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Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World Hardcover – Deckle Edge, June 6, 2023
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A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian
“Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core." —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland
“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
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 hundreds of 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, Vaillanttakes 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 wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateJune 6, 2023
- Dimensions6.64 x 1.34 x 9.56 inches
- ISBN-101524732850
- ISBN-13978-1524732851
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
—The New York Times, "10 Best Books of 2023"
"A gripping depiction of the blaze’s devastating trajectory.... The book’s true protagonist is fire, which Vaillant treats like a living, breathing creature that is destined to grow even more dangerous as the world becomes even more combustible. At a time when wildfires are dominating news cycles, Fire Weather is not just a timely and stunning account of recent history—it’s also a frightening preview of what could become our new normal."
—Shannon Carlin,TIME Magazine's"100 Must-Read Books of 2023"
“Few books on climate change have so viscerally captured the destruction we’ve wrought....This is all captivating, terrifying stuff, especially through Vaillant’s excellent storytelling....You almost feel as if the paroxysmal blazes will burn to the last page.”
—John Washington, New York Review of Books
"This timely and riveting account of the 2016 McMurray wildfire explores not just that Canadian inferno but what it bodes for the future. Vaillant has a chillingly serious message: This is the inevitable result of climate change, and it will happen again and again."
—The New York Times, "100 Notable Books of 2023"
"Gripping...Vaillant takes readers back into the deep history of the boreal forests before thrusting us into the Beast’s fiery heart. Fire Weather is a report from the front lines of environmental cataclysm and a prediction of what more will surely come."
—Neda Ulaby, NPR
"A gripping narrative and a loud wake-up call....Impossible to stop [reading]."
—Becca Rothfield, The Washington Post
"Vaillant writes so vividly that he can make subjects like the mining of bituminous sand...fascinating....A timely warning of more smoke to come."
—Laura Miller, Slate
"Provides a refreshingly clear explanation of this hazy, uncanny moment in the earth's history...Vaillant is the type of journalist who picks a single narrative and monomaniacally researches it, plunging himself deeper and deeper into the murky details, and then emerges, many years later, with a small universe cupped in his hands....By turns heart-racing and horrifying."
—Robert Moor, New York Magazine
"Riveting....A minute-by-minute disaster-movie narrative of the inferno....A deserved winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize."
—Guardian, "Book of the Year: Best Ideas Books"
"A tale of terror from a climate change frontline....Fire Weather includes a lot about the science of fire and weather. But it is also a book about the cognitive dissonance in climate change discourse....Epic."
—Derek Brower, Financial Times
"A tortuously timely examination of the effects of climate change....Vaillant’s book offers vital context for how the world’s forests became more flammable."
—Kate Knibbs, WIRED
"A glimpse into to a climate apocalypse....We aren’t done producing and using fossil fuels, and our world is heating up. Those two trends are inevitably going to bang into each other again, and Vaillant’s book is a useful look at how that might unfold."
—DealBook
“Fire Weather is a gripping book that brings readers to the front lines of a major forest fire, while also exploring the inter-twined history of oil and gas development and the study of climate change. Its lessons should not be soon forgotten.”
—Sarah Boon, Science
"No book feels timelier than John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, a deeply reported narrative of one of Canada’s most destructive recent wildfires....A strongly argued polemic on the culpability of the petrochemical industry in a hotter, increasingly flammable world....Vaillant's description of the fire rips along, an adrenaline soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down."
—Cal Flyn, Air Mail
“Mesmerizing...meticulous and meditative."
—David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times
"Fire Weather is animated by a fascinating history of regional exploitation and illustrative absurdities from a get-rich-quick city burning down."
—Amy Brady, Scientific American
"A gripping yarn."
—David Enrich, The New York Times
"A terrifying examination of the catastrophe being wrought by myopic unwillingness to address the climate crisis, Fire Weather is easily the most important book published last year….The resonance this book has had not just in Canada but around the world shows how on the mark and important it is….Vaillant’s now prize-winning book continues to live in my mind. It is truly vital reading, for everyone; it will leave you shaken and, hopefully, stirred to action."
