle. 90,000 people live there in 25,000 homes.
😯It’s a one-industry town; most people are employed in bitumen recovery, upgrading and transport
😯“Nearly half of all American oil imports - around 4M barrels per day - come from Canada. Of this vast quantity, almost 90% originates in Fort McMurray.”

Things I loved learning about:

✔️How a water bomber works (bird dog)
✔️What WUI means and why more than half of Canadians and ⅓ of Americans need to be worried
✔️Spring Dip
✔️Origins of Esso
✔️How fire pumper trucks work in extreme conditions

For Canadians, this was a big deal. The last time a city had burned in Canada was Toronto in 1904 and that only spread 6 blocks. How did this one get out of control and why did it take so long to contain it?

(since published, 90% of Lytton burned in 2021)

You’ll have to read to find out what ‘fire weather’ is and what we can do to prevent this scenario from happening again.

This was a #nonfictionnovember choice for my bookclub.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Fire Weather’ by John Vaillant is several books in one: Canadian history, the science of fire, world climate statistics, history of the politics of oil, gas and coal companies, and all about the Canadian Fort McMurray fire. The author has written a monumental book! It is well-written, and well-researched with extensive and reputable source material, and scary. There are photos, charts and drawings. Also, if readers want to see how Fort McMurray, an Albertan Province oil-company town created for the purpose of housing workers mining for a type of oil, bitumen, which is the inspiration for this book, burned down, there are hundreds of YouTube videos about it.

This link is to a YouTube video of a house in Fort McMurray burning down in five minutes: https://youtu.be/JTlGFsP4JeQ?si=6fpcB...

I have copied the book blurb:

”A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation that modern forest fires wreak, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. His urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.”

This is a more in-depth video look at the Fort McMurray fire:

https://youtu.be/Xn2ydiQctus?si=NhKjn...



I have learned a huge number of things about fire I never knew by reading ‘Fire Weather’. One, is what a fire flashover is, and how fast it is. Below, is a link to a YouTube video demonstration of a flashover fire.

https://youtu.be/BtMmymOxdjc?si=xJg2r...

A flashover is a fire which has accelerated due to certain elements of a burning fire which increase its burning capabilities exponentially. I certainly had no clue of how fast a small wastebasket fire, maybe because someone drops a lighted cigarette or match into it, can lead to a house burning down. The video shows how fast a fire can spread because it evolves into a flashover. The book describes the science behind a flashover, along with what it is. Worse, while indoor flashovers are commonly studied and taught to others by fire experts, they never were a common or worrying thing with burning forests or neighborhoods. However, because of climate change, they now are.

Two, big fires create weather. Not only can lightning storms begin because of a large fire, but tornadoes - TORNADOES - can come into being. People in Fort McMurray who escaped the fire were seriously injured by suddenly finding themselves trying to escape from being hammered by objects big and small flying through the air. The winds sucked people back into their houses. Trucks were lifted up off the ground and flung blocks away by strong winds. Some people found that the skin of their bodies was being scoured off from ash and burning debris in the strong wind caused by the fire. It wasn’t just the heat and it wasn’t just the fire and it wasn’t just the smoke that threatened their lives. They maybe could escape all of that and yet get caught up in a tornado! The author explains how and why tornado fires are thought to form, and how shocked the scientists and the firefighters are about seeing these theoretical firewind storms for the first time, especially in areas where they have never happened before. Until now.

Three, urban house fires must be usually fought differently than forest fires. Fires behave differently if they are burning down trees instead of houses and vehicles. Because of climate change and how people are filling up the spaces between forests and urban developments, called WUI’s (wildland-urban interface), fire fighting has become a nightmare of conflicting methodologies. Urban fire fighters often do not have the training or equipment required to fight forest fires. What is happening because of people building houses next to forests is urban fire fighters are being forced to fight fires which began in nearby forests. The author writes very eloquently about the emotional toil on homeowners and firefighters in several chapters.

