Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

A rule of thumb for structural firefighting is that the gallons per minute (gpm) of water should match the British thermal units (Btus) being generated by the fire. On Beacon Hill, this equation was so hopelessly skewed in the fire’s favor that sending a fire department to face it was like sending plumbers to confront a bursting dam. Most of the hose streams deployed were evaporating long before they reached the flames.

Once the crews were on scene, it was difficult for them to see the houses, or even each other, and it was impossible to hear anything over the growing roar of the fire, which witnesses compared variously to a jet engine and a freight train. The unremitting din was further intensified by the constant snap and crack of sundering timber—trees and houses alike—and by the sporadic explosions of electrical transformers and fuel tanks. The heat between those burning houses, now comparable to the planet Venus, was unbearable, and so was the smoke. It quickly became clear that, not only was there no way to fight this fire, there was no time. There was time only to get the residents out before they were overrun. This spontaneous transition from firefighting operation to lifesaving operation has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century urban fire—from Portugal and Greece to Australia and California. Some residents had fled already, but who, exactly? In order to find out, firefighters were going door to door. The RCMP were on hand—both to manage traffic and to aid in the searches. The risk of becoming trapped, of being surrounded by the fire on this thickly wooded hilltop, was real and growing more likely by the minute. Steve Sackett, a firefighter in the first wave with the Slave Lake crew, was reconnoitering with Jamie Coutts when the Shell station by the entrance road exploded, producing a shock wave that could be felt hundreds of yards away. “We could feel it in our bodies,” Sack...

By now, hundreds of Abasand’s houses and condos were on fire. Running to each one was a half-inch waterline connected to the city’s water supply. As each house burned down, those lines would break, and water would run freely at a pressure comparable to a powerful garden hose. The same thing had happened in Centennial Park, Beacon Hill, and Waterways. One broken line wouldn’t make a difference; a hundred might not even be noticeable; but a thousand or more flowing unchecked, hour after hour, could compromise a pump’s ability to maintain pressure and push water up onto those hilltops. They could even drain the reservoir feeding it. With no water, the firefighters were like soldiers deprived of ammunition.

not even the safe was safe from the fire.

It bears noting that these observations and exchanges were entered into the Congressional Record in 1956, fifteen years before the first Earth Day, and thirty-five years before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first report. There was no such thing as “climate denial” then, and there were no “climate skeptics.” Those present, all of whom were white men, and most of whom were churchgoers born at the very dawn of the automotive age, were open-minded about this alarming new information, and they discussed it with intelligent interest.

The kind of disruption Revelle alluded to in the context of drought and rainfall 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. Fire behavior is just one indicator, but it is a graphic one, and Revelle’s home state of California offers a good example: 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).[*5] Meanwhile, the drought Revelle predicted has become a serious and persistent condition—winter and summer, threatening the viability of mountain forests, agricultural lands, and the waterways that link them.

Since Revelle’s presentations on Capitol Hill, three generations, amounting to 5 billion people, have been added to the world’s population, along with billions of fuel-burning vehicles, engines, stoves, generators, and power plants of all sizes. In that time, annual CO2 emissions have increased fivefold from their already-climate-altering 1950s levels.

Forty years on, the API’s decision to turn its back on a century of solid climate science is proving to be the most consequential policy reversal in the history of human civilization.

This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.

Painfully clear is the fact that there is no way for firefighters to combat these superheated, firebreak-leaping fires—with or without a tornado in their midst. Water has little effect on a high-intensity wildfire, and fire retardant drops are about as effective as firebreaks. Among the structures burned near Redding was a fire station. There was a time not so long ago when a fire like this one, which forced the evacuation of forty thousand residents, destroyed more than fifteen hundred structures, and burned nearly four hundred square miles across two counties, might have been a monstrous anomaly, but now such fires are becoming the norm. Simultaneous with the Carr Fire was the Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest ever recorded in California. As of August 2018, seven of the most destructive wildfires in the state’s already fire-prone history had ignited within the previous twelve months alone.

I was born in the 1960s, but I personally knew people born in the 1870s and ’80s, when the petroleum industry was in its infancy and Standard Oil was a start-up. The Civil War, waged by horse- and manpower, was a raw and recent memory then; Queen Victoria reigned over a global empire held together by sailing ships, and the climate visionaries Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Högbom were still in high school. In 1875, Chicago was still rebuilding after its great fire, the battle at Little Big Horn had not yet been won or lost, and boreal explorers were still fantasizing about how men might one day turn Alberta bitumen into money. Back then, 1.3 billion people walked the planet—literally, because there were no cars. Nor was there plastic, and the Keeling Curve of CO2 had only just begun its relentless upward bending. That world—the same one into which people whose hands I touched were born—is so close temporally (I looked into their eyes; I felt their breath), and yet it is so remote chemically, biologically, atmospherically, technologically, anthropogenically from the world we inhabit now, the world we are currently unmaking, the world our children are inheriting that resembles, less and less, the one that made us.

Starting around 1980, when atmospheric CO2 hit 340 ppm for the first time in a million years, annual global temperatures began rising more steadily, with smaller deviations. Since 2000, every year has been trending warmer than the last, and, since 2010, these annual increases have been steadily greater. By almost any measure, anyone born after 1990 is finding themselves in a new geological era, navigating a world fundamentally different from the one Baby Boomers and Gen Xers inherited. The chances of anyone alive today experiencing a year as relatively cool as 1996 are effectively nil.

As the Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann put it, “The vast proportion of historic greenhouse gases have been emitted as by-products of the choices and activities, not of the masses of ordinary people, but rather of the wealthy minority of the world’s population…It’s a very specific part of humanity that has created these problems.”

Maybe it wasn’t as profitable as we thought it was, because we haven’t paid the bill. —Kirk Bailey, former executive vice president, Suncor Energy

None of this will be the fault of Nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next.

For generations, individuals, companies, and governments who knew better capitalized on carbon dioxide’s quiet invisibility, and their own ability to manipulate the law and public opinion. Meanwhile, the twenty-first century has been telling us, again and again, through every means of expression available, that CO2 cannot and will not be ignored.

The consequences of burning millions of years of accumulated fossil energy in a period of decades will be ongoing and dramatic. The effects will influence everything that matters in more ways than we can imagine for the foreseeable future and probably far longer. In light of this, 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 willful and ongoing failure to act on climate science is unforgivable; recrimination is justified, but none will be sufficient. In this case, at the planetary level, there is no justice; the punishment will be shared by all, but most severely by the young, the innocent, and the as-yet unborn.