—Deborah Dundas, The Star
"This acclaimed and award-winning book offers a braided history of the rise of the oil sector and climate science. Set against the backdrop of the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alta., wildfires it is just the right amount of terrifying."
—The Globe and Mail
"Vaillant is an absolute master when it comes to gripping environmental storytelling. His latest book...is no exception. Cinematic and richly written, Fire Weather tackles the science of greenhouse emissions and droughts, the politics of unregulated capitalism, the dangers of oil-sand mining, and how these factors came together in one devastating mega-fire in Alberta."
—Orion Magazine
"A gripping, richly narrated story that reads like a climate thriller in places, its often fast-paced narrative layered with detailed history and fascinating science....In effulgent prose, Vaillant takes us into the heart of this chthonian place and puts us right there, amid the ash and blackened dust—the Pyrocene’s Apocalypse Now....[A] must-read story."
—Jonathan Hahn, Sierra Club
"A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind."
—Panio Gianopoulos, Next Big Idea Club
"An eloquent, comprehensive, and thoroughly referenced look at the catastrophic fire that engulfed large parts of Fort McMurray, Canada, during early May 2016 in what became the nation’s most expensive disaster on record....Vaillant paints his setting and characters in economical yet vivid detail, making the breakneck arrival of the Fort McMurray fire all the more frightening."
—Bob Henson, Yale Climate Connections
“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world, and here he captures the majesty and horror of one of its great disasters—and what made it tragically possible.”
—David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
“In John Vaillant’s vivid anatomy of the apocalyptic Fort McMurray inferno, the histories of humankind’s ever-accelerating consumption of fossil fuel, and of our ever-increasing vulnerability to extreme wildfire, converge with the relentlessness of fate — and the urgency of prophecy.”
—Philip Gourevitch, bestselling author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
"A compulsively readable journey into our fiery times. At the center, Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character—fast, hungry, and evolving to shape the warming decades to come. You might never hear an engine or watch a bonfire the same way again."
—Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast
“The Fort McMurray fire was a vortex of people, ideas, institutions, forest, oil, city, and wind, the quirky and the existential, all mutating under the wanton impress of the Anthropocene Age. Fire Weather offers a compelling account of that tragedy, and a reimagining of a pyric infection that threatens to remake the planet.”
—Stephen Pyne, author of The Pyrocene
"Fire Weather is a towering achievement: an immense work of research, reflection and imagination that will, I believe, come to be seen as a landmark in non-fiction reportage on the Anthropocene, or what Vaillant here calls 'the Petrocene' -- that epoch defined primarily by humanly enhanced combustion. Fire Weather is extraordinary in terms of its scope and range; it also sings and surprises at the level of the sentence. It grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core."
—Robert Macfarlane, best-selling author of Underland
"A graphic...guide to the coming of a new climate, in which forest fires are changing from a seasonal hazard in remote areas to a permanent menace to urban societies....A scathing account of the lies that Canadians have told themselves about their relationship with the natural world."
—Michael Ledger-Lomas, Jacobin
"Fire Weather effectively captures...just how hard it can be to react logically to a crisis caused by natural forces and human induced climate change and carbon emissions....Vaillant’s journalism is best shown through the powerful firsthand accounts of fire, and the conversational science he layers throughout the book."
—Katrya Bolger, Rumpus
"To call Fire Weather a masterpiece doesn’t give it—or John Vaillant—enough credit. Both a scrupulously researched, compellingly written account of the 2016 wildfires that destroyed much of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and a deep dive into the history, politics, and finances that underpin the petroleum industry, Fire Weather is an ecological cri de cœur and easily the most important book of the year.
—Robert J. Wiersema, Quill & Quire
"Searing...Vaillant concedes that we've made Earth a fire planet. His robust and vivid writing, detailed reporting, and urgent concern for the environment make for sizzling reading."