Four, forest fires are burning with an intensity and frequency never seen before. Forest fires are hotter, and because they are hotter, fire fighters are seeing a style of forest fire burnings in the last decade that they not only have never seen before, they cannot fight, such as a forest fire which has spawned a tornado. Expert fire fighters cannot do much of anything to stop these new hotter fires. Climate change is the cause of hotter, and worse, more frequent, fires. Many trees have evolved to survive fires, but not these intense hotter fires. The author has a chapter which fully explains everything about how forests are burning differently than before.

Insurance companies are cancelling policies in many areas afflicted by disasters being caused by climate change, like fires. This is because insurance companies deal with facts and statistics. Politicians are mostly avoiding doing anything concrete about climate change even if they talk the talk.

The book explains, since 1958, how a lot of scientists and corporations became aware climate change was happening because, hello, the math was obvious about how the atmosphere was affected by burning fossil fuels and carbon dioxide. But, although at first corporations and politicians listened and set up planning commissions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, after Ronald Reagan was elected President, Reagan intentionally stopped the funding for any private development of alternative energy sources, any federally-funded academic studies of science/engineering alternatives, and closed down the formation of any federal committees planning to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Any scientist or person who openly supported the provable and visible reality of the climate changing because of fossil fuel burning was immediately the focus of official ridicule and disinformation. Anyone who believed in the climate change which was occurring, obviously visible to the eye and scientifically measured, was often fired. Instead, obfuscation and lying became the marching orders for political agencies and involved corporations.

A lot of people prefer to ignore climate change effects because of jobs, dreams for upward mobility, and beliefs in the political and corporate obfuscation which has gone on for decades. I’ve noticed fewer politicians are talking about how climate change does not exist, though. However, now many of those people, who thought or said they believed climate change was a lie, are saying, if they talk about it at all, it’s a natural occurrence, despite the reality of thousands of scientific studies showing climate change exists, and has been accelerating because of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere put there by the activities of people. But, most rich people, including most of those who got rich from investing in corporations involved with accelerating climate change, are buying islands and yachts, and/or are building homes that are fully equipped to handle the social disruptions many of the wealthy can see are coming because of climate change that they know is real, even if they are explaining to their employees that climate change is fake news.


The book has extensive Notes, Bibliography and Index sections, along with very informative acknowledgments.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book examines the environmental impact of climate change as it relates to the topic of wildfires. The author analyzes the causes and effects of the 2016 fire at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada and what it portends for the future. The main section about the fire itself is bookended by an analysis of Canada’s multibillion-dollar petroleum industry, specifically bitumen production in the area surrounding Fort McMurray, and a segment devoted to the history of climate change. This section also includes what corporations in the energy industry knew about it, when, and what was (or was not) done about it at the time.

The major set piece of this book is the Fort McMurray fire, which the author describes through the eyes of fleeing residents and the first responders trying deal with the disaster. This section is particularly well written and provides the reader with a sense of the rapidity and intensity of the fire. The other sections are related to climate change and culpability, which are available in many other texts I have read before. Vaillant gets a little carried away with anthropomorphizing fire, but overall, it is a well written book on an important topic that combines elements of history, science, politics, and business.

[Vanessa (Happy Summer! [Summer hiatus]) M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up Vaillant's book Fire Weather due to two recent forest fires we experienced this spring. I wanted to learn more about wildfires in how they grow and spread. Vaillant's writing is clear, coherent, and straight-forward. The first portion of the book lays out the Fort McMurray wildfires of 2016. The second part explains historically to today the changes in the climate and how that has transformed and heightened the prevalence of wildfires. He handles writing about personal tragedies deftly. I did cry though during the reading. These fire whirls (tornado) that Mr. Vaillant writes about in the last section of the book are crazily scary.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutal summer heat waves, droughts, and wildfires have been active across the Northern Hemisphere this summer. We are getting used to the dangerous fires that devastate forests and cities such as the recent Palisades fire in California. Vaillant reports on the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in northern Alberta which lasted for 15 months engulfing 2300 square miles of forest, destroying 2500 homes and buildings, forcing the emergency evacuation of over 88,000 people, pumping 100 million tons of CO2 into the air, and becoming Canada’s most expensive natural disaster ever. A heat wave on top of a drought and a light winter snowpack led to an all-too-common result.

