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JV: --what I call 21st century fire, and that is a full-blown fire tornado. And you'll see these little spirals of flame, you know, whirling off on the edge of the frame sometimes. And those are called fire whirls. So we're seeing fires burn where they've really never burned before. We're seeing them burn with intensities that really have never been recorded before. We're seeing phenomena that humans have never witnessed before.
BROADCAST
The world is on fire.
As we record this, hundreds of wildfires are burning in parts of France, Spain, Russia... The US, UK and Canada. So how unusual is this, and are we entering a new era in fire weather? That's our climate question. From the BBC World Service, I'm Graihagh Jackson. And I'm Jordan Dubbar.
To help us answer that question, we have the author of Fire Weather, John Vaillant. Hi, thank you so much for joining us this week.
It's so good to be with you both.
John, I mean, people will see that fires are currently burning across the world. Are we in a new era of fire weather?
Yes, unequivocally, we are. And that said, fire has always been with bitch here here okay us on temperate landscapes. It's a natural part of life for almost any ecosystem. And what we're seeing, though, that's different is intensity, frequency, and scope.
So we're seeing fires burn where they've really never burned before. We're seeing them burn with intensities that really have never been recorded before. We're seen phenomena that humans have never witnessed before.
Unstoppable Pyrocumulonimbus fire clouds
What are these phenomena that we haven't seen before?
Well, the one that seems to be in the news right now is the Pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud. And that's a scientific term for a fire-generated, thermally-generated thunderhead, basically. So imagine those giant anvil clouds you see that generate lightning. Where we have seen them historically is over volcanoes. So think of photographs or old engravings you've seen of historical volcanoes like Popa or Krakatoa.
Starting around 1998, 1999, 2000, fire scientists and satellite data analysts started seeing them over really big wildfires. And that was a first.
And now we're seeing them with more and more frequency. I understand France has just logged its first pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud. I think Portugal had one last year, but these are really new events in Southern Europe. The Western United States and Canada have been experiencing them for about 20 years.
To give you an idea of how rapidly this is building, though, Canada had its worst fire season in its recorded history in 2023. It burned from coast to coast for about six months. And during that time, 142 pyro CB events were recorded.
So these are these gigantic firestorm systems that can reach heights of altitudes, I should say, of 45,000 feet. They puncture the stratosphere. They are so big, they occupy so much atmospheric space that they turn, they gyre like hurricanes. They generate their own lightning. They generate their own hail.
I mean, it really sounds biblical and it looks biblical if you're in it. It really feels like the end times and it's terrifying energy.
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Kay Blogger must take a moment here to grok this. A BBC reporter has just broadcast Internationally: "sounds biblical, looks biblical, and it really feels like the end times." Let me just set here a moment and absorb that then…
Cough cough oh I think some of that smoke from Reno fires is getting here
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Transcript continues
3.55
And these systems are so big and when you think of fire, one way to think of a big fire, it's really like a giant lung. It's inhaling all the time. It needs oxygen in order to burn just like we do. And when it gets big like that, imagine a whale or an elephant exerting itself. And so this giant fire is pulling in air and oxygen from all around the landscape and it can generate hurricane force winds as it does that. So that's why you see the trees tossing and turning and you see, sometimes you'll see the clothing of firefighters flapping.
Fire tornadoes
BROADCAST
I had no idea the wind could be so strong, hurricane strength, Jordan. Yes is that, so this is due to the sheer amount of heat. You mentioned before that these were over volcanoes. Is that also what can cause these tornadoes within the storm system?
J: Yeah, so this is, if you have a pyro CB, if you have pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud, that's kind of a precursor for really a new and even newer and more terrible chimera, you know, of climate change and what I call 21st century fire, and that is a full-blown fire tornado. And what you'll see, there's a lot of amazing video being shot of the Spanish and French firefighting efforts, and you'll see these little spirals of flame whirling off on the edge of the frame sometimes, and those are called fire whirls. They're not really dangerous, but they're noticeable.
But what's happening now, still rarely, thank goodness, are actual measurable fire tornadoes. The first one was recorded in the terrible Canberra fire in South Australia in 2003. That was an EF-3 tornado. So that's wind speeds of 160, 165 miles an hour. That will tear the roof off your house. That'll flip your car over. It'll kill you. We had another one of those, the first one ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere in Redding, California in 2018,
I wrote about that for the Guardian right after it happened. And I had the eerie privilege of walking that ground afterward. And there was a firefighter who was attending that fire in an F-150 pickup truck. That's a two or three ton truck. It was lifted off the road, thrown through the air, rolled repeatedly, crushed and burned. He was a father of two. Of course, he was killed, as you can imagine. And everything around him, all the cars and trucks around him had been rolled and crushed. There were a hundred foot steel high-tension power pylons, weighted down with many tons of transmission cable that were simply torn out of the ground, thrown into the forest. All the houses in the area were simply gone. They were simply gone. There was no glass. There were no small objects. Everything left was broken or crushed and burned.
