For weeks now, red flag warnings from the National Weather Service indicating a high risk of wildfires have been popping up all over the United States — from the Mexican border to the Great Lakes and the Florida Panhandle. Similar warnings are appearing north of the Canadian border. On February 20, the province of Alberta, a Texas-sized oil state above Montana, declared the official start of the fire season. That was almost two weeks earlier than last year and six weeks earlier than twenty years ago. Alberta is in the heart of Canada, a place famous for its cold and snow, and yet some 50 wildfires are burning in this province. In neighboring British Columbia, where I live, there are nearly 100 active fires, a number of which stem from last year’s legendary fire season (the worst in Canadian history) linked to low snowpack and above-average winter temperatures.
It is alarming to see these fires and warnings when it is supposedly the middle of winter, but the fire, as annoying and dangerous as it is, is only a symptom. What is happening in North America is not a regional aberration; it’s part of a global change, what climate scientists call a phase change. Last year, virtually every indicator of planetary distress crossed into uncharted territory: sea surface temperature, air temperature, polar ice loss, fire intensity – it doesn’t matter, it’s out of the ordinary . It was 72 degrees Fahrenheit in Wisconsin on Tuesday and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Paraguay; large parts of the North Pacific and South Atlantic are more than five degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at the London School of Economics, summed up the situation for the BBC in July: “I don’t know of a similar period where everyone parts of the climate system were in record or abnormal territory. And with these extremes comes mortality: more than 130 souls perished last month in wildfires outside Valparaiso, Chile – more than died in the Maui fire last August or in the Paradise, California, fire in 2018 – making it the deadliest in the world since Black Saturday in Australia caught fire in 2009.
Historically, it was humans who outstripped the natural world. From arrowheads to artificial intelligence, our species has steadily progressed faster than geologic time. But today, geologic time – especially atmospheric time and oceanic time – moves as fast as we do, in some cases faster – faster than technology, faster than history. The world we thought we knew is changing beneath our feet because we have changed it.
Exxon’s own scientists predicted these fossil fuel-induced anthropogenic changes about half a century ago, but we are still not ready for them, nor are most of our fellow human beings. If I’ve learned anything from writing about wildfires, it’s that this hotter, less stable world is not the new normal. We are entering an incognita climate, the unknown climate. Here are dragons, and some of them are fires 20 miles wide.