—Booklist
"A gripping account of the May 2016 fire that engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. [Vaillant's] vivid description of the conflagration...is set against the Dantean backdrop of Fort McMurray’s oil-sands mining industry, one of the dirtiest outposts of the fossil fuels sector....Vaillant’s exploration of this material is rich and illuminating, and his prose punchy and cinematic....The result is an engrossing disaster tale with a potent message."
—Publishers Weekly
"There’s a lot of good Elizabeth Kolbert–level popular science writing here along with grittier portraits of the lives of the people who make their living among the tar sands and scrub. Vaillant...asks interesting questions...Perhaps the one most worthy of pondering being a deceptively simple one: 'Is fire alive?' A timely, well-written work of climate change reportage."
—Kirkus
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ORIGIN STORIES
The National Weather Service issues a “Fire Weather Watch” when weather and fuel conditions may lead to rapid or dramatic increases in wildfire activity.
In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.
—Alexander von Humboldt
PROLOGUE
On a hot afternoon in May 2016, five miles outside the young petro-city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, a small wildfire flickered and ventilated, rapidly expanding its territory through a mixed forest that hadn’t seen fire in decades. This fire, farther off than the others, had started out doing what most human-caused wildfires do in their first hours of life: working its way tentatively from the point of ignition through grass, forest duff, and dead leaves—a fire’s equivalent to baby food. These fuels, in combination with the weather, would determine what kind of fire this one was going to be: a creeping, ground-level smolder doomed to smother in the heavy dew of a cool and windless spring night, or something bigger, more durable, and dynamic—a fire that could turn night into day and day into night, that could, unchecked and all-consuming, bend the world to its will.
It was early in the season for wildfires, but crews from the Wildfire Division of Alberta’s Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture were on alert. As soon as smoke was spotted, wildland firefighters were dispatched, supported by a helicopter and water bombers. First responders were shocked by what they saw: by the time a helicopter with a water bucket got over it, the smoke was already black and seething, a sign of unusual intensity. Despite the firefighters’ timely intervention, the fire grew from 4 acres to 150 in two hours. Wildfires usually settle down overnight, as the air cools and the dew falls, but by noon the following day this one had expanded to nearly 2,000 acres. Its rapid growth coincided with a rash of broken temperature records across the North American subarctic that peaked at 90°F on May 3 in a place where temperatures are typically in the 60s. On that day, Tuesday, a smoke- and wind-suppressing inversion lifted, winds whipped up to twenty knots, and a monster leaped across the Athabasca River.
Within hours, Fort McMurray was overtaken by a regional apocalypse that drove serial firestorms through the city from end to end—for days. Entire neighborhoods burned to their foundations beneath a towering pyrocumulus cloud typically found over erupting volcanoes. So huge and energetic was this fire-driven weather system that it generated hurricane-force winds and lightning that ignited still more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire. All afternoon, cell phones and dashcams captured citizens cursing, praying, and weeping as they tried to escape a suddenly annihilating world where fists of heat pounded on the windows, the sky rained fire, and the air came alive in roaring flame. Choices that day were stark and few: there was Now, and there was Never.
A week later, the fire’s toll conjured images of a nuclear blast: there was not just “damage,” there was total obliteration. Trying to articulate what she saw during a tour of the fire’s aftermath, one official said, “You go to a place where there was a house and what do you see on the ground? Nails. Piles and piles of nails.” More than 2,500 homes and other structures were destroyed, and thousands more were damaged; 2,300 square miles of forest were burned. By the time the first photos were released, the fire had already belched 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, much of it from burning cars and houses. The Fort McMurray Fire, destined to become the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, continued to burn, not for days, but for months. It would not be declared fully extinguished until August of the following year.
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.
“No one’s ever seen anything like this,” Fort McMurray’s exhausted and grieving fire chief said on national TV. “The way this thing happened, the way it traveled, the way it behaved—this is rewriting the book.”
1
If a tree burns in the forest and nobody sees it . . .
