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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. As temperatures rise, I don't have to tell you that wildfire season is growing longer and more intense. If the orange skies in June in New York last Wednesday were alarming, consider also that wildfire season has just begun. Coincidentally, there is a new book that offers a look at our so-called 21st century new abnormal in this respect.

The book is called Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. It comes to us from Vancouver-based journalist and author John-- I'm going to ask him how to say his last name. Forgive me. I should have prepared this before the show. I think it's Vaillant, but he's going to tell the story of this new abnormal in part through the lens of the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada. Now I'm told you pronounce his name Vaillant. John Vaillant joins me now. John, welcome to WNYC. Sorry for the mispronunciation at first and thanks a lot for joining us. Congratulations on the book.

John Vaillant: Oh, thanks. Yes, I'm used to that, Brian, and thanks for persevering.

Brian Lehrer: That's because your name is spelled V-A-I-L-L-A-N-T. Do I have that right?

John Vaillant: I know. Tell me about it. Yes. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: You got to put the I in the right place if you want people to say Vaillant.

John Vaillant: I know. It's immigrant stubbornness, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, a valiant effort to live with that your whole life, and you've probably heard that joke a million times.

John Vaillant: There you go. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: We'll bring this up to the present, and what happened in New York and elsewhere around here last week, but your book is an account of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire as I said in the intro. Take us up to that part of Canada and back to 2016. What was it?

John Vaillant: You all got a glimpse of it just a few days ago. It came down to you. That orange is something that folks out West are painfully familiar with, and now you've been initiated too, I'm sorry to say. Back in 2016, we had another extraordinarily hot, extraordinarily dry May. Fort McMurray is 600 miles north of the US border. It is a huge bitumen mining operation that produces feedstock for the US petroleum industry. Canada is the largest foreign supplier of petroleum to the United States, and 90% of that comes out of Fort McMurray, so it really matters to Americans.

That city, 90,000 people caught on fire on May 3rd, 2016. It started out of a huge boreal fire, came out of the forest. It was 90 degrees that day, 30 degrees above normal. The relative humidity was comparable to Death Valley in Southern California, and that created conditions in the forest that are almost comparable to spraying it with gasoline. The heat being projected by this massive fire was about 1,000 degrees. That projected heat, radiant heat moves at the speed of light, and everything in front of it desiccated and became fire hot instantly. That fire moved right into the city, and so two-story houses that cost $500,000 basically exploded in the flame neighborhood by neighborhood.

Brian Lehrer: You write that a week later, the fire's toll conjured images of a nuclear blast. There was not just damage, there was total obliteration, and the fire, you write, continued to burn not for days, but for months. It would not be declared fully extinguished until August of the following year. How unusual is that?

John Vaillant: The boreal forest, for those who do not know, is the largest biome on Earth. It's that huge ring of trees that goes all the way through Northern Canada, Alaska, all the way through Siberia, through Scandinavia, and back around to Canada. It's the largest biome on Earth, the largest source of fresh water on Earth. It also burns on a regular basis. That's normal, that's part of how it regenerates itself. There's some of the tree species in there that will not regenerate until the pine cones, spruce cones heat to temperatures that only fire can produce. That's all fine, that's all normal.

What isn't normal is when you heat that system up 30 degrees above its normal healthy temperature and reduce the humidity to desert dryness, and then set it on fire. Then what you get is a supercharged situation where the trees basically explode, and it cauterizes the ground, and houses that are in the way, because the modern house is actually made with a shocking number of petroleum products in it, they volatilize, vaporize, and burst into flames. This is a result of what I'm calling 21st-century fire. We really started to see these strange, super intense behaviors around the world starting around 2000.

There was a fire tornado in Canberra, Australia in 2003. Further south in Alberta, the hottest fire ever measured anywhere on Earth ignited in 2001. Another town was overtaken by fire in Alberta in 2011. 500 houses burnt in a few hours and along with another 3,000 square miles of forest on top of that. We are seeing these events not just in the northern hemisphere, but also in the southern hemisphere. You're seeing rainforests catch on fire in Brazil and also in British Columbia, in Chile, in Tasmania, so all is not right, all is not well with our global forests.

