Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

A lot of things are said to be “visible from space,” but not from six thousand miles above Earth. At that distance, one is on the far side of the exosphere, the invisible threshold beyond which only remote satellites and heavenly bodies are found. From this celestial height, Earth appears to be uninhabited—no Pyramids, no Great Wall, no Shanghai or Los Angeles; not even the Mississippi River is visible. Canada’s great boreal forest shows up as a green smear across the forehead of the globe, and only continental features like the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains are easily found. But if you know what you’re looking for, you can pick out Fort McMurray’s bitumen mining and upgrading complex. From 6,000 miles up, its visibility is comparable to that of San Francisco Bay or Cape Cod, both of which cover roughly one thousand square miles of land and water. Meanwhile, the world’s largest open pit mines—abyssal holes like Utah’s Bingham Canyon, or the Fimiston Super Pit in Western Australia—are nowhere to be seen.

Due to a combination of rugged conditions, high wages, and the fact that burning petroleum represents a kind of local virtue, truck and ATV sales are noticeably higher in Fort McMurray than in other comparably sized Canadian cities, but so are rates of assault, spousal abuse, drug abuse, STDs, COVID-19, alcoholism, and suicide. The same steroidal earning power that astounds the folks back home—and gladdens the hearts of truck dealers and tax collectors—burns holes in workers’ pockets, and also in their noses. “Fort Crack” is another nickname Fort Mac has earned, and it is a real place, too. While there is an established market for crack and methamphetamine, cocaine is preferable, in part because it clears from the bloodstream more quickly than other blood-tested substances, and blood testing has become much more rigorous since the heady and freewheeling days of the last boom, when it seemed that just about anyone with a pulse could get a job there. Because of this, there is also a market for clean urine. In 2018, a Fort McMurray resident was caught entering Alberta with thirty-one kilograms of cocaine; equivalent to roughly 300,000 lines, it had a street value of between $3 million and $4 million.

Many of those who make the journey to Fort McMurray find the money they’ve made surprisingly hard to hold on to, and a lot of that intercepted cocaine was destined for people like Jake McManus. I met Jake back in 2010, before he went north at twenty-five with a five-year plan, and I remember thinking, If anyone can pull this off, he can. Jake was a hardworking journeyman, startlingly competent with large, dexterous hands that could fix anything; he had a supportive family, and his father had advised him on a business plan. Up at Site, all expenses paid with as much overtime as he could stand, he was looking at $150,000 a year—to start. He would keep his head down and save it all, he said, and when he looked up again five years later, or even three years later, he would be a player. With a nest egg like that and skills to match, no southern city could say no to him.

When I ran into Jake in Vancouver a year or so later, he was drunk, and there were scars on his handsome face. The money had come and gone—down his throat and up his nose; for a while he’d had a lot of new friends. His hands looked different, too: it was the knuckles; Jake was big, and he wasn’t a back-down kind of guy. He was in a program, but it had been hit and miss; his longest drug-free stretch had only been a month. He was still strong and able—he was powerlifting now—and when he fell he would catch himself, but he kept falling. I asked him what happened. It was the hours, the schedule, he said, the ten days off after twenty-eight on, and when he came home, all his friends were at work, nine-to-fiveing like ordinary...

The boreal is a difficult place to work—in any field and in any season. The desire to escape—to a bar in Edmonton, to a drug dealer in Red Deer, to a wavering girlfriend in Kelowna—can be overpowering, and accident statistics reflect this. By the time Highway 63 was twinned from two to four lanes between 2010 and 2016, it had earned a reputation as one of the most dangerous roads in North America. In a single month in 2007, at the height of Fort McMurray’s latest and greatest boom, twenty-eight people were killed on it—almost one a day. People started calling it the “Highway of Death” and “Suicide 63.” Bumper stickers were made up: “Pray for me, I drive 63.” By 2013, 63 and its tributary, 881, had seen so many fatalities that a death map began circulating. It is pocked with red dots—so many, so close together, that it resembles maps of migrant deaths along the Mexican border. Many of these accidents coincide with shift changes, and locals adjust their travel plans accordingly, advising visitors to do the same.

