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Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World
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.
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.
432 pages, Paperback
First published June 6, 2023
About the author
John Vaillant
19 books492 followersJohn 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).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,079 reviews
April 26, 2023
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.
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.
August 17, 2023
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.
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.
March 7, 2023
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.
January 23, 2024
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.
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.
July 23, 2024
Fire tornados and forests exploding from heat… so, this is… not good? Hmmm
October 31, 2023
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.
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.
February 4, 2024
"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.
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.
June 17, 2023
This astonishing, and beautifully written, book is to non-fiction what Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD is to fiction.
Essential reading.
Essential reading.
November 24, 2023
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.
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.
February 14, 2024
‘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.
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.
January 15, 2024
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.
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.
December 14, 2023
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.
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.
April 23, 2024
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.
November 12, 2023
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.
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.
August 19, 2024
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.
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.
July 12, 2024
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.
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.
January 21, 2024
I was riveted by this book. From Vaillant's chronicling of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire to his chilling chronology of our obsession with fossil fuels and combustion, this book should be required reading for all inhabitants of planet Earth. Vaillant describes the Lucretius Problem to explain the delayed evacuation of Fort McMurray and projects that concept unto our inability to fully act on climate change, despite the science staring us in the face. The Lucretius Problem is a mental defect where we assume the worst-case event that has happened is the worst-case event that can happen. The Lucretius Problem has proven itself to be a feature of society's response to our new reality.
September 5, 2023
An incredible story with all sorts of interesting facts and an important message, but the writing is overly verbose, to the point it often seems padded and repetitive.
September 29, 2023
This one really made me angry. Not at the author, because it´s an excellent book, but at humans. We are stupid and arrogant and that´s why we are so doomed.
July 17, 2024
My favorite piece of nonfiction I've read in years. The continuing narrative of the Fort McMurray wildfire forming and then bursting out of control is incredible, as is the depth of analysis of the broader factors that enabled it, from the history of bitumen extraction and the increasing use of flammable materials in home developments to more than a century of developing climate science.
February 23, 2024
The book starts off well enough using wild fire facts and global warming. Vaillant provides a detailed and empathetic narrative that really connected with me.
BUT THEN….the guilt laden, divisive, awful political drivel starts.
The age old brain dead diatribe about left vs right. Liberal good Conservative bad.
Eco terrorism is misunderstood, people are addicted to gas and so on.
What Vaillant completely fails to mention is that oil was instrumental in the industrial age to get human kind to where it is today. What he fails to mention is that both liberals and conservatives use gasoline and oil byproducts everyday.
Our economy doesn’t run on hopes and dreams of angry but well paid people like Vaillant.
There is zero mention in the book of China sucking the world’s resources dry and creating unprecedented pollution. Zero mention of giants like Elon Musk who are helping to create the future without oil.
But there is mention of the climate nut job Greta Thunberg, the wonder kid who is good at pointless pontificating.
Vaillant is simply another leftist divisive tool who used the tragedy of Fort McMurray fire to further his hate filled agenda. It is really an unfortunate and unforgivable work as it distracts from the real issue of climate change and how ALL of us can LOGICALLY work towards a better future.
BUT THEN….the guilt laden, divisive, awful political drivel starts.
The age old brain dead diatribe about left vs right. Liberal good Conservative bad.
Eco terrorism is misunderstood, people are addicted to gas and so on.
What Vaillant completely fails to mention is that oil was instrumental in the industrial age to get human kind to where it is today. What he fails to mention is that both liberals and conservatives use gasoline and oil byproducts everyday.
Our economy doesn’t run on hopes and dreams of angry but well paid people like Vaillant.
There is zero mention in the book of China sucking the world’s resources dry and creating unprecedented pollution. Zero mention of giants like Elon Musk who are helping to create the future without oil.
But there is mention of the climate nut job Greta Thunberg, the wonder kid who is good at pointless pontificating.
Vaillant is simply another leftist divisive tool who used the tragedy of Fort McMurray fire to further his hate filled agenda. It is really an unfortunate and unforgivable work as it distracts from the real issue of climate change and how ALL of us can LOGICALLY work towards a better future.
October 20, 2023
This book should be categorized as horror because it’s fucking terrifying.
A detailed and well researched look at the oil industry, wildfire, climate change with the backdrop of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. I want to shove this book down every politician and oil executive’s throat.
I would ding it half a star for the overuse of heavy handed metaphors which got a bit tiresome.
A detailed and well researched look at the oil industry, wildfire, climate change with the backdrop of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. I want to shove this book down every politician and oil executive’s throat.
I would ding it half a star for the overuse of heavy handed metaphors which got a bit tiresome.