Brian Lehrer: Unbelievable when you talk about rainforests because they are, of course, almost by definition expected to be some of the moistest places on Earth, which should in theory be fire-resistant. We'll get to the connection to climate change in a minute. This is, of course, our climate story of the week, and we do have to be responsible when talking about climate and talking about weather and distinguish between the two.

Not everything that happens in the weather even that's extreme and intense is a function of climate change. We'll get to that in the case of this, but I want to circle back to something you just said describing some of those intense fires. You said the trees explode. The trees in some of these cases don't just burn, we can all imagine trees made of wood, obviously, burning in a hot fire, but trees explode?

John Vaillant: This is what I learned. Fire doesn't burn the object, it heats the object up so that it emits flammable hydrocarbons and other gases that will ignite. That's what the heat in fire is for. The fire is trying to feed itself, and how it does it is by heating objects up until they emit gases that the fire can engage with. When I say explode, I don't mean exactly like a bomb, like the tree blowing into pieces. I mean that it's off-gassing so intensely that the entire tree is instantly engaged in fire and burns virtually to nothing.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your phone calls for my Vancouver-based guest John Vaillant, journalist and author. His new book we are discussing is Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. Again, his book documents the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada, but obviously, this is extremely relevant to what we've been experiencing here in recent days here in New York. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

What we did experience here in New York the other day was really unique. I've lived here pretty much my whole life, and I've certainly never seen anything like the orange skies and felt the smoke, smelled the smoke, tasted the smoke in the air even indoors in my apartment. Something new was happening up in Nova Scotia, up in Quebec, or was it just a flukey direction of the wind those several days, and I guess still now to some degree? What happened last week? Put that in the context of your book if you can.

John Vaillant: For sure. What you experienced was smoke from a massive wildfire burning in a place where they are not unheard of, but where this was extreme and unusual. I grew up on the East Coast in the States, and when I think of Nova Scotia, I think of Nova Scotia as the land of fog. I do not think of it as the land of orange fire smoke, and no one else does either. I would say it's new, but I would not say that it's unique. What you are being initiated into, I'm sorry to say, is a new reality of northern hemispheric fire. We've already got it. It's almost like a disease spreading. We've already got it in California. We've already got it in Western Canada. It's really bad in Alaska.

Alberta has burnt more by this date by far than it ever has in the historical record. The West is on fire in a really serious way, so is British Columbia where I live. These are huge provinces, bigger than Texas. What you have now is this same reality of drying forests, desiccating forests, coupled with extreme temperatures and random ignitions coming to your town. That is a trend that is going to continue.

I've spent a lot of time studying this, watching its progression, and the first time we saw orange skies like that on the West Coast in Vancouver where I live was 2015. Very few people had ever seen that before. Now it's a regular thing. We've won the award too for the worst air in the world. You had your turn and you have my condolences, but I cannot say that it's a unique event. It's just the first time.

Brian Lehrer: Stu in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Stu.

Stu: Hi. We know that forests take in carbon, they're the best carbon capture technology there is. When a forest burns down at this level, we're losing the ability to take in carbon, plus carbon is trapped on the floor of the forest, and we don't know how much of it is released but some of it at least will be released, which in turn makes climate change worse, even worse. It's what they call a feedback loop. I'd like your guest to discuss that.

John Vaillant: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

John Vaillant: This is a really sobering development that started again around 2000 with the advent of what I'm calling 21st-century fire, is that these huge forest systems, the Amazon rainforest, the circumboreal forests are shifting from carbon sequesters to carbon emitters. That doesn't mean that they aren't still sequestering carbon, which is what forests naturally do. It's what all growing plants do, but the ratio is shifting. That has to do with beetle kill and bug infestations, it has to do with drought and buy-offs from that, and it also has to do with these massive fires that release basically the equivalent to the emissions of entire country's annual emissions into the atmosphere in a period of days.

Right now, Canada's already a large emitter partly because of its bitumen processing in Alberta, but now these forests have overtaken that. You could say right now Canada's the biggest emitter on earth because so much of it is on fire, and it's a really serious development. It absolutely undermines the sequestering capacity of those forests and of other forests.