The semis are fast, but the pickups are faster, and there is something lethal about ice and oil and money and men. When a southbound Ford 150, four beers in and seventy-five payments to go, collides with a northbound Kenworth T800 hauling a B-train of empty sulfur tankers, the combined impact speed may be more than 160 miles an hour. A witness to such a collision described it this way: “The front end of the pickup truck was destroyed in a manner I had never seen before: a thousand-petaled peony blossom—tiny strips all peeling away from an epicentre of densely fused aluminum and steel.” An impact like that can throw a body a hundred feet or more. Sometimes, the only way to find them in the cold and dark is with infrared sensors, and these are standard equipment on Fort McMurray’s emergency vehicles. One veteran paramedic I met has personally attended more than a hundred fatalities—all of them within a fast hour of Fort McMurray. “Most of them are head-ons,” he said. When I asked him how he handled it, I immediately wished I hadn’t. His eyes, an arresting Slavic blue, fixed on mine as he said, “Do I look normal to you?”

After midnight, when the traffic is lighter, you might encounter Scheurle (“Shirley”) trailers—oversized flatbeds with a hundred wheels and multiple tractors pulling ultraheavy loads, bits and pieces of cokers and fractionating towers the size of Saturn V rockets. These road trains move at a crawl, but nothing else does and, late at night, 63 is generally left to the semis. Most of them are tandem trailers—B-trains, but not the kind you usually see carrying gas or mail. These are shapes you don’t encounter elsewhere: tubes of liquid nitrogen; heavily reinforced heated cylinders loaded with raw sulfur; others with long, funneled bellies laden with petcoke, the dirty secret of the bitumen industry. Some are emblazoned with hazardous cargo badges, but it’s impossible to read them or any other labeling, not because of the dark, but because every vehicle is coated from end to end with road grit. Thus camouflaged, these massive trucks hurtle through space well over the posted speed limit—all hundred feet and hundred tons of them. This despite the fact that, though the road m...

Never in Earth’s history, or in ours, have so many fires been ignited in so many places on such a continuous basis. At the most basic level, consider every candle, lantern, and cook fire across the globe: approximately 3 billion people around the world still cook and/or heat their homes with open fires. Then, consider every gas stove, furnace, and water heater; every coal-fired and biomass-burning power station; every generator; every human-caused brush and field and forest fire. Already, we are into many billions of fires per day, worldwide, and that is not even counting matches, lighters, or pilot lights, or more rarified sources like oil refineries, incinerators, and war. Nor does this tally take into account automobiles.

Even though we use the terms “oil” and “gas” in casual conversation, as if they were familiar to us, few of us ever actually see them. For most of us, they are abstractions, code words for what we’re really talking about, which is fire and money. Whether it is a teaspoon of butane in a pocket lighter, fifteen gallons of unleaded in a car’s gas tank, two thousand tons of heavy oil in a freighter’s fuel oil bunkers, or five thousand gallons of Jet A in a 737’s wings, its ultimate purpose is to burn—to be transformed into fire and the energy that combustion represents. Until then, it waits patiently for one of us—a smoker, a driver, a captain, a pilot, a cook, an arsonist—to summon it forth. Most of us never even see the flames we’ve conjured up: the car just drives; the plane just flies; the shower just gets hot. The stove burner is not “on fire” but a blue flower blooming—day and night, all year round—so simple and safe and, above all, contained, even a child can use it.

These everyday feats become still more impressive when one considers what we’re actually burning: even the youngest viable fossil fuels are millions of years old. The French call gasoline “essence”—and that is truly what it is. According to the energy historian Vaclav Smil, every gallon of gasoline represents roughly one hundred tons of marine biomass, principally algae or phytoplankton, that has gone through an inconceivably long crushing, cooking, and curing process deep underground. One way to visualize a tank of gas is to imagine a mass of ancient plant matter weighing as much as fifteen blue whales crammed into a tank next to your spare tire, just behind your child’s car seat. A typical driver can burn that in a week, often for the most trivial of reasons. All those distilled plants were grown by the same sun that grows our food today, so what we’re burning is, in essence (that word again), ancient, super-concentrated solar energy.