In Canada, this is more than a philosophical question. Canada contains 10 percent of the world’s forests, vast tracts of which are uninhabited. But “vast” is an ineffective descriptor when it comes to Canada, its forests, or its fires. One way to grasp the magnitude of this country is to get in a car in Great Falls, Montana, and head up I-15 to Sweetgrass, on the Canadian border. Once you’ve crossed into Coutts, Alberta, reset your odometer and point your car north. Then, settle into your seat for a couple of days. With the Rocky Mountains on your immediate left, this route takes you up the western edge of the Prairies, through Lethbridge, Calgary, and Red Deer—wheat and cattle country. Once past the northern metropolis of Edmonton, you will find yourself increasingly alone on the road, surrounded by broad expanses of hardscrabble subarctic prairie—fields frozen solid or half drowned and barely fit for cattle feed.
On the main road, now no wider than a residential street, hamlets with one blinking light and a gas station slide by and not another for fifty miles. To the east and west, gravel range roads run out to the vanishing point, and man-made structures appear more and more as intermittent novelties. Here, a schoolhouse-sized Ukrainian church with its tin-sheathed onion dome stands alone against a windswept loneliness so profound it suggests the Russian steppe. There, a barn collapses asymmetrically beneath the weight of a hundred heavy years, fully half of them spent clenched in the fist of winter, the people long gone. Farther on, a ten-acre lake so startlingly blue that mere reflection, even of Alberta’s sky, seems insufficient to explain it. Somewhere along the way, you will cross an unmarked divide where deer give way to moose, crows give way to ravens, and coyotes give way to wolves. By the time you get to North Star, the wide-open spaces for which Alberta is famous will be filled in by low, mixed forest and bogland that bears a strong resemblance to Siberia. By the time you stop for coffee in a lonely place called Indian Cabins, it will be tomorrow and your odometer will be approaching one thousand miles, but you will still be in Alberta.
Up here, in the landlocked subarctic, things seem to occur in outsized dimensions: lakes can be the size of inland seas and the trout inhabiting them can weigh a hundred pounds; large wild animals, including the continent’s biggest bison, outnumber people. In Wood Buffalo National Park, the second-largest national park in the world, is the world’s largest known beaver dam. Spotted in 2007 with the aid of a satellite, it is more than twice as long as the Hoover Dam, and it appears to be growing. In 2010, an adventurous man from New Jersey named Rob Mark set out to visit it. He was allegedly the first person to do so, and it was hard going. “The foliage is so thick,” Mark told the CBC, “you can’t see very far . . . then it turns into muskeg, which is incredibly difficult to walk on. And then it goes out to complete bog swamp.” It explains why so few outsiders frequent this place in the warmer months, and why winter is the preferred season for cross-country travel. “The mosquitoes,” added Mark, “are absolutely horrific.”
One exception to the general gigantism can be found in the trees, which seldom exceed sixty feet in height or a hundred years in age. These woods, a shifting mix of pine, spruce, aspen, poplar, and birch, are known collectively as the boreal forest, and whatever they may lack in individual size, they compensate for in sheer numbers. Girdling the Northern Hemisphere in a circumpolar band, the boreal forest is the largest terrestrial ecosystem, comprising almost a third of the planet’s total forest area (more than 6 million square miles—larger than all fifty U.S. states). Fully a third of Canada is covered by boreal forest, including half of Alberta. Continuing west, over the Rocky Mountains, through British Columbia, the Yukon, Alaska, and across the Bering Strait into Russia (where it is known as the taiga), the boreal forest stretches all the way to Scandinavia and then, undeterred by the Atlantic Ocean, makes landfall on Iceland before picking up again in Newfoundland and continuing westward to complete the circle, a green wreath crowning the globe.
As densely wooded as the boreal might appear from the roadside, it is, within, something far more amphibious, containing more sources of fresh water than any other biome. In this sense, the circumboreal forest resembles a kind of hemispheric sponge that happens to be covered in trees, their billions of miles of roots weaving the continents together in a subterranean warp and weft. While not as openly fluid as Florida’s Everglades, the boreal’s countless lakes, ponds, bogs, rivers, and creeks serve a similar function of gathering, storing, filtering, and flushing fresh water. Billions of birds, representing hundreds of species, live in and migrate through this ecosystem.