March 8, 2024
Vaillant makes a compelling argument that we should refer to the current era of earth's history not as the Anthropocene, but the Petrocene in recognition of the centrality of the energy harnassed from fire to the challenges facing humanity. He builds the story around the epic and horrifying fire that devastated the petroleum industry city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, miraculously without loss of life. It's capitvating, if difficult to read; having been in Colorado Springs during the Waldo Canyon fire, it definitely stirred deep feelings and memories. He does a good job humanizing the members of the community, and tracking their responses. But the thematic center of the book follows the description of the fire's growth when he shifts focus to the politics and economics that unleashed the atmospheric carbon dioxide at the root of the crisis we're facing. He details the fact that very clear statements were being made about the science and implications of our reliance on petroleum. It's not entirely hopeless; the final sections detail the legal and economic movements that may be rein in oil companies. Very well written. A necessary, disquieting book
August 10, 2024
If you have any doubts about the history of carbon dioxide’s impact on the planet or the role of the petroleum industry in the increase of the greenhouse effect and climate change you should read this. If you are already convinced that climate change is happening and we need to understand more clearly its history and root causes you should read Fire Weather. If you want to hear the suspenseful and incredible story of a boreal forest fire that forced over 100,000 people to evacuate their homes you have another reason to read this.
Even the scientific explanations are engrossing; the more I read the more I wanted to understand Vaillant’s vision of our era.
Even the scientific explanations are engrossing; the more I read the more I wanted to understand Vaillant’s vision of our era.
February 15, 2024
Meteorologist approved. After the last few years wildfires have skyrocketed to top of the list of things I want no part of. Fire Weather just reinforces this newfound fear. Books dealing with weather are hit or miss and often times the reader has to wade through the meteorological weeds which can be intimidating . Vaillant includes a lot of information in the book and could have been made into multiple publications. Don't let that turn you off. Fire Weather is easily digestible and reads more like fiction than your normal science tale. Fire Weather has my highest recommendation! .
My sincere thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of Fire Weather.
My sincere thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of Fire Weather.
March 1, 2023
What a treat: one of my favorite authors (I loved both "The Tiger" and "The Golden Spruce") writing about one of my favorite subjects, wildfires. And as always, he does it masterfully.
I remember Fort McMurray from 2016 as it was widely covered in the media, but only after reading this book did I understand the magnitude of the event. Vaillant reconstructs in fascinating detail what happened in Alberta at that time, and it is a gripping story - the only other book on wildfires that did a similar job was "Paradise" by Lizzie Johnson.
While this vivid description fulfilled my expectations, the author offers much more here. He combines his reporting with the story of another disaster, much slower in coming but no less horrific: how man's appetite for fossil fuels has created the eponymous fire weather on a global scale. While not as fast-paced, I found this part of the book absorbing, even enlightening. I had no idea how long scientists and Big Oil have been fully aware of the damage they are doing to all of us.
Many thanks to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
I remember Fort McMurray from 2016 as it was widely covered in the media, but only after reading this book did I understand the magnitude of the event. Vaillant reconstructs in fascinating detail what happened in Alberta at that time, and it is a gripping story - the only other book on wildfires that did a similar job was "Paradise" by Lizzie Johnson.
While this vivid description fulfilled my expectations, the author offers much more here. He combines his reporting with the story of another disaster, much slower in coming but no less horrific: how man's appetite for fossil fuels has created the eponymous fire weather on a global scale. While not as fast-paced, I found this part of the book absorbing, even enlightening. I had no idea how long scientists and Big Oil have been fully aware of the damage they are doing to all of us.
Many thanks to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
July 1, 2023
Another extraordinary book from the remarkable John Vaillant. Gripping environmental storytelling, using the May 2016 Ft McMurray fire (which burned over 15 months) as a real-life example. The clearest exposition I've seen of the multiple issues around global warming and carbon emissions. Bleak yet slightly hopeful.
Among other interesting philosophical detours, the one about ”failure of imagination,” that is, how impossible it is to plan for anything we can’t imagine to be real especially resonated as a sorry reason for why people have failed to do much about the mess the planet is in.
Among other interesting philosophical detours, the one about ”failure of imagination,” that is, how impossible it is to plan for anything we can’t imagine to be real especially resonated as a sorry reason for why people have failed to do much about the mess the planet is in.
July 21, 2023
This book was well written, but I actually hated it. I wanted to know more about the Fort MacMurray fire and I did learn more HOWEVER to get to that I had to wade through a lot of really bizarre philosophy on fire and it’s relationship to humanity? If we cut that out the book would be like 40 pages long.
February 16, 2024
This book. Man. B.O.R.I.N.G. It was like 4 different books and only 1 of them was interesting. I thought the book was about the worst fire in Canadian history but that only covered 1 part. There was too much history, too much climate change science. The author didn’t know what he was writing about. Just ugh. Only reason I finished was for my book club.
December 1, 2023
Too long- told the same story over and over, didn’t feel like he truly captured what Fort Mac is like in real life, I’d be curious what locals say about it.
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