While bitumen, crude, and all their derivatives are known collectively as petroleum, they fall under the broader umbrella of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are not just oil and gas, they are truly the stuff of life: without hydrogen and carbon, Earth would be a lithic sphere and nothing more—uninhabitable, unrecognizable. Simpler, perhaps, than describing what hydrocarbons are, is describing what they aren’t: water, air, rocks, and metals—in other words, things that are not, and never were, alive in the biological sense. But even with 99 percent of Earth’s constituents off the table, an awful lot of things remain unaccounted for. “Hydrocarbons” is an awkward concept to wrap one’s head around because they take such wildly different forms. As dissimilar as they may seem on the surface, Kentucky coal and Kentucky bourbon are both full of hydrocarbons; so are Irish peat and Irish whiskey. Hay bales, cow farts, library books, and extra-virgin olive oil are all hydrocarbons, too. Likewise, Big Wheels, Barbie dolls, LEGOs, Lululemon, Trojans, Vaseline, WD-40, and every tree on Earth are also hydrocarbon based. So is human fat. Fats—lipids—are the organic precursors to all the petroleum we burn. They occur in plants, too, including algae and phytoplankton. Long after other components of these creatures have decomposed or been reduced to inert sediment, the lipids endure, thus confirming a suspicion held by many people attempting weight loss: fat lasts forever.

Fire is possible because oxygen is so reactive, but the secret to its continued success is that there is the “right” amount of it relative to other atmospheric gases. Fire has a hard time sustaining itself when oxygen levels fall below an atmospheric concentration of 15 percent. Meanwhile, in concentrations above 35 percent, dinner by candlelight would be ill-advised. Currently, atmospheric oxygen sits in the Goldilocks zone, just shy of 21 percent: exactly what we need to live and prosper, and exactly what fire needs to burn in ways that have proven extraordinarily beneficial to us—most of the time. We evolved to accommodate these conditions, but fire didn’t; fire’s behavior is determined by immutable laws of chemistry and physics. So, it is a fortuitous coincidence that we find ourselves overlapping in space and time under such mutually rewarding circumstances.

But hope is a human construct, a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty that holds no sway in the natural world. And yet, hope, like fear, is contagious, communicable; when expressed by a respected leader, like Darby Allen, it has the power to create an imaginary zone of protection around a group. Hope—the willpower of positive thinking—is clearly adaptive to human survival. To remain cohesive under pressure, communities need trustworthy authority figures capable of leading by example and exhorting others to manage their thoughts and feelings, especially doubt and fear. But there is a fine line between hope and denial and delusion.

There is destructive fire, which burns down houses and forests, and then there’s transformative fire, which makes familiar objects—like houses—disappear altogether, and leaves whatever’s left—the cement foundation, the steel reinforcement rod holding it together—altered at the molecular level. This is what happened in Slave Lake in 2011: large, expensive things like riding lawnmowers couldn’t be found because they had, more or less, vaporized. Little remained besides cast iron bathtubs and the warped husks of furnaces and cars. In the aftermath, a formal review was conducted, faults were found, and recommendations were made. Among the many findings was the disturbing determination that the fire was not started by lightning or by accident, but by arson.[*] A surprising number of people saw the Slave Lake fire as a one-off and said it couldn’t happen again. But none of those people serves in the Slave Lake Fire Department.

In the midst of the Chisholm Fire’s most explosive phase, a funnel cloud was observed, and later investigation revealed mass blowdowns of mature trees within the burn area. For fires of this magnitude, we need a different scale of measurement and, in the end, the six authors of a peer-reviewed paper entitled “The Chisholm Firestorm” resorted to megatons, the units of energy used to measure the explosive power of hydrogen bombs. The energy released during the fire’s peak, seven-hour run was calculated to be that of seventeen one-megaton hydrogen bombs, or about four Hiroshima bombs per minute.

This, now, is what fire is capable of on Earth. The chemistry and physics of fire remain unchanged, the trees themselves are no different than they were fifty years ago, but the air is warmer and the soil is drier—enough to make the latent energy living and dying in these forests that much easier to release. Historians speak of Britain’s Imperial Century, the American Century, and the Chinese Century, but those who study the symbiotic relationship between humans and combustion make a good argument for this one going down as the Century of Fire. Two decades in, the case only strengthens. Across North America, and around the world, fires are burning over longer seasons and with greater intensity than at any other time in human history. As conditions change, and the envelope of our experience is pushed, new language and reference points must be found, and so it is with the Chisholm Fire that subsequent fires are being compared. “Chisholm was the forerunner of worse things to come,” Dennis Quintilio, a senior wildfire consultant with Alberta Forestry, explained to me in 2016. “The curves are all going one way.”