One reason the trees never get very big or very old is because, in spite of all that water, they burn down on a regular basis. They’re designed to. In this way, the circumboreal is truly a phoenix among ecosystems: literally reborn in fire, it must incinerate in order to regenerate, and it does so, in its random patchwork fashion, every fifty to a hundred years. This colossal biome stores as much, if not more, carbon than all tropical forests combined and, when it burns, it goes off like a carbon bomb. In North America, the epicenter for these stratospheric explosions is northern Alberta. Because of this, every town up here, big or small, faces the same dilemma: where the houses end, the forest begins. There are bears, wolves, moose, and even bison in there, but the most dangerous thing hiding in those woods is fire. Under the right conditions, a big boreal fire can come on like the end of the world, roaring and unstoppable. These are fires that can burn thousands of square miles of forest along with everything in it and still be out of control.
Virtually unknown and, at the time, unseen by all but a handful of people, is the Chinchaga Fire of 1950, the largest fire ever recorded in North America. Igniting on the border of British Columbia and Alberta in June of that year, it burned eastward across northern Alberta for more than four months, impacting approximately 4 million acres, or 6,400 square miles, of forest (roughly, the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island, or three times the size of Prince Edward Island). The fire generated a smoke plume so large it came to be known as the Great Smoke Pall of 1950. 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. Prior to the Chinchaga Fire, the last time such effects had been reported on this scale was following the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Carl Sagan was sufficiently impressed by the effects of the Chinchaga Fire to wonder if they might resemble those of a nuclear winter.
Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in cooperation with fire scientists from Canada and Mexico, issues a document called the North American Seasonal Fire Assessment and Outlook, which attempts to predict the likelihood of wildfires across the continent. The Outlook includes maps for each month of fire season, and they are color-coded, with red indicating a likelihood of increased fire activity and green indicating a decrease. Like 2015 before them, the monthly maps for 2016 showed a lot more red than green, and the map for May showed more red than all the others: in addition to large swaths of Mexico, the American Midwest, and all of Hawai’i, red covered much of southern Canada—from the Great Lakes all the way to the Rocky Mountains. It was an enormous area and included most of Alberta’s active petroleum fields. In the middle of that hot zone, in the middle of the forest, sat Fort McMurray.
Fort McMurray is an anomaly in North America. Located six hundred miles north of the U.S. border and six hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, the city is an island of industry in an ocean of trees. Without the lure of petroleum, this part of Alberta would resemble Siberia in even more ways than it already does: sparsely populated; its rivers spun like compass needles toward the Arctic Ocean; its trees low, short-lived, and prone to fire. Here, half a dozen permanent settlements dot a region the size of Kentucky, and only one has a population over 800: in 2016, Fort McMurray and its satellite communities were home to an international population of nearly 90,000 people living in 25,000 houses and buildings ranging from trailer homes and condominiums to McMansions and high-rise concrete apartments. The city’s “urban service area”—the area covered by garbage collection and firefighting services—covers twenty-six square miles of convoluted terrain laced with creeks and ravines that are further fragmented by two major rivers and two tributaries. Together, they surround and entwine the city like the writhing arms of an octopus.
Scattered across the surrounding landscape in semipermanent “man camps” was an additional shadow population of roughly fifty thousand workers whose numbers ebb and flow with the price of crude oil, the pace of development, and routine maintenance cycles at the processing plants. As one longtime resident put it, “We’re just a colony of oil companies.” Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer and the third-largest exporter. Nearly half of all American oil imports—around 4 million barrels per day, come from there—the equivalent of one ultra large crude carrier ship every twenty-four hours. Of this vast quantity, almost 90 percent originates in Fort McMurray.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf (June 6, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1524732850
- ISBN-13 : 978-1524732851
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.64 x 1.34 x 9.56 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Forests & Forestry (Books)
- #2 in Climatology
- #5 in Environmental Science (Books)
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Customers find the book engaging and informative about wildfires. They appreciate the well-researched content and simple explanations of scientific facts. The story is captivating, with personal stories that keep the tension high. Readers praise the writing style as descriptive and enjoyable. The book provides an insightful look at climate change and its history.
