And in August, the sky over the Iberian Peninsula turned gray. It wasn't pollution, Sahara dust, or haze, but the green forests of northern Canada, seeping through our noses and eyes. The country that hosts 10% of the planet's forest mass saw a significant portion evaporate under the flames of 600 fires. The smoke cloud traveled 7,000 kilometers over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, knocking on our doors so that no one would miss the latest plague of global warming: the Arctic on fire.
The utopian spectacle has been going on for fifteen years since its premiere. In that time, over ten million hectares of tundra and boreal forest in Siberia have burned, releasing tens of megatons of carbon into the atmosphere. Greenland experienced its first major forest fire in history. A surprising event considering that the island has no trees, and its surface is completely frozen except for insignificant tundra areas on the margins of the ice sheet. A few years earlier, in Alaska, the tundra also burned due to a lightning strike. "The tundra has been virtually fire-free for the last 11,000 years," noted Arctic biologist Syndonia Bret-Harte in Nature.
And what is happening? "We were not designed to live this way. We are living an experiment that has lasted 150 years, until we have exhausted nature's patience," explains Vancouver writer John Vaillant, who has just published Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World.
His book tells the story of a fire, the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, the center of Canada's oil industry, but it is also the story of billions of fires. Those that every day, decade after decade, we have ignited with every car engine, every light switch, every boiler button, every factory chimney. "In 1875, 1.3 billion people walked the planet, literally, as there were no cars yet. That world, in which people were born whose hands I touched, looked into their eyes, and felt their breath, is very close temporally but, at the same time, very distant chemically, biologically, atmospherically, technologically, and even anthropogenically from the one we inhabit today," explains Vaillant.
On May 1, 2016, Fort McMurray, the wealthiest city in America, built on millions of barrels of oil, became a ghost town like Chernobyl after 88,000 people abandoned it in a single afternoon. A multimillion-dollar disaster that ravaged an area of forest the size of the Community of Madrid, melted vehicles, and turned entire neighborhoods into incendiary bombs under 14-kilometer-high pyrocumulus clouds. The same ones that appear when volcanoes erupt.
For days, in the subarctic region of North America, the impossible was happening: 33 degrees Celsius, when the region's highs ranged between 15 and 20. The fire created its own meteorological system, with hurricane-force winds and lightning that sparked new fires many kilometers away. The flames lasted for months. It was not declared extinguished until August of the following year.
But if Canada, Alaska, Siberia, and Greenland are burning, what will happen to us in the Mediterranean? "Well, it's already happening. Look at Cyclone Daniel. It was terrible. 7,000 people died in Libya and 10,000 disappeared. The disaster was epic," Vaillant responds.
The summer following Fort McMurray was even worse. The CO2 level in the atmosphere reached 405 ppm (parts per million), a 45% increase from pre-industrial levels. "Anything significant that increases by 50% —housing prices, blood pressure, rat mortality, precipitation— will be very noticeable and often, for the worse," says Vaillant.
That summer, all European countries experienced large-scale forest fires, including Ireland and Greenland, something that had never happened before. More than a hundred people died in Spain and Portugal. New Zealand suffered unusually intense fires, while Chile and British Columbia, two large coastal territories in opposite hemispheres, experienced their worst fire seasons in history. California suffered, among others, the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, which destroyed 9,000 buildings, killed 44 people, and generated winds that overturned vehicles. In early 2020, the fires in Australia globally blocked solar radiation, creating a self-contained anticyclonic vortex one thousand kilometers in diameter with its own ozone hole. The columns of incandescent smoke rose to 35 kilometers in altitude, twice the height of any known pyrocumulonimbus injection to date, disrupting the climate in the stratosphere for three months, while taking a 66,000-kilometer stroll through the southern hemisphere.
In the nineties, pyrocumulonimbus was almost unknown. Now it is not only a feature of major forest fires but is growing in size and frequency to replicate the effects of volcanoes, which have been the fastest and most powerful climate transformers in Earth's history.
Vaillant explains the atmosphere with a fart. "If someone is traveling in a car and another passenger releases methane, the first person notices it within seconds. Despite being protected by an extraordinary combination of ozone, gravity, solar radiation, magnetic fields, and the set of gases that allow life, our atmospheric habitat is as fragile as a fish tank and can be contaminated just as easily. The idea that it could be altered is not something we seriously considered until a generation ago. Although Earth's atmosphere is vast and invisible, it is also finite, like a closed room: what happens in it stays in it. Nothing we do or emit truly disappears. This is hard to remember, or even believe."
