July was the world's hottest month on record. Wildfires this summer destroyed a Hawaiian city and caused excuations(疏散) in Canada. Greece, and Thailand. Floods devastated towns in Vermont in July and killed thousands of Libyans in September.
John Vaillant's new book Fire Weather aims to shake us out of this with a tale of terror from a climate change frontline: the city of Fort McMurray, in northern Canada's vast forest, where an uncontrollable wildfire during an exceptionally warm spring in 2016 flooded entire communities within days.
Vaillant tells his story at disaster-movie pace, starting with the glimpse of smoke on the horizon and assurances from the authorities that all will be fine. Mounting misfortune follows as the flames lick golf courses on the city's edge. By the end, 90, 00 people had been evacuated, 2,500 structures destroyed, another 500 damaged. The energy generated by the fire created its own weather system, with hurricane force winds and lightning strikes.
What attracts me most is the book's central irony. The story takes place in Fort McMurrary, which is the industrial centre of northern Alberta's tar sands, one of the world's largest fossil fuel deposits. It is a city whose existence depends on the hydrocarbons whose burning caused climate change; but whose existence almost ended in a climate-caused burning.
Fire Weather isn't a typical disaster book. Vaillant's references to Nassim Taleb, Lucretius, Seamus Heaney, The Lord of the Rings, Xerxes, and Moby-Dick can grant. But Vaillant's theme is also catching my eyes. Our industrial world is releasing carbon at a rate 10 times faster than scientists can find in the geological record for the past 250mn years, he writes. "Thanks to fire and our appetite for boundless energy, we have evolved into a geologic event that will be measurable a million years from now."