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Customers find the book informative and well-researched. They appreciate the simple explanations of scientific facts. The author's knowledge and experience are unique. Readers appreciate the detailed details of specific events while maintaining a broad overview. Overall, they describe the book as educational and enjoyable to read.
"...He is so thorough in his research and analysis that his picture of our future world climate became so overwhelmingly bleak and depressing to me that..." Read more
"The style of writing was refreshing and the facts and technical details were very helpful to understand the whole fire situation" Read more
"...Excellent narration. Much information. A subject everyone should be aware of & how this industry affects the planet...." Read more
"...Thanks to warming weather, the fires start easier and burn hotter, so hot that they can jump large spaces (fire breaks, streams, small rivers)..." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and packed with useful information about wildfires. They describe it as an important nonfiction book written at the breathless pace of a suspense novel. Readers consider it one of the best books of the year and essential reading for adults.
"...It reads like a thriller, and I got to point in it where I simply could not put it down." Read more
"A great read! Read everything and anything he writes. So good and compelling." Read more
"This book was a nailbiter and packed full of useful information about wildfires. One of the better books I've read this year." Read more
"Riveting and compelling, Fire Weather is an unrelenting and scouring glare at the events and energies that have brought us to this point in time..." Read more
Customers find the story gripping and complex. They appreciate the author's ability to make large, complex topics personal by involving them with the lives of the characters. The book is described as an uplifting read despite the horror, written at a breathless pace.
"...It's an incredibly well-written and gripping story about the biggest wildlife in North America as of 2016...." Read more
"...stars only because Vaillant had the honesty and wisdom to acknowledge revirescence in the Epilogue...." Read more
"Intense page turner. Scary to think about what's next if our leaders don't accept the reality of not taming global warming." Read more
"...This book reads like suspense fiction, only it's not. It's real and happening now; the proverbial train wreck in slow motion...." Read more
Customers enjoy the writing style. They find the story gripping and well-written with descriptive prose. The author is described as a good essayist and their new favorite writer.
"...If you're not, you'll still love it. It's an incredibly well-written and gripping story about the biggest wildlife in North America as of 2016...." Read more
"The style of writing was refreshing and the facts and technical details were very helpful to understand the whole fire situation" Read more
"Hello. This text is all-encompassing regarding anything you want to know about the oil industry & its consequences in a specific area of..." Read more
"A good essayist -- an incident possibly not well known outside Canada but getting to be a yearly event...." Read more
Customers find the book informative about climate change and wildfires. It provides a history of CO2-driven climate change that they had not known before.
"...This book is about all wildfires and also about climate change...." Read more
"...the Fort McMurray Fire of 2016 to lay out the science and history of climate change and show the palpable impacts of human action...." Read more
"Very well written, with a history of CO2 driven climate change I had not known of before...." Read more
"One of the best books I've read about the impacts of Climate Change and the future world of fire we've created." Read more
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2024If you're concerned about climate change, you must read this book. If you're not, you'll still love it. It's an incredibly well-written and gripping story about the biggest wildlife in North America as of 2016. It reads like a thriller, and I got to point in it where I simply could not put it down.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2024Shortly after beginning to read John Vaillant’s book, Fire Weather, I realized that I’m the type of person that he took aim at—a Climate Change doubter. At first, when Gore did his show on global warming in "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006, I was a denier (like an atheist). Perhaps I was simply suffering from the Lucretius Problem: it was beyond my experience, so I could not accept it. Show me the data, show me the causal relationship, prove it to me.
In Atmospheric Science 101, I had learned to distinguish weather from climate and learned how enormous and powerful the earth’s atmospheric system is. To me, it’s always seemed beyond our ability to influence weather, much less climate. I remember the failure of rain dances to end droughts and of seeding cyclones and hurricanes to weaken them and mitigate their damage. If we can’t influence weather, how do we dare to dream of influencing climate?