And honestly, the only other scenario I've seen like that is our photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was total destruction on a scale that I think that I didn't have grey hair before and I do now, and it was a shocking sight. And these are energies that simply did not exist on Earth prior to the excessive use of fossil fuel emissions, the excessive generation of fossil fuel emissions.
How does climate change affect wildfires?
BROADCAST
Let's unpack that a little bit more. What do we know about the impact of climate change on fires like the ones we're seeing?
JVSo we're emitting millions of tons of CO2 and methane every year and the Earth does that too but we are adding to it in ways that are measurable and are now over the past 50 or a hundred years actively changing the nature of our climate. So these are heat retaining gasses that hold heat in the lower atmosphere. So it's simply warmer. Southern Europe is enduring, I think, its fourth heat wave, and it's still July. In decades past, one heat wave might happen in a summer. And now they're coming in successive waves.
And when you think about what fire likes, fire likes heat, fire likes dry fuel. And those are the conditions we're seeing in France and Spain, Italy, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco right now, Portugal, all across the American West, in British Columbia where I live, and fire likes hot, dry, windy. So those are obviously natural conditions.
And again, fire is a natural part of our landscape, but there's a big difference between the 90 degree peak temperature summer of my youth, and the 105 degree peak temperature summer of my current reality.
BROADCAST
So climate change is essentially amplifying what we might've seen before. So where it might be a dry summer, it's a very dry summer. It's a Very hot summer. It's even windier than it might've been. So this is amplifying all of these things that spread wildfires.
9.30
JV: That's right. And they build on each other. And so there's a, what I think humans and most of us who aren't mathematicians have trouble with is the way a single degree of temperature warming can amplify the power of a fire or the power a rainstorm exponentially. And So basically, crudely put one degree of temperature increase, on average, across the world, creates the opportunity for a lot more fire. It isn't just one degree more fire, it's much more fire. And so we're seeing that playing out in real time, amplifying in ways that we aren't ready for, that we don't understand particularly well, but that climate scientists, who are well versed in physics, math, and chemistry have been trying to warn us about, but it's abstract.
But there's nothing abstract about a pyrocumulonimbus fire system when it is barreling across your landscape and you are having to run away from it. They are the biggest things you will ever see.
They are as big as a hurricane. they can Shroud and area in fire Cloud covering an area 50,000 Square miles. So a single Pyro CB can cover an area the size of Greece.
Nighttime heatwaves and the “whiplash effect”
BROADCAST
There's also increasing nighttime temperatures, which means that forest fires are less likely to die down overnight, but there's also something that you write about in your book called the whiplash effect, which essentially means there's more tinder, there's more plants to set fire to. Can you just unpack how exactly that comes to be?
11.20
JV: Sure, and I really wanted to back up into the nighttime temperatures. That again, the fire likes that. So where a wildfire might settle down to a kind of a dull roar where it's still burning, but it's not actively spreading, that might've been the case 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Now you see fires actively spreading during the night. And so in the old days, which weren't that long ago, there was almost a compact between the fire and firefighters. So everybody took a break at night. The fire slowed down. Firefighters could get a few hours sleep, get a meal, resupply.
Now they're chasing that fire 24 hours a day. And so that is a really new and terrible development.
And then in terms of the whiplash effect, what we're seeing in Southern California is you know you might have you know, there's extended drought in Southern California, but there have been the occasional very rainy winter. And so this is you'll have this resurgence of shrubbery and trees, including ones that might have burned off in previous fires.
So what that turns into, though, is new fuel. As the summer wears on, as new temperature records are broken, that fuel dries out, might even die, you know, on the stem. And then when a fire comes through, it's got a whole new stash of fuel to burn.
And an extraordinary situation we're seeing is in Northern Alaska, where the last ice age has barely ended. So there are places in the Brooks Range and North Central Alaska where no tree has grown in 100,000 years. Well, forests are sprouting there now. 10-Year-old saplings are growing where no tree has grown in 100,000 years and they are already burning down.
So what we're seeing literally across the globe is a complete, if slow motion, change in the entire forest regime.
BROADCAST
John, some of the most vivid writing The Fort McMurray fire in Canada in your book about this fire weather and about wildfires comes from the fire at Fort McMurray in Canada in 2016. Can you just tell us what happened at that fire and why it was such a big deal?