When you consider the vast quantities of water flowing and filtering through the boreal forest, and the fact that Fort McMurray is located at the confluence of not two but four rivers, in close proximity to numerous lakes, creeks, and muskeg bogs, it seems counterintuitive that the air could be as dry as Nevada’s, but this is the reason Alberta’s sky is so famously clear: because the air has so little moisture in it. It has so little moisture, not because of where that air is, but because of where it comes from. This parched air, a feature of the region’s high-pressure systems, flows in from the north. “North,” in Alberta’s case, is a polar desert known as the Northern Arctic Ecozone. Comprising most of the Canadian Arctic, all the way to the North Pole, it is one of the driest places on Earth. The injection of desert-dry Arctic air, combined with the day’s unprecedented temperatures, created ideal conditions for the rapid and sustained evaporation of all surface moisture. That morning, the relative humidity had dropped from 30 percent to less than 20 percent in under an hour, and it had yet to bottom out.

Fire is the principal mechanism by which the boreal forest purges and regenerates itself, to the point that the cones of several keystone conifer species, including black spruce, will not drop their seeds unless they are heated to temperatures unachievable by sunlight alone. Not only do these blasts of intense heat open the cones, releasing the seeds inside, they also indicate that fire has cleared the ground below and opened the canopy above, thus improving the odds of those seeds’ successful germination. Without fire and its seemingly random but ultimately regular patterns of return, the boreal forest would collapse. There is in this cycle a kind of codependency that, when viewed from the point of view of fire, upends the notion of what a forest is, and whom it serves. As the naturalist and author David Pitt-Brooke wrote of a similar forest farther south, “Fire-spawned stands of lodgepole pine are, in a sense, locked into a fire cycle. They are creations of fire and, in turn, they create conditions hospitable to future fire. You could almost think of it as a symbiosis…a form of farming: fire creates these stands of lodgepole pine so it can eat them later.”

In most of the circumboreal, this is when winter snow cover finally gives way to spring’s lengthening days and the resurgent flush of leaves and grasses. During this transition, however, there is a critical moment when, with no snow left to cover it, and no foliage yet to shade it, the normally damp, dark forest floor is exposed to the novelty of direct sunlight. This period of a week or two, which occurs before the trees’ roots have fully thawed and their branches have budded, has a name—the “spring dip.” During this brief window of time, between the river’s break-up and the forest’s green-up, trees—coniferous and deciduous alike—are exceptionally vulnerable to fire. Under these conditions, leaves, cones, and deadfall take on the characteristics of kindling, and last summer’s grass will burn like newspaper. In 2016, the spring dip lined up perfectly with Fire 009.

Before Jamie followed them, he had a moment alone with his fellow fire chief. “I told Darby Allen right in the parking lot, ‘You’re an idiot no matter what. If you evacuate everybody and nothing happens, you’re an idiot. If you don’t evacuate everybody and the fire comes, you’re an idiot. You’re going to be wrong and everybody’s going to hate you no matter what, so follow your gut. If your gut says, ‘We need to get people out of here,’ then get them out of there. If the fire doesn’t come, then, whatever—no matter what call you make, and no matter when you make it, everybody else is smarter. Everyone else would have figured it out before you. Everyone else would have done it different than you. Doesn’t matter. When you’re the guy that’s in charge, you just do what you know is the best in protecting people and you roll with that. That’s the job. The job is to do what’s right for people regardless of what the people think.’

The Gordian network of intertwined systems that make up a city is truly daunting. Initiating an evacuation, even from a portion of Fort McMurray, would disrupt many thousands of people—everyone in that area from newborn infants and senile grandparents to pets and belligerent drunks. Complicating matters was the fact that most people were at work or in school. How do you get the message to them? How do you handle their emotions? What if they insist on going home? What if they refuse to leave? What if there’s an accident at a crucial intersection? If you shut down gas and electricity, what are the implications? What about the hospital—should you use vans or medevac? What about looters? And law enforcement? There were men in jail and women in childbirth; there were supermarkets full of perishable food, and perishable customers; there was a pet store, an animal shelter, and tanks of live lobsters.

A large evacuation, mismanaged, could create its own disaster.