Brian Lehrer: Make the climate connection. Can you say this is from climate change? Because, as I said a few minutes ago, I think I always have to be careful doing a climate story of the week, journalists in general who aren't scientists need to be careful not to conflate weather in climate and call every hot day or every hurricane or whatever a function of climate change. To what degree is this a function of climate change?

John Vaillant: Brian, we all have to be careful with that, and I really appreciate that. I think our listeners and you and I can all handle the idea that it's a both and. Big fires are normal in the boreal forest. It's a huge system. None of these trees are long-lived. Most of them die by burning sometime somewhere between 50 and 150 years into their life. This is par for the course to have big fires, but to have big fires that burn through a city for two weeks straight is essentially unheard of.

I think the best analogy I've heard, Brian, is people comparing it to a baseball slugger on steroids. We know the guy can hit, we know the guy can drive it over the fence, but on steroids, he does it a bit more often and a bit further. That's what the advent of higher amounts of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere are enabling. We have a system that already is prone to a certain type of behavior, but because it is warmer, because that heat has an evaporating effect on forest systems, you get an enhanced steroidal energy coming out of those, what would have been more natural temperate fires.

Brian Lehrer: Then in New York baseball, the guy gets injured and then he is out for a month, but that's another show.

John Vaillant: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Even in the context of that joke, are there ways to-- Obviously, we have to address prevention of further climate change. That's the long-term prospect of decarbonizing the economy and all of that that we talk about all the time, but what about the adaptation? If these 21st-century intense fires are going to be with us for a while if that's already baked in now for years or decades to come even as we try to go all-electric and cars and buildings and all of that stuff, are there ways to mitigate the effects of these fires before we stop warming the Earth?

John Vaillant: That's a tricky one. As you say, it's baked in. We've front-loaded the system. We've loaded up the system with CO2 and methane both in the oceans and in the atmosphere. We have to live with that for probably the rest of our lives. We're going to be dealing with big fires for the rest of our lives, and at the same time, we're going to have to learn how to live with them and understand them. One of the reasons you've had these tragedies and catastrophes, particularly out West but also in Portugal, in Spain, Greece, Chile, there've been really terrible fatalities as a result of these fires, is because we are still living in the 20th century in terms of the way we build and also in terms of the way we fight fire.

What happened in the second half of the 20th century is millions of us decided we wanted to go back to the woods again and build our houses right on the edge of the forest or in the forest. That is now a place that the insurance companies in California are refusing to insure. These fires are literally changing the way insurance works, and that in turn is going to change where we build, how we build, and what we build out of.

That's what really needs to change is our mindset because we were lulled into a false sense of security all through the second half of the 20th century as we expanded into suburbs, and we've got the running trail outback for mom, and we've got the cul-de-sac out front for junior to ride his scooter on and lovely forests everywhere, but those forests are now going feral. Houses, the modern house is loaded with explosive petroleum products. the way those houses burned and Fort McMurray was absolutely shocking. Two-story houses burned to the ground in five minutes.

Brian Lehrer: Kylie in Ridgewood, that's the Jersey Ridgewood, not the Queens one. Hi, Kylie, you're on WNYC.

Kylie: Hey. I apologize because the story's from 2019 which is a pre-pandemic lifetime ago but I found the story from the CBC that the forests in Canada are partially maintained and controlled with a chemical called glyphosate, which is more commonly known as Roundup. I wondered if your guest could talk about whether or not that chemical is still sprayed on Canadian forests, and if so, was that part of the air quality concern for the orange cloud that we experienced last week in the New York City area?

Brian Lehrer: Do you know, John?

John Vaillant: Yes, I know some about it. I'm not an expert in it. I do know that glyphosate, I think I'm saying it correctly, is still sprayed. It's used to kill deciduous trees to favor coniferous trees in tree farms. It's a crime against nature really, it shouldn't be done. What we have found is that tree farms, these are monocultural grows where you're growing only one type of tree, they're definitely more prone to fire, and it's just not what nature intended.

It may be what the market likes, but it's not what nature intended, and nature is communicating very strenuously with us right now about ways that we are transgressing. As far as the orange cloud, that was not clouds of Roundup washing over the people of the Eastern seaboard. I really want to reassure you about that. I'm not going to say that there weren't toxins in there or traces of Roundup in there.