The proponents of Climate Change would cite levels of CO2 that were supposedly in the atmosphere in past eons of geologic time, as if they had collected the benchmark data themselves. How dare they claim any such accuracy? Not only that, but they would also make projections of doom by certain years, and those years would come and go without the predicted catastrophes. Their calculations and warnings were obviously wrong. Why trust such flawed futurists? (Vaillant writes that the data come from analysis of tree rings and ice cores.)
These and other objections prevented me from taking the bait. Then in June 2023, along comes Vaillant and his Fire Weather. Doggone it if he didn’t seem to address, in various chapters, all my objections in substantive terms, citing data and sources and using the fire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada as a literary device to make the case for Climate Change. Newly massive wildfires, he writes, are one of the results or products or consequences or symptoms or manifestations of Climate Change. Hence, his book’s subtitle, “A True Story from a Hotter World.”
He is so thorough in his research and analysis that his picture of our future world climate became so overwhelmingly bleak and depressing to me that, one night, somewhere around Chapter 22 or 23, I simply closed the book and put it down. I wasn’t going to quit; I was just overwhelmed and didn’t want to read anymore. Several days later, I finally picked it up again and finished it.
I can’t say that I am now a true-blue convert and an unquestioning believer, and while I do worry about our future and support general efforts to lessen man-made emissions of CO2, I’m not a frantic activist. I gave the book five stars only because Vaillant had the honesty and wisdom to acknowledge revirescence in the Epilogue. Whenever there is disaster or catastrophe, some life survives, and both Nature and humans respond and recover from it. He cites tulips and amaryllis flowers “pushing through the ash” soon after the Fort McMurray wildfire. He adds, “Earth’s capacity for revirescence is without parallel in the known universe.” He says there have been five extinction periods in earth’s history, yet here we are among the other plants and animals, some of which will become extinct, too.
“It is almost unbearable to consider that our reckoning with industrial CO2 is only in its infancy, and that future generations will bear this burden far more heavily than we do now…In this case, at the planetary level, there is no justice; the punishment will be shared by all, but most severely by the young, the innocent, and the as-yet unborn…In the meantime, life will persist, and so will we.”
That broad, wise perspective, and the caring that is within it, won his book five stars from me.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2024The style of writing was refreshing and the facts and technical details were very helpful to understand the whole fire situation
- Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2024A great read! Read everything and anything he writes. So good and compelling.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2025Hello.
This text is all-encompassing regarding anything you want to know about the oil industry & its consequences in a specific area of Canada.
Extremely in-depth describing an horrific fire that occurred there.
Excellent narration.
Much information.
A subject everyone should be aware of &
how this industry affects the planet.
Thank you to the author for composing this revelatory treatise.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2024Intense page turner. Scary to think about what's next if our leaders don't accept the reality of not taming global warming.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2024The writing is first class and the subject is extremely relevant and important in our time. But I was unable to commit to 9 hours on the subject.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2024A good essayist -- an incident possibly not well known outside Canada but getting to be a yearly event. Right up there with Steven Pyne's better works. Not to mention Norman MacClean, Alston Chase..
Top reviews from other countries
- luis ricardo amaral sallesReviewed in Brazil on June 7, 2024
3.0 out of 5 stars Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World (English Edition)
afgaf
- Larry KryskiReviewed in Canada on January 13, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, Informative and ESSENTIAL Reading
An absolutely essential read for ALL humanity if we are to survive Global Warming as a species. If Homo sapiens are truly an intelligent species, it’s time that we step up and demonstrate that truth. Fire Weather is aggressively and honestly written… exceptionally well researched and cross-referenced. Most importantly, it ties together human history with planetary history with financial history, especially around fossil fuel development and its deleterious consequences. The effects John Vaillant describes around the Fort McMurray fire, bad as they are, are just minor compared to what is coming if we don’t get control of our environment in an intelligent way, and quickly. Survival, not profit, must be the perspective and motive. Greed has gotten the world into this scenario. Goodwill, honesty and hard work coupled with wise decision-making applied sooner than later might reestablish a healthy climate. The lives of billions are on the line. Thank you John Vaillant for such a brilliant work. Your collection of so much pertinent information so skillfully juxtapositioned, will raise the environmental knowledge base to new levels. This may be the most important book written in the last 100+ years — my view as a serious decade-long environmentalist, electrical engineer and publisher.