JV:
So Fort McMurray in Alberta is the petroleum hub of Canada. And that might not sound like much until you realize that Canada is, depending on who's measuring, the fourth or fifth largest oil producer, petroleum producer in the world. So it's up there with Iran and Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Fort McMurry is about 700 or 800 miles north of the U.S. Border. Deep in the boreal forest. And the boreal forest is that kind of green, piney, subarctic forest system that runs all the way across Northern Canada, through Alaska. In Russia, we call it the Taiga. Siberia, you know, think of Siberia.
Northern Alberta is a lot like Siberia right in the middle of the boreal forest, one of the most flammable and combustible ecosystems on planet Earth. On May 2016, an El Nino that had been warming the North Pacific for the previous couple of years, thus impacting the snow pack in the Rocky Mountains, the Cascade Mountains of the North American West, heated up everything in its path, created the conditions in May 16 for a very early summer. And extraordinarily dry conditions.
On May 3rd, 2016, the high for that date was broken by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. So it went into the low 90s. And we are in the boreal forest, very high latitude, keeping in mind that the rivers and lakes there were still frozen. There were car-sized blocks of ice on the Athabasca River, which is the main river flowing through the city of Fort McMurray. So into this recently post-winter environment comes these unseasonably hot temperatures that dry everything out. Introduce fire into a landscape like that, and you're going to not just have intense fire conditions, but explosive fire conditions.
16.00
And so within a matter of two days, despite earnest efforts from Alberta's very capable wildfire fighting service, this fire got away and the wind shifted and blew a 10 mile wide, 100 meter tall wall of flame into the city, forcing the largest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times.
BROADCAST
And didn't this fire behave in ways that people didn't expect? Like it jumped across a kilometer wide river or something?
JV:
Yeah. Firefighters, both municipal and wild land oriented, are very familiar with big fires, and they're no stranger to it. But what they were seeing here was a fire behaving in ways they had never themselves experienced. And one of those, the Athabasca River is about a third of a mile wide. So that's wider than any fire break, you know, people are making in Spain or France right now. And when you have... 100-meter flames, as we've seen in some of the terrifying footage coming out of Spain and France, these 100-meter flames are radiating incredibly intense heat in front of them. And so radiant heat, you know, this is a quick science lesson.
Radiant heat is the invisible heat that tells you not to touch the candle. Your finger starts to get close to it. You know, I'm not going to go any closer because I'm going to burn myself. So multiply that, you know, by millions of times, you're dealing with walls of heat, radiant, heat, which moves at the speed of light, by the way, and is hitting temperatures close to 500 Celsius.
So what's happening then is even before the fire gets there, the heat is desiccating everything in front of it. So every leafy tree, every poplar and aspen that normally would be full of water, when it's hit with 500 Celsius temperatures, it desiccates instantly. So it turns instantly into matchstick firewood. Then the embers land on it. So, and the other thing to think about is objects, flammable objects, can reach combustive temperatures without fire.
So, the tree now is 500 Celsius in temperature, but it doesn't have any fire on it yet. So, the moment an ember lands on that, it explodes into flame.
So imagine as this wall of invisible 500 Celsius heat rolls over the forest into the neighborhoods, across the plastic swing set into the garage, over the tar-shingled roofs and the vinyl siding. That's causing all those petroleum products to start to vaporize. And so these houses now are not catching on fire in the way that you and I are used to seeing. These houses explode into flame.
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these houses now are not catching on fire in the way that you and I are used to seeing. These houses explode into flame. (Wow, every phrase he says is so important it's a lift out quote. -ke)
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19.10
And so you had three-quarter million dollar two-story, solidly built winterproof houses in Fort McMurray, burning from rooftop to basement in five minutes. And then people went out of their garage or went out in their garden, looked down the road, and there's a wall of fire coming down the street at them.
So people got out of there quickly. These are tough, can-do people. They got themselves together. They gathered up their kids and their cats and dogs, and they ran for the exit. But also people who had been trained what to do in fire situations, because they're working in the petroleum industry. So they had some training about what to take, what to do but nothing really prepares you for seeing your garage explode into flames and knowing your kid is still at school. And it's heartbreaking and terrifying to think about it.
And honestly, I'm 10 years into this, and when I think about what those people went through, it still chokes me up because it's a very human story, it's an atmospheric story, it's industrial story, but really a lot of hearts were broken that day seeing everything that they'd worked for, everything that they owned, everything that they treasured and valued disappear literally before their eyes.
A miracle is that nobody was killed in those flames. That's the real strange mercy of that event.
