Fire Weather

Rising forty thousand feet into the stratosphere, the plume’s colossal umbra lowered average temperatures by several degrees, caused birds to roost at midday, and created weird visual effects as it circled the Northern Hemisphere, including widespread reports of lavender suns and blue moons.

Our experience of fire occurs in the realm of the visible, but it is made possible by the invisible, and there is a world of energy in those vaporous, unseen realms. It is not the tree or house that burns, but the gases those things emit. This is what the heat is for: to liberate the flammable gases from their solid or liquid prisons by transformin

Wildfires are commonly described as a single entity moving across a landscape, but big ones can be divided into three distinct parts, and the ways in which they travel and impact human settlements have an analog in medieval warfare, which they may have inspired. Without wind to drive them, most ground fires tend to progress slowly, creeping outward

According to the energy historian Vaclav Smil, every gallon of gasoline represents roughly one hundred tons of marine biomass, principally algae or phytoplankton, that has gone through an inconceivably long crushing, cooking, and curing process deep underground.

Nobody tracks the incidence and costs of natural disasters as closely as insurance companies. In so doing, they provide us with some of the most objective and reliable data on the impacts of climate change and its accelerating severity.

A bitumen mine is not a place you would let your child play, but it is excavated using equipment familiar to any four-year-old conversant in Tonka technology—and with a similar grandiosity of ambition. In order to access the bitumen, the forest above it must first be removed. In industry parlance, this living material is referred to as “overburden,

This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.

Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura concluded that the tornado’s wind speed was somewhere between 140 and 165 miles per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 2,700°F”—the melting point of steel.

It has been said that helicopters don’t fly; they beat the air into submission. The same can be said of the effort required to turn bitumen back into a usable, marketable fuel.