Every year, Vaillant recalls, the global fossil fuel industry releases ten gigatons of carbon that had been sequestered in the Earth's crust in the form of coal, oil, and gas. The rate is ten times higher than any gas emissions discovered in geological records of the last 250 million years.
After publishing a graph of global temperature increases, Cristi Proistosescu, a Climate Dynamics professor at the University of Illinois, tweeted: "I just want to make sure the graph is clear: Don't see it as the hottest August of the last century. See it as one of the coolest Augusts of the next century."
Physicist Albert Allen Bartlett said, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
QUESTION. And what do you say to people living in cities who believe that wildfires don't affect them, or that it's too far away?
ANSWER. It's a lie we tell ourselves. They also thought that in Fort McMurray.
Q. And what do you say to climate change deniers?
A. Climate denial is a disease, and conservative politicians are exploiting it. Look at the graphs. We have twice as much CO2 in our atmosphere as in the pre-industrial era. There has never been such a rapid change in planetary history. Nothing could have caused it except for an artificial injection of CO2. And that's what we did. It's not science fiction or religion. These are facts.
Q. And we don't see them because...?
A. Climate denial is partly moral cowardice, and partly arrogant resistance to change, and accepting responsibility for the consequences of our appetites. Then you have some politicians and Fox News, and Murdoch, who discovered the recipe to pollute the conversation and dominate it. It's a brilliant psychological operation. There are intelligent and talented Americans who have now become supporters of Trump against all rationality. My father has sided with Trump, and he is a progressive and well-educated man. He was like me at his age. And look at him now. It's crazy when all the evidence is there. People don't accept what's in front of them. Maybe it's a defense mechanism, or that we are very malleable, or programmable, and that is terrifying and instructive.
Vaillant calls this period of our history the Petrocene, comparing it to the warm period of the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago. At that time, the seas and continents were already close to their current configuration. Our ancestors were still in Africa. Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) walked upright and experimented with the most basic stone tools in present-day Ethiopia. The world was perfectly habitable, but in a very different way, not so much because of who lived in it but because of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. CO2 levels were in the range of 400 ppm, similar to current levels, but average temperatures were 2°C to 3°C higher, what we expect by the end of the century. With much less permanent ice, sea levels were twenty-five meters higher than today. Nearly half of the human population lives in coastal areas submerged during Lucy's time.
Q. So are we all going to die?
A. The scientific community agrees that a sixth major extinction is underway, and its origin is human activity. The idea may be hard to accept, but it shouldn't surprise us: in Earth's history, there has never been a disruption like that caused by humans: billions of large and highly skilled primates, whose evolutionary behavior depends mainly on global-scale hydrocarbon combustion. It's a planet that also has to accommodate billions of livestock the size of pigs and cows emitting methane. The symmetry is atrocious. What we are allowing to happen now with carbon dioxide and methane is similar to what cyanobacteria did with photosynthesized oxygen billions of years ago. Gassing the planet to death.
Q. Is there no way out? Because if there isn't, the deniers are right.
A. Life has always bounced back, in one way or another. There is no doubt that there will be life at the end of the Petrocene. The question is what kind of life, how much, and where.
Q. Where?
A. Well, I don't know, but it won't be on coral reefs. There is no doubt that all of us, regardless of age, will experience cataclysmic changes in the next 3 to 15 years. Another way to think about it is that it's the story of our lives, and if anyone can deal with this, it's us. I believe most of us will continue to live, but the question is how we respond to the messages nature is sending us, because it is communicating with us very vehemently. Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is something we have never done before. It will be difficult, uneven, and there will be violence. This is not about banning cars from circulating in Beijing for two weeks to host the Olympics. Nature will force us to become more provincial, to live more simply, to travel less. And that's a good thing. I have a lot of faith in nature's ability to regenerate. I'm not naive; I'm optimistic.
Q. Are you also optimistic about climate summits, with world leaders setting goals that are never met?
A. Not everyone is responding in the same way, but there are enough people who are. Young people believe that climate will be the great issue of their lives, so they are much more motivated than an 85-year-old Fox News viewer whose foundations and beliefs were formed in the 20th century, a world that no longer exists. There is already a generation that has only known this uncertainty and is very motivated to try to find some stability.