Fort McMurray is in a remote location surrounded by boreal forest. It exists to service the extensive oilsands mining industry that is spread out around it. Almost every job is directly or indirectly dependent on it. It’s a tightknit community including the 185 men and women in its fire department who ended up fighting to save their own homes and those of their friends. The firefighters were experienced having faced many wildfires but they were taken in by this fire. Vaillant writes as if the fire is alive. It creates its own weather shaping the winds to supply the oxygen it needs, sends out tentacles to find more fuel, launches embers far ahead to start new fires and jump barriers. It changes directions, ebbs and flows. It’s a tricky opponent.

The fire plume, which was growing steadily larger, was actively changing the regions meteorology. No longer simply a ground interface fire, it had become a force of nature. As temperatures rose past 1,000 degrees F, the air at the smoke columns center rose ever more rapidly, driving upward, like smoke up a hot chimney. As this superheated air rose faster and faster, it created a vacuum into which cooler air was drawn from all sides at greater and greater velocity. Operating like a recirculating fountain, storm systems this large also generate powerful downdrafts along their outer edges, which, in the case of the wildfire, can cause it to burn even more intensely, like an atmospheric turbocharger.

The fire burned in the forest for months before coming to Fort McMurray. But with fires so common in the forest, residents dismissed it and the firefighters were sure they could contain it as always. But normal procedures that worked with prior fires didn’t work on this one. Pumping water at the edges or on trees and houses in its path did nothing. Even when pilots could see through the smoke to drop water or retardant from planes and helicopters the fire didn’t stop. Trees were incinerated in a flash by the fire’s radiant heat before the fire touched them. The fire leapt across the nearly kilometer wide Athabasca River.

A pyrocumulonimbus cloud or pyroCb can be two hundred miles wide and reach into the stratosphere. A fully developed pyroCb, like the one shrouding Fort McMurray on May 3rd is so huge and energetic that its behavior is influenced by the Coriolis effect – the rotation of the earth. In the Northern Hemisphere this will cause the system to spin counterclockwise, just like a hurricane…In addition to hail, PyroCbs can also generate their own lightening…fires caused by lightening can be ignited virtually anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of a PyroCb…With the forest already primed to burn, a pyroCb, combined with wind-driven embers and lightening, changed this fire…into a perpetual motion machine of destruction…

When the fire broke through and hit the city there was little time to evacuate the city of 88,000. It was midday. Moms and dads were at work and children at school. The sky went from blue to black in minutes, then it turned red. The fire spread so fast there was no time to pack. Evacuees saw huge flames quickly moving towards them. They left in panic, many escaping as embers were falling around them, leaving with only the clothes on their back. “The exodus of May 3 was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history.”

The firefighters transitioned to life saving. They and police knocked on doors and amazingly got everyone out as neighborhood after neighborhood fell to “the beast.” To the fire their homes were “a smorgasbord of kiln-dried fuel topped with tar shingles, garnished with rubber tires and gas tanks.” The garages in Fort McMurray typically held ammunition, fuel cans, and gas cylinders. The explosions were constant. Although the firefighters were in full retreat, their efforts had critically provided precious time to get everyone out. Vaillant gives us personal stories that make us feel their terror. He delivers a harrowing presentation.

It is hard to overstate the totality of the disorientation people were experiencing: the roar and crackle of the fire; the wind searingly hot and alive with sparks and ash; the black and acrid smoke that stole breath and reduced visibility to a car length; the flames a hundred feet high across a front that seemed to have no end or edge. It was as if the world had been remade in fire, and now it was coming…

What finally enabled firefighters and those assisting them to halt the fire’s advance into the city was bulldozing entire blocks of houses. Each house was completely demolished and stuffed into its own basement which was filled with water. Heavy duty equipment and operators were readily available from the oilsands mining companies. The creation of sufficient space without fuel helped spare important parts of the city. After the fire moved on from Fort McMurray, it continued burning in the forest another three months.