Adapting to the new wildfire dangers
BROADCAST
John, climate experts say that many parts of the world will get drier and warmer, creating these conditions that you've talked about where these wildfires can become even bigger. I'm just wondering then what do people in communities and governments need to do to adapt if we are in this new era of fire weather? What things need to change in terms of how we deal with these fires.
21.00
JV: Managing water is going to be huge, recognizing what fire is now capable of. And so, one of the first confusions people have is, they might see a fire on the landscape on a ridge far or many miles away from them and say, oh my goodness, those mountains look like they're on fire. It's a spectacular view at night. And that's no threat to me because it's many miles away.
Okay, but the threat to our communities comes from the embers that those fires generate. And so you could be admiring the burning hills that feel safe miles away, but if the wind is blowing toward you, that means the embers are too. And so your city, your town can literally ignite behind you. So we aren't prepared for that. That could happen in a place where people weren't even thinking about fire yet.
BROADCAST
If I'm a homeowner, how do I protect my house, my livelihood?
JV: You're really in a pickle there. And so we really need to emphasize evacuation. And so every city, every town now has to have an evacuation plan for fire and for flood. A lot of new communities, housing estates, housing developments, have only one entry road. That is a disaster, if there's a car accident on that road, if it's blocked by fire or debris, now you have a bunch of people effectively cattled, trapped inside their own neighborhood. So, and you could have really high lethality there.
So you need to have at least two exit roads. You need to have an evacuation plan. And when it comes to building materials, what Fort McMurray showed us is how deeply petroleum has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. And so right now houses can have tar shingles, vinyl siding, all kinds of glues and laminates in the plywood. Your sofa is extremely flammable. It's made of stuff with polyurethane or polypropylene, or all these things will start to off gas combustible. Fire accelerants, you know, if they're heated to fire hot temperature.
You know, petroleum is extraordinarily handy. It's got us where we are today. We owe it a great debt. But the gains it's given us in the short term are being taken away from us in the long term. And fire is one of the most kind of graphic and charismatic ways that happens.
Will we need to abandon some settlements?
BROADCAST
Are you talking about running away here for good? Cause presumably if we can't fight these fires, how long can we really live and stay in an area with that level of risk of to our lives?
JV: That is being decided on a case-by-case basis. And what we saw in LA, what we saw in Paradise, California, what we saw on Lahaina, what we saw in Valparaiso, Chile a couple of years ago, what we saw in Jasper, Alberta, two summers ago, what we're seeing now all across North Africa and Southern Europe are people deciding we have to go now. There is no place that is safe from fire now. And there might be some exceptions in desert cities, you know, where you don't have a lot of flammable terrain, but any place where there is forest or grassland, what we call the wildland urban interface or the WUI, fire can be introduced into our communities from those wildland, urban interface zones and impact us with the ferocity of a wildfire. And that is something that all of us, even in traditionally cool, wet, temperate places, need to come to grips with.
BROADCAST
John, thank you very much for joining us. It was really a pleasure to be with you. Thanks so much for your interest. Thanks, John. Thank you for watching don't forget you can subscribe to the BBC World Service YouTube channel so you don't miss an episode. And if you've liked what you've watched, please do give us a like. And if have a climate question that you'd like us to answer, do comment it below and we'll try and answer it in a future show. I'm Graihagh Jackson. I'm Jordan Dunbar, see you next Time.
Huge wildfires have been sweeping across Southern Europe and North America. Is climate change increasing the risk? And what can we do?
Click here to subscribe to our channel 👉🏽 https://bbc.in/3VyyriM Weather experts say the world is starting to see new types of wildfire – including enormous Pyrocumulonimbus fire clouds that spit lightning and black hail. These infernos can burn for more than a year. They can also spawn fire tornadoes, which move at more than 200 kilometres an hour destroying everything in their path. Climate Question hosts Graihagh Jackson and Jordan Dunbar talk to John Vaillant, the author of “Fire Weather”, about how wildfires are increasing in intensity and frequency, and how they are burning in places they have never burned before. Click here to subscribe to our channel 👉🏽 https://bbc.in/3VyyriMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSu0m9mAzuo&t=139sMonday, August 3, 2026
Sci-fi: Eternal journalist on Earth assignment since 1955- NEW at Heating Planet blog
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Heating Planet blog origin two posts from 2025 Rerunning here
"Donald Trump's calling global warming and climate change a hoax was in the news at the same time as floods fires mayhem and stories about the melting Antarctic. Here in my kitchen in Tahoe I said to myself, after 2025 no one will call global warming a hoax again;" https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2026/08/heating-planet-blog-origin-two-posts.html
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