There are sights and sounds—frequencies of perception—that are instinctively wrong, that tap into our primal, animal sensibility and tell us it’s time to go—now. It can be the tone in someone’s voice, or the pitch in a gust of wind; it can be a screech of tires, the lurch of an airplane, or a sudden movement by a stranger; it can be the size, color, and proximity of a smoke plume. In none of these situations is there an established threshold, or fixed redline. Instead, there is a kind of subjective, sensory equivalent to crossover—a moment beyond which we are moved involuntarily to a state of high alert—and this moment seems to be the same for the majority of people. In Fort McMurray, starting around 12:30, this threshold was being crossed by everyone who looked at the southern sky.

At this point, most of the city’s residents were still at work, or at lunch, and their children were still in school. But that was about to change, and it would do so like the moment of arrival in a sci-fi movie, or in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds: people stopped in their tracks, heads turned to the sky, beholding something whose size and import they could neither limn nor scale. It wasn’t Martians, or Godzilla, but it was a monster and they knew it.

All morning, time had been moving in a peculiar way, but this is the nature of Nature on a deadline: things unfolding gradually across the intersecting horizons of landscape and time until that moment when, with astonishing suddenness, they merge and the event is upon you. You wonder where all the time has gone, when in fact it hasn’t gone anywhere, it is the events within it that have appeared to amplify in speed and scale—because they now include you. This is one of the supreme challenges facing humans in how we manage the physical reality of our planet: the deceptively simple tension between time, rate, and distance. A hurricane can be plotted and tracked a week out, where it remains an abstraction on a network weather map, and yet when it is upon you, time and events achieve a kind of singularity and, suddenly, nothing else exists; its immediacy—its presence—is overwhelming.

Paul Ayearst, a lifelong resident of the boreal forest, a hard worker, conscientious citizen, and dedicated family man, found himself in the same cognitive dilemma as so many others that day: he had heard the warnings, he had seen the fire growing bigger and closer, and yet, on some crucial, active level, he did not, or could not, acknowledge the immediate and terrible implications of a Rank 6 boreal fire at his doorstep. The danger confronting him, his home, and his beloved family did not fully register until his weeping wife shouted the fact into his face. Even then, his brain, and its fierce loyalty to the status quo, resisted.

But reality does not require human belief in order to be real.

Palmer knew this road intimately, but now he felt disoriented. Landmarks are how we navigate and scale ourselves to landscape; their steady, dependable presence projects a sense of permanence and inviolability, which helps to anchor us in space and time. We don’t call them “songlines,” as they are known in Australia, but they serve a similar psychic role: we know when we see a familiar feature that the next one—a sign, a gas station, a tree, a hotel—will be coming along shortly, and in this way we stitch our homeworld together. Even though we may only name them when giving visitors directions, these are the waypoints that guide us through our daily rounds. Between their disappearance and the smoke, Palmer was becoming a stranger in his own hometown. This was happening now on a city-wide scale: the memory palace was burning down.

Of the four most abundant fuels available to the fire on May 3, three of them were trees: black spruce, balsam poplar, and aspen. The fourth was houses. Of those three tree species, the houses of Fort McMurray most closely resembled black spruce. They were not infused with highly flammable sap but with something equally combustible. Most house fires originate inside the home, and people who study these ignitions draw a sharp distinction between modern furnishings and so-called legacy furnishings. The latter are considered antiques now: wooden tables and chairs; lace curtains; couches with cotton upholstery, stuffed with cotton batting, or maybe even horsehair. These will burn, but nothing like modern furniture, much of which is made of plastic, or wood “products” bound together with glues and resins, upholstered with polyester or nylon, and stuffed with polyurethane. Today, it is common to find oneself sitting or sleeping on furniture composed almost entirely of petroleum products. As bizarre as it sounds, many people prepare for their day by dressing themselves from head to toe in highly flammable petroleum-based materials.

“I didn’t know that the fire had crossed the river,” he said. “The river’s almost a kilometer wide so I didn’t think for a second that this side of town was in danger. Nobody had told us. We felt stupid.

Smoke columns behave like fountains in other ways, too: suffused within that swirling vortex, inconceivable in the face of so much fire, was a colossal amount of water—not just from moisture bound up in the forest, but also from melting ice, broken water lines, and fire hoses. In order for fuels to burn as explosively as they did in Fort McMurray, any residual moisture had to be removed by evaporation. All that water has to go somewhere, and it does: what looks from a distance like “smoke” is really a combination of soot, combustive gases, toxic chemicals, and steam. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water vapor were being carried skyward though the smoke column, ten, twenty, thirty thousand feet above the fire, where it condensed and then froze. There, miles above the city, hurricane-force downdrafts hurled fusillades of black hail back to earth, just as they had done in ancient Egypt. Reduced to their most elementary ingredients, these carbon-infused ice pellets were all that remained of the trees and houses so recently devoured by the fire.