Vaillant’s 150 pages describing the fire are compelling. But he leads with a history of the area and its oilsands industry, tells us about the boreal forest, and profiles other fires which provided some background. The last third of the book gives a history of the science of climate change and its emergence as a major issue. He describes more horrific fires driven by climate change. He discusses the dominance of business interests particularly the oil industry and the tangled efforts by governments to deal with climate change and the businesses that block their efforts. After reading the dramatic presentation of the fire, this section comes as a bit of a letdown. Written in 2023 he seems somewhat optimistic that the world might finally get serious about addressing the issue. Sadly, the US has gone in reverse. We now have an administration that calls climate change a hoax. But as Vaillant points out, with increasing climate caused disasters, at some point there will be no alternative to facing up to it.

[Katie B · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2016, a wildfire swept through Fort McMurray, an area key to Canada’s oil industry. Over 88,000 people were forced to evacuate and it was the costliest disaster in that country’s history. This book provides a look at what led to this absolute devastation and how we as humans continue to contribute to the problem meaning this type of destruction is bound to happen again and again. While full of interesting facts, at times the writing was a little dry and not as engaging as I had hoped. Still a worthwhile read though and comes highly rated by other readers.

Thank you Vintage for providing a free copy! All thoughts expressed are my honest opinion.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fire's beginnings are always humble, and any future beyond the uncertain present is dependent on a tripod of factors over which - at first anyway - a fire has no control: heat, fuel, and oxygen. These are the ingredients of fire, but a fourth ingredient - a catalyst - is needed to unite these disparate elements into a dynamic whole. Frankenstein's monster needed a jolt of lightning, and so in its way does fire.

I was aware of wildfires, of course. But it wasn't until this summer that the wind blew the Canadian air down upon us as a toxic blanket, blocking out the sun. And headlines, seemingly every day: Canada, California, Australia, Hawaii. There have always been wildfires, sure. But these were something different, an unimaginable, inexorable destruction.

Still, I might not have bothered with this book, except I saw that John Vaillant was the author. If you've read his book, The Tiger, you will know why I had to click "Buy Now" immediately.

The point of this book is that climate change has increased temperatures and dried the soil, making places more susceptible to wildfires, with ever-increasing intensity. The author focuses on the wildfire in 2016 at Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, a fire that destroyed the entire town and smoldered for almost a year. As expected Vaillant told this in riveting fashion.

Volcanoes can be devastating, but they are fixed in geographical space and usually offer some warning; nuclear weapons are devastating, too, but they are governed by international treaties and detonated with intention by human beings. Fire is different: it has its own agency that manifests as something akin to will, and it is aided, often unintentionally, by human beings.

If I have a complaint with the book, it's that on Part Three the author turns preachy and political, angry even. He writes that a Southern Congressman in the 1950s, during a congressional hearing, appeared to get it about what would come to be called climate change. He notes that the congressman voted against a Civil Rights Act. His point was to suggest in a smarmy way that even he was capable of understanding. It seemed to me he took an irrelevant shot.

In another passage, the author writes that after a volcano, things stabilize, regenerate. He offers, in a glib footnote, that some economists believe that the same self-regulating processes exist in financial markets. Vaillant is having none of that, believing apparently that Facebook and Amazon are more destructive than Krakatoa.

Still, there was much to learn here, and much to think about. Vaillant quotes the mayor of a British Columbia hamlet after a wildfire there in 2021: I'm sixty, and I thought climate change was a problem for the next generation. Now I'm the mayor of a town that no longer exists.

[Guy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings. While the central narrative about the 2016 Fort McMurray fire is gripping and told with a verve that manages to be appropriately horrifying without being exploitative or having too much of the rubbernecker about it, the persistent and lengthy digressions too often kill the pacing and distract from that real-life disaster movie; I understand the absolutely vital wider issues that the author wanted to address, but feel as though those could and should have been allowed to be self-evident from the long-gestating causes and devastating effects of the case in point, which speaks so well for itself.