I'm not qualified to say that, but the bulk of what you were seeing is carbon, is really large pieces of carbon, and the way light refracts through opaque or cloudy substances depends, it changes color depending on the size of the particle. You can tell it's pretty large particles when it starts going into orange like that. What you're basically seeing is tiny, but almost visible pieces of tree floating through the air. That's most of what you got, and it's not good for you at all, was carbon and bits and pieces of burnt tree.

Brian Lehrer: Amy in Ocean County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Amy.

Amy: Hi, Brian. Hi, John.

John Vaillant: Hi.

Amy: I was telling your screener that we are actually used to the smell of smoke in summer and late fall, I guess, because we have what we call prescribed burns or back burning in the pinelands here. Actually, there's a website that the forestry service or the Forest Fire Service puts out. It's called Fire Aware because we're used to that smell. They do back burning, they dig ditches and they burn trenches, and so it prevents devastation and the devastating fires that your guest John is speaking about. We're just basically used to that smell, and it's prevented a forest fire.

We had one back in the early '90s, and I think that was the best-case scenario I can give, but I think that's why California had such massive fires because they aren't doing prescribed burns, and that's why New Jersey's been saved. The Brendan Byrne and a few other state forests had a few hundreds of acres burnt, but they can control it because of the prescribed burns. We see some ashes falling and stuff. I don't know if your guest can comment on that, but that's all I could say about that. Thank you for this. It's very interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Amy, thanks for-- Thank you for reporting in on what's going on in that part of Jersey. A lesson to be learned there. I think these are larger areas of Canada than we're talking about in the case of South Jersey, but maybe there's a controlled burn or some of the other techniques that she was describing there specifically that can be applied.

John Vaillant: I'm glad you brought up prescribed burns because it's a really good practice and I'm really glad it's being done where you live. I can confirm that prescribed burns are also done in California, but it's an enormous state with a lot of wilderness. It's hard to do it in a consistent way across a state that big. Even a state the size of New Jersey, funding is an issue, and also, there's a lot of pushback when there's a lot of smoke in the air. That's one of the reasons that fire suppression became so effective in the second half of the 20th century is people didn't like the smoke.

There used to be a lot more smoke. There used to be a lot more burning in the early 20th century, and all through the 19th and 18th centuries. There were fires going all the time, accidental, intentional. What we've really lost sight of and really need to reconnect with is the native tradition of seasonal burning, spring burnings. It was really a kind of forest house cleaning. Every spring, fires would be lit all over the continent where there were settlements by Indigenous people who were clearing out the dead brush, the dead grass, the fallen leaves. It created a situation where you didn't get these catastrophic buildups.

The thing about the boreal forest is its wilderness on a scale that most Americans aren't familiar with. It's really hundreds and hundreds of miles. It's very sparsely inhabited, so to go in there and do a prescribed burn doesn't really make sense because a lot of those forests burn naturally anyway. They're hit by lightning and they might burn and no one might even see the evidence of it because it is literally that remote. What we're seeing here are fires like that, but starting in many places at once and in places where we're really not used to it, such as Nova Scotia. We have the combination of a quantity of large fires and in areas that are less familiar to us because it is now hotter and drier.

It's just these tweaks of the system. I think about it in terms of these invisible thresholds that I think we're crossing a lot in the past 20 years or so without quite being aware of it, but we're seeing these subtle changes, fire where we didn't used to see it, smoke where we weren't so used to seeing it, temperatures that we're not familiar with. That tweaks the system in all these different ways.

A previous caller was talking about feedback loops. That's absolutely a factor. We don't know what all of those feedback loops are or all the myriad ways that they influence each other, and that's what climate change is in a way. Almost by definition, it's going to be a discovery of these new changes and new extremes, and we're going to be caught on the back foot a lot.

Brian Lehrer: Folks, that's our climate story of the week with journalist and author John Vaillant, even though the I on his name is on the wrong side of the Ls, author of the new book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. How timely and poignant that this book happened to come out right now. Kind of creepy almost, but you can't say he didn't tell us. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. John, thank you so much,

John Vaillant: Brian, really a pleasure to speak with you and with your listeners.

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