Pilots flying over large wildfires have reported charred tree branches bouncing off their windshields at twenty thousand feet.

The relative humidity—second only to wind in terms of its importance to fire behavior—was still dropping. It would bottom out at 12 percent, a level of desiccation typically found in kiln-dried lumber.

In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience. Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousand petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of desiccated trees, is something no Canadian firefighter or emergency manager had experienced. But this is the nature of twenty-first-century WUI fire, and not just in the boreal forest. Authorities in California, Australia, Greece, Spain, Russia, and elsewhere have found themselves in the same situation—basing their responses on outdated concepts, on what they’ve already seen, instead of what fire weather is capable of now. The data was there, but the interpretation wasn’t, and this—the Lucretius Problem—gave the Fort McMurray Fire an all but unassailable advantage over the people charged with fighting it.

the atmosphere never cooled down, and that is what is different about the twenty-first century. The highs are certainly higher, but it is the lows—in all seasons—that are, in their way, more disturbing. A typical spring night in Fort McMurray used to be in the 40s; in May 2016, nighttime temperatures barely dropped below 70°F. In Canada and northern Europe, nights during which the temperature stays above 68°F are referred to as “tropical.” Twenty years ago, Toronto might experience one or two tropical nights in the month of July; in 2020, it counted fourteen. During the same month, Phoenix, Arizona, sustained an average twenty-four-hour temperature of 99°F for the entire month, a new record. Not only can fire sustain itself much more easily in warm temperatures, but ice, snow, rain, and dew will all melt and evaporate more quickly (as will lakes and rivers), making all fuels easier to ignite.

Unlike military bombing, which can be done from miles up, air tankers operate at low altitudes, more like crop dusters than B-52s. The lower the release, the less evaporation of water, or diffusion of retardant, will occur. For this reason, drops are typically made just two or three hundred feet above the target, which leaves a perilously narrow margin for error, especially when flying through the thick smoke and unstable airs of a wildfire. Even under ideal conditions, the combination of a heavy load of liquid and a low approach means that even the smallest human error or mechanical glitch can carry an aircraft into the ground. Or, in this case, a neighborhood.

Fire resembles living things in many ways, but there is a crucial difference: as long as there is sufficient wind, fuel, and dry weather, it never gets tired, and it never sleeps. The people fighting this fire, however, were running out of gas, and so were their trucks. They had now been operating in crisis mode for a day and a half straight, and there was no end in sight. The intensity of physical activity is hard to measure, but a Fitbit tracker on the wrist of the Suncor firefighter Lucas Welsh offers some idea. From when he went on duty at lunchtime on the 3rd until he returned to Site late that first evening, his heart rate stayed at or above 150 beats per minute, with the only dips occurring during location changes in his truck.

When those houses were being designed and built and sold, no one considered the possibility that they could burn like a refinery fire, or that the same apparatus used against such fires would be brought to bear on Prospect Drive.

Our atmosphere envelops the cosmic sand grain of Earth just as Priestley’s glass bells enveloped his mice, just as bitumen envelops a grain of bituminous sand, just as our skin envelops our own bodies: relative to what they are covering, each of these insulating layers is gossamer-thin. The vertical distance from sea level, where most humans live, to icy suffocation at Camp 4 on Mount Everest is less than five miles—a mere .06 percent of Earth’s eight-thousand-mile diameter. Put another way, your skin is ten times thicker, relative to your body, than the habitable portion of the atmosphere is relative to Earth. This gaseous membrane is all that separates us from the lifeless oblivion of deep space, and neither we nor fire could survive without it.

Despite the fact that we are protected by a formidable combination of ozone, gravity, solar radiation, magnetic fields, and life-enabling gases, our atmospheric “living room” remains as fragile as a fish bowl—and as easily contaminated. The idea that our atmosphere could be changed—by us—is not something we have ever, in our entire history, had to consider seriously until a single lifetime ago, which is about as long as we have had to seriously consider the automobile.