I must confess to also finding it rather overwritten, mainly in the author's apparently overwhelming urge to have a metaphor or analogy for absolutely everything, in a way that goes far beyond anything that might add value to vibrant imagery or layman's translations of scientific jargon. The example that first springs to mind, of a great many I could have chosen, is when he compares the "crossover" point for a wildfire (which "occurs when the ambient temperature in degrees Celsius exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage") to the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL - spoiler alert - becomes self-aware and takes over the ship. I love 2001 as much as anyone, but the analogy to me felt arbitrary and over-extended, and many passages in Fire Weather end up being similarly and quite unnecessarily prolonged by the overuse of clunky comparisons to explain or reframe events, processes and theories that were never that complicated in the first place.

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while I'll read something where my jaw just drops at the quality of the writing, at the sheer breadth of research that went into it.

That's exactly how I felt reading "Fire Weather." John Vaillant ... oh boy, does this guy spin a compelling yarn, let me tell you! The time and effort that must have gone into writing this thing ... if you tell me AI will ever be capable of one day doing something like this, I'd never believe you.

But of course, whatever AI can do is all the result of plagiarism. An AI trained on books like "Fire Weather"? Trained to regurgitate books like "Fire Weather"? That's one thing, but it ain't writing.

I wasn't really sure I wanted to even read this when I saw it on the shelf. Ah, it's going to be about some wildfire, I thought to myself. But I saw all the lavish praise blurbed all over the front and back cover, so I thought OK, maybe I'll give it a shot.

I'm so glad I did, because this is quite a ride, and in no way just about some wildfire, either.

The fire itself is the Fort McMurray fire. Fort McMurray? It sounded familiar to me ...

Oh yeah, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands!

This tells a different story than "Ducks" did, though oddly I think there is a similar strain that you might catch running through both.

See, Fort McMurray you might say is Exhibit A when it comes to the way in which we humans have managed to completely desecrate and rape the Earth.

Located in Alberta, Canada, Fort McMurray is "blessed" with something called bitumen, a form of petroleum that requires the use of incredibly specialized and heavy machinery to convert into something sort of like oil, though it comes nowhere close to being as valuable as the real thing. But it essentially fossilized money, so every greedy POS oil company and their political backers want a piece of it.

Well, in something that I initially chalked up to cosmic retribution of a sort, in 2016 Fort McMurray experienced a wildfire that essentially rewrote the book on a wildfire could do. And yeah, at first when reading this, I can't say I felt especially bad for those folks up there, with their million dollar homes, multiple automobiles, and generally entitled way of life. They'd moved up there to get rich, to work the tar sands, to sell their souls (and, ultimately, their health and longevity) to "get rich quick."

But the more I read, the more I came to view the people of Fort McMurray — like the coal miners of West Virginia or the frackers of Pennsylvania — as little more than soldiers, like those who in "All's Quiet on the Western Front" run into battle and get their limbs blown off while their commanders and political leaders essentially get off scot-free.

No, it's not quite the same, it's not compulsory the way past wars were, and they're certainly getting handsomely paid for the effort, but capitalism makes us all do regrettable things.

"Fire Weather" is in part about the Fort McMurray fire, but it's more generally about fire itself, and in how our species has come to master it and bring it into the world. Homo flagrans, to take Vaillant's term for what we humans are — burning man.

Fire, like capitalism, is fixated on growth at all costs. It only ever wants more and more and more, to the detriment and destruction of all else. So in a world that's burning at a greater pace than at any other time in human history, it's almost poetic to realize that fire — the force that powers our cars, our AC units, by and large our entire society — has an appetite that rivals our own.

We see now where our appetites have gotten us, but does that mean we have the power to resist them?

[Radiantflux · Rating 3 out of 5]

11th book for 2026.

Vaillant has been one of my favourite environmental writers for years, so I came to this with high expectations. The book is built around the May 2016 fire that destroyed much of Fort McMurray—Canada's bitumen capital burning down in a fire its own product made possible.