- Richard P.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Our house is on fire - Greta was right!
This is a mind bending and mind expanding book. It is a big book and not a single word in it is wasted. Beautifully written. I heard the start of it being read on Radio 4 and it sounded interesting. I also heard the end on the radio and thankfully it sounded as though there was a seed of hope in it somewhere. I have just read past the middle so am looking forward to finding the little bit of hope at the end. I need it!
The only glimmers of hope by the middle of the book are that no one has been killed yet by the fire. They achieved a miraculous evacuation which started far too late even although everyone could see the fire coming. No one was able to believe it was going to be so bad even when the fire expert was broadcasting live and watching it approach through the window of the local radio station. Some residents were still dilly dallying around to pick up a few things when houses in their street were exploding in flames. You felt like shouting 'run for it' at the book!
By coincidence, the last book I read was Donald L Miller, Masters of the Air in which he describes the history of the U.S. 8th Airforce in WWII. His descriptions include fire bombing of Hamburg. I was just starting to think that the description of the way the flames were shooting up in Canada was sounding familiar when the author makes a direct comparison with the Hamburg firestorm. You do need to take a bit of time to get your head around the scale of the fire as it effortlessly jumps across a river a full Km across. The units of measurement start to be described in terms of 'Hamburg firestorms' and 'Hiroshima's per hour'. Mind bending units of measurement.
The only thing that seems to have saved everyone in the town was some tremendous discipline and unflappability. If someone had panicked and tried to push to the front as the huge flames were licking the very windscreens of their cars it could have blocked the only escape routes and there seems to only have been two. You have to marvel at their composure but that is not the right word for it, probably selflessness would be better. They all deserve a medal for that.
I think this is an awesome book which leaves you looking round your own house at the furnishings and the trees in the garden and start thinking about them a bit more carefully than you had been doing before you read it.
It also makes you wonder on a much bigger scale when you think that Apollo 8 showed us in 1969 just how beautiful and at the same time vulnerable the earth was. The atmosphere being a very thin blue line before the blackness. The infinite blackness of space in which there are no neat and tidy picture frames.
I was left thinking we all need to do more to fix the carbon mess we are making, indeed one in which the residents of the town were ironically contributing to in giant quantities. I was left energised by the book to try and do a bit more.
To the author - thank you for the inspiration and for that little bit of hope that I heard on Radio 4 is coming at the end of the book, although I have yet to reach it.
- Dr. Jochen Robert MoehrReviewed in Germany on November 19, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books I ever read!
This is an incredibly informed and informative account of climat change. It starts and ends in the context of the Fort McMurray Fire in 2016. But it touches on so much more. And John Vaillant is a master of language bar none.
- Florian RochatReviewed in France on June 22, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Climat: la dernière heure
As of this day, Canada is burning from west to east. How did we get there ? John Vaillant provides the answers by chonicling the Fort McMurray fire, which burned for more than four months and distroyed 2500 homes in 2016, and our long, blind faith in oil and other fossil fuels.
The phenomenon of global warming was dicovered 150 years ago. Scientists, governements ( there were several honest hearings in Congress in the 1950’s) and even petroleum and industrial companies recognized the dangers for life on earth, but everyone failed to act, and then the oil industry never stopped growing.
As the planet keeps warming and more and more places in the world come to experience the same consequences than Canada, citizens everywhere must raise and pressure their gouvernements to fight and win a global war against that war waged on Earth. Their children and grand children lives are at stake, no less.
The author of masterpieces as « The Tiger » and « The Golden Spruce », John Vaillant, with «Fire Weather », takes nature writing into a quite new dimension.