Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

The Prologue provides an overview of the 2016 fire that is the subject of the book. In early May, a small wildfire quickly spread through a part of the boreal forest in Alberta, Canada, that hadn’t experienced a fire in decades. Although firefighters responded quickly, the fire grew from four acres to 2,000 in two days, raging so fiercely that it generated its own weather system, including strong winds and lightning that ignited more fires. The fire destroyed multiple neighborhoods in Fort McMurray and spurred the same-day evacuation of almost 100,000 people.

Wildfires are often mitigated by weather, but climate change and hotter temperatures exacerbated this “new kind of fire” (5), which behaved in unpredictable and frightening ways. However, the fire also destroyed the epicenter of Canada’s oil industry, an industry that directly contributes to climate change, which in turn feeds the fires that threaten its existence.

Canada, an immense country spanning half the North American continent, contains 10% of the world’s forests. These “boreal” (meaning northern) forests contain several different kinds of trees, including spruce, pine, poplar, aspen, and birch, and are uniquely vulnerable to forest fires because of the amount of flammable carbon they contain.