The obvious move here is to call out the irony. Vaillant doesn't make it. He spends 400 pages working hard to get me to feel sorry for Fort Mac and its residents. But this is a petro-city full of well-paid workers cashing in on an industry that has knowingly lied about its product for forty years. I'm not going to feel sorry for them. The book that acknowledged this would have been the better book.

The first part is strong when talking about boreal fire on its geophysical scale: Chinchaga's plume in 1950 produced lavender suns over Europe and prompted Sagan's nuclear-winter modelling; Chisholm in 2001 ran at four Hiroshimas per minute. The fire science is also great—crossover, flashover, pyrocumulonimbus, pyro-tornadogenesis. Part Three's ExxonKnew chapter, summarising what Exxon knew and when, is a tight account of a now well-documented cover-up.

Part Two is where the book lost me. 150 pages of hour-by-hour firefighting, with the fire written as an antagonist (one firefighter compares it pausing then turning back up his street to the velociraptor in *Jurassic Park*). The effect is to make the fire the bad guy and the industry a bystander. Having blockaded loggers in the Victorian Alps in the late 1990s, I have no sympathy left for people who knowingly destroy the natural world for a wage.

The final section has the data for a serious indictment of the bitumen industry—$40B a year in subsidies, six times the energy input per barrel of conventional oil, the $30M Alberta War Room set up to harass anyone who criticises it—but Vaillant lists them and moves on. The First Nations downstream of the tailings ponds, with their cancer clusters and lost treaty rights, barely make it in.

Vaillant's hopeful ending has not aged well. Mark Carney, his prime example of capital pushing back, is now Prime Minister of Canada and signing pipeline deals. The transition is happening anyway, just not the Western-finance way he predicted—Chinese solar passed 1.2 TW in February 2026.

Overall, the parts work but the frame doesn't. Read it for the fire science.

3-stars.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Divided into three main sections and all are excellent.

Part 1 - Life in northern Alberta in and around Fort McMurray. Describes the environs and the people drawn to the arduous work in the bitumen industry. Provides notable historic moments about the people that shaped the area.

Part 2 - The fire. Frightening; some statistics are mind boggling.

Part 3 - The science behind our warming world. More mind boggling facts and statistics that won't cheer you up. There's a hopeful message in the final chapter but I think the constant drive for more and higher business profits and the self-serving nature of humans will keep our world on a downward spiral. (Maybe the most surprising tidbit to me was the honest approach to the global warming science by the oil industry giants in the early years. The most predictable part of the book was how the oil industry eventually turned to denialism a la the tobacco industry.)

The writing is excellent and the stories move along at a good pace. Vaillant writes for a broad audience but always at a high level. I will seek out more of his books.

[Matt Quann · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we were kicking off our first book club there was an overwhelming consensus: we've got to alternate nonfiction and fiction. I'm used to a fiction bookclub, but I was impressed with Vaillant's ability to add poetry and style to a tale of environmental disaster. For me, the book could have been slightly more condensed in the middle and third sections for a smoother read, but I otherwise really enjoyed it.

[Tanja Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was brilliant and intense! The smoke is still reeking from the pages. The author weaves the science of climate change into the lived reality of its consequences. We get to participate in the efforts of saving a town from the fires in Canada. Many parts of the world, particularly the west coast of North America, has a fire season that becomes longer as it grows hotter. The consequences for the people are devastating. Unfortunately, the human imagination is loath to stretch beyond lived experience, which means we tend to underestimate the speed and devastation of fires.

I have no massive experience myself. I grew up in a country where the indigenous people would burn the forest to sow crops. I hated it, particularly needing to sit in a car driving through. On the other hand, this kind of regular, partially controlled fires, in fire resistant forests, prevented massive, uncontrolled fires. I also watched a house burn when I was about ten years old. It was across the street and the flames licked the sky at least fifty meters up. I remember the dark shadows of papaya trees outlined before the flames. If those trees caught, we would evacuate. The entire neighborhood was awake, and afraid. The fire brigade, if there was one, could do nothing. I don’t remember any sirens. The town might not have had any fire fighters. There was no wind and no other houses, not even the bamboo huts with teak leave roofs, caught.