The Petrocene Age has enabled ordinary people to command energy in ways kings and sultans could only dream of, and with an ease hitherto unimaginable. Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day. Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equivalent would have required hundreds of enslaved people and draft animals. Today, with cheap and plentiful oil at our disposal, everyone’s an emperor. Every time we get in a car, on an airplane, or on a ship, we are traveling with a vast invisible retinue that multiplies our potency even as it multiplies our emissions. During this first century and a half of the Petrocene Age, as we have harnessed, democratized, and amplified fire on demand, we have also unleashed some unintended consequences: a by-product of becoming a petroleum-based society—in other words, a fire-based society—has been the superheating of the atmosphere.

Exhaust fumes, like the atmosphere they flow into, are mostly invisible and easy to keep out of mind, but if that Silverado’s tail pipe were directed back into the vehicle, the driver and all her passengers would be dead in minutes. If the Silverado’s exhaust were piped into the driver’s living room, she and her family would be dead in an hour. But somehow, when we run our cars “outside,” in our shared atmosphere, all the soot and toxic gases magically disappear.

The comparison of manufactured greenhouse gases to personal hygiene is not an arbitrary one. Both are closely tied to the Petrocene Age. The first time a Western doctor recognized the connection between handwashing and patient survival wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century. In 1847, the Vienna-based obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that births attended by midwives seemed to result in fewer infections than those attended by physicians. Wondering why this might be, Semmelweis observed that, while doctors in his hospital handled all manner of sick and septic patients, including cadavers, midwives focused solely on mothers and babies. Ruling out other possibilities, Semmelweis concluded that the doctors’ hands were the one consistent link between sick or dead patients and birthing mothers. Semmelweis broke this link by washing his hands in a systematic way before attending births. The incidence of infection dropped dramatically among his patients, and he made handwashing standard practice.

Science can be frustrating for nonscientists because scientists are trained to be humble and cautious and not to speak in absolutes. Almost everything they say is qualified somehow. It’s an approach that doesn’t generate clicks, or draw eyeballs, or make money, and it leaves openings for cynical actors.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was convened the following year. In response, the American Petroleum Institute—the same organization that had founded and then disbanded the CO2 and Climate Task Force—formed a new organization, joining dozens of energy, mining, chemical, and manufacturing companies. They called themselves the Global Climate Coalition, but the name was deceptive. The GCC’s role, officially, was similar to the API’s—to advocate on behalf of industry—but it did so by casting doubt on climate science and discrediting “alarmists” like James Hansen. Adopting the tobacco industry’s playbook (which owes a great deal to John D. Rockefeller’s PR machine),[*11] the GCC disavowed and undermined decades’, and millions of dollars’, worth of cutting-edge climate research. Lobbyists and receptive politicians (including presidents), along with complicit scientists, bankers, economists, CEOs, evangelical pastors, and conservative news outlets, took the discipline, caution, and humble openness to alternative theories that are hallmarks of good science, and weaponized them. Between them, Exxon and the Koch family alone have spent at least $200 million on think tanks, lobbyists, pseudoscientific studies, opinion pieces, advertorials, political campaigns, and advertising, all of which was (and is) designed to obfuscate, minimize, and confuse the issue.

By turning the precautionary principle on its head, the GCC and its allies subverted scientists’ absence of 100 percent certainty, pretzeling it into an argument for maintaining the status quo. It’s hard work, undermining a century of solid science, but the strategy paid off: 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). Despite knowing full well the implications for climate, vehicle manufacturers developed and encouraged a market for SUVs, which, in addition to being larger, heavier, and more resource intensive than ordinary cars, were able (thanks to the GCC) to circumvent mileage requirements because of their designation as “light trucks.”[*12] Meanwhile, actual light trucks—like pickups—were also marketed aggressively. Ford’s F-Series pickup trucks are the best-selling vehicles in automotive history.

There’s a saying in the business world that applies equally to wildfire: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

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.

Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura concluded that the tornado’s wind speed was somewhere between 140 and 165 miles per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 2,700°F”—the melting point of steel. In other words, Bustillos had endured the equivalent of an EF-3 tornado, combined with a blast furnace. He and the dozer operator had been inside the same thing that the Australian Tom Bates had filmed from the Kambah Park rugby pitch in Canberra.

“This isn’t a ‘drought,’ ” wrote the climate journalist Bob Berwyn in 2020, “because that implies recovery. This is aridification.” Aridification precedes desertification.