I do not ever want an experience like that again. Much less an uncontrolled, exponential, forest fire. I refuse to travel to the Mediterranean during the summer months. The risk is not nil here in the Nordics, but it’s lower. We knew this was coming and we have known about the greenhouse effect since before the combustion engine. But for the sake of profit, we let the world burn.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

[20 April 2025]
It took me a while to read this book. Partly because it was quite long, but mostly because it was intense. Detailing the history and impact of the devastating 2016 fires that destroyed Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, it was a very powerful book, especially in light of the recent fires in urban Los Angeles. These fires are very different from most wildfires and they are likely to become even more common in the near future.

Very well written, with descriptions of the fire so vivid that I had to take breaks to distance myself from the emotional impact. And the author does some of that himself, by interspersing forays into the history of the town and the science of the fires. Some readers objected to the way Vaillant anthropomorphizes the fire. I noticed that, of course, but it didn't bother me. I think in a way it was necessary to demonstrate how unusual the behavior and progress of the fire really was. Neither a wildfire nor an urban fire, this was something totally new and required totally different responses.

Very much recommended.

[Arndis · Rating 5 out of 5]

we are cooked (bókstaflega)


nei en þetta er svakaleg bók, svakaleg rannsókn, öll hugtök og kenningar skýrar, efnið rosalega spennandi og virkilega sorglegt. lesturinn er á köflum eins og að lesa mjög spennandi skáldsögu.

mæli mikið með!

[Hank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that gave me much of what I wanted and some that I didn't know I wanted.

This book is about a couple of large forest fires, mainly the 2016 Ft McMurray one in Canada. It is also about a warming planet and climate change so any deniers will not enjoy this. Anyone on the fence...this book contains some eye opening statistics and quotes that shocked even someone who had a 30 year career working around the fringes of climate change.

I was mostly interested in the types of weather fire creates which I found in abundance. Firenados, extreme radiant heat, stratospheric ash, all of it. I was treated to firefighting tecniques and our utter inability to large forrest fires. The magnitude of the Ft. McMurray, the large California fire of 2018 and an Austrial one are truly stunning. The fact that these are becomming more and more frequent is frightening.

If you are looking for a well writting book about bitumen or a small slice of the oil and gas industry or climate change or massive fires or just the effect a completely destroyed town has on humans, this is your book.

[Stefanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Super compelling! And I learned so much. This book has got disaster storytelling, an inside look on how the oil and gas industry operates, a cogent and not-boring history of our knowledge of the impacts of CO2 on the atmosphere. Through the lens of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, Vaillant makes a compelling argument that we are a "fire-based society" - and we're out of control.

Full disclosure here, I only vaguely remember hearing about the Fort McMurray fire when it happened, and the only thing that stuck out in my memory was that it was somehow "problematic." Turns out, it's because this example of modern "super fire" (my term) happened in a Canadian town that's a major center for bitumen mining - a.k.a. the main cause responsible for creating the environmental conditions that have led to the existence of record-breaker fires in the first place.

Vaillant uses interviews to get first-person accounts from people in Fort McMurray, and after a primer on bitumen mining, gives us the play-by-play of this fire growing from "a concern" to engulfing parts of the town. Then there's a section on "how did we get here" which explains the scientific history of learning about the impacts of CO2 on the atmosphere, and how much scientists - and oil industry! - knew for decades. The closing sections highlight a few more examples of this new type of fire, from California and Australia (remember the one right before the pandemic?).

That would have been alarming enough, but I happened to be reading this book while major fires in the LA area decimated the Pacific Palisades, Eaton and Hughes. In January!! It really underscored Vaillant's point that "fire season" is every day now, in some areas. And those areas are expanding.

The book ends having well presented the problem and the need to address it, but felt a little short on solutions. (I realize it's common, but I don't think any climate crisis book should be published without at least one significant section devoted to this aspect.)

Nonetheless, I'm super glad I read this book and would recommend it to others. Another win from the Sci Fri Book Club (January 2025 selection).