[00:09:02] Host: Right. I was going to say hurricanes in the south, the same as we're getting here in the north and the west, and the east apparently, with the fires.

[00:09:14] John: Yes. This sense of exceptionalism that I think we all have, partly based on our experience and I think partly just as kind of a defense mechanism that we carry with us, and I experienced that, too. I live in British Columbia. There are big fires there. There always have been. A number of the forest systems in Canada, especially in the north, are naturally flammable. That's a part of their life cycle. In fact, there are trees that will not reproduce unless the cones are actually heated to temperatures beyond what's achievable from sunlight alone. They're serotinous cones opened by fire. That said, a lot of us felt somewhat comfortable, I'm sorry to say, with the idea that, "Well, Southern California has terrible fires. Australia has really terrible fires. They lose a lot of structure down there. Those are really devastating things, but that's not going to happen to us because we live in a rainforest."

Well, we do live in a rainforest, but that rainforest is heating up and drying out, so now we are having fires in Canada at high latitudes that no one's seen before that are burning with an intensity that doesn't really exist in the historical record. This is what climate change does, is it produces results that we aren't anticipating, so there's a failure of imagination. You hear these scientists saying, "Well, it's going to be worth this, it's going to be worth that," and you go, "Yes, yes, sure. I know my environment," but we don't, actually, because we have created a new environment, and we are being introduced to it in violent and painful ways.

[00:10:57] Host: The scientists are talking about, "You're getting years," right? "You're looking at years down the line. This is going to increase," but we also have scientists that are saying, "This year, these are the regions where fire may occur." We just had a red flag warning before this Malibu fire. You wrote about North American Seasonal Fire Assessment and Outlook to be able to predict. Even in this region of Fort McMurray, there were predictions that this was going to happen.

[00:11:35] John: I do want to clarify that the predictive forecasts and the meteorology around these fires is generally excellent, excellent to impeccable, and that was the case with the Fort McMurray Fire. It was predicted six months out because there was an El Nino. There had been low snowpack for a couple of years, been unseasonably hot, unseasonably dry. The north was already in a state of drought, already heightened flammability, and then they also saw that we were going to be having quite a hot summer that 2016, and then a week out, they were predicting extreme fire conditions.

They did their part. That was not where the breakdown was. The breakdown was in the interpretation of the data, which is, "Yes, May is always dry in Alberta. It's always fiery," and there have been some colossal really epic, bigger-than-California fires in Alberta and British Columbia. It is a huge landscape. A 2,000-square-mile fire literally might not even make the news if it's far north enough.

That's the scale we're talking about. That's all possible, and everybody knew that, but it was the speed and intensity, and that's what you're experiencing now around Malibu, that the speed of those flames, you've got 60-mile-an-hour winds. The fire growth is insane. The ember cast is insane. The humidity is desperately low, so it's those factors, those little tweaks. "Yes, we always have fires at this time of year." That's true, but you don't have it when it's 7% humidity, and maybe 110.

I don't think it's that hot right now, but for the Redding Fire in 2018 that caused the first bonafide fire tornado, EF-3 tornado, in Northern Hemispheric history known to humans, I think it was 100 degrees at 8:00 PM, and the relative humidity was right around 10 or 9, really frighteningly low.

For us, it's like, "Wow, it's really hot. Wow, it's really dry, but we're used to that," but fire notices those little differences. Water freezes at 30 degrees or 32 degrees; it does not freeze at 34 degrees. Well, I'm quite sure that there are thresholds for fire behavior that you cross. At certain levels of humidity and certain levels of temperature, fire becomes able to do, move, expand at different rates with different intensities, and I'd love to know more about that.

[00:14:29] Host: Yes, you just mentioned, and you wrote about this as well, that these temperature changes are not just affecting the heat of the day, but it's the diurnal shift that is not as drastic as it used to be. Then if your night is not as cool as it needs to be, then you're not getting that break after the fire is ignited.

[00:14:59] John: That's right. There are a lot of elephants in the room that we're not seeing, so we notice the high temperature. "Oh, we broke a record," and that's real, and that's something we should pay attention to, but we don't often notice that we broke a humidity record, too, in terms of low humidity. What we also don't look at is the fact that these nighttime temperatures aren't going nearly as low as they used to, and that makes a difference.

That means that fires which used to settle down at night, they wouldn't go out, but they wouldn't advance or expand with the same aggression that they would in the daytime. Now fires are expanding aggressively at night because it is so warm. It simply doesn't cool down. You don't get the same dewfall. We saw this in Fort McMurray at 57 degrees of latitude, which is basically up by Alaska, where the fire was raging all night long, day and night and day and night and day and night, for almost a week inside the city, and then expanding for, again, a couple of thousand square miles beyond it.

We're seeing that now, I'm sure, in Franklin. We saw it in the Hermit Peak Fire in New Mexico a couple of years ago. Night burning made the news then, but that's a real factor, and you've seen this with Cal Fire's response. They're doing night missions now. They're using night vision goggles and flying helicopters and water bombers at night, which it's already dangerous enough, and this adds another risk factor. They're responding to these changing conditions.

[00:16:46] Host: You had talked about the boreal forest and the nature of a lot of these trees, that it is the fire that allows them to reproduce, for the cones to open and to seed, that it is a natural part of the cycle to destroy and create, but then we have decided to put our homes in the middle of this, and I'd never heard of the WUI or the Wildland-Urban Interface, but you wrote that a third of the American homes are WUI homes and half of Canadian homes. Give us a little more understanding of what that means and why it's so detrimental, for these fires.

[00:17:37] John: Well, scientists are thinking that the 20th century was actually a relatively cool and wet period compared to what's coming, and suburbia and changing life habits and work habits of Americans and Canadians led to this rediscovery of the forest, and as people, as highways got better, cars got better, gas stayed cheap, people became wealthier, you could buy a second home, and people were returning to the forest after learning the hard way through the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, that that houses in the woods often burn down.

That's why when you look at villages in Europe, there's a cluster of houses, and it's surrounded by fields, and that makes sense. It's easier to get to your acreage. It's easier to graze your animals, but also, these are natural fire breaks, and your woodlot would often be quite a ways outside of town, so this was an organic development, but some of it was through hard-lived experience.

Stephen Pyne, the éminence grise, the greatest living writer about fire that we know of in the States has written about this, too. He said watching homes burn in the forest, he said it's like watching polio come back. He said we vaccinated for this. We learned the hard way how to build our communities so that they wouldn't burn in forest fires, and now because fire suppression has gotten so good, especially through the second half of the 20th century, post-war, people lost their fear of it. They lost their respect for it.

Now you have all this new fuel in the forest in the form of houses, and you have rising temperatures. You have increasing drought. You have beetle kill. You actually have a more flammable situation, and here are all these homes that are now in the way that make wonderful fuel. It's a seamless transition for a wildfire coming out of the forest into the built environment, partly because so much of the modern home is actually petroleum-based. Petroleum, we think of it as energy. We think of it as, again, a precursor for fabric and rubber and all kinds of stuff, but really it is super flammable. At its base, it's made to burn. That's why we take it out of the ground. You can turn it into a tar shingle. You can turn it into vinyl siding. You can turn it into a polyester coating for your sofa cushion, but at its base, it is super volatile. You heat that stuff up, it burns like a refinery fire.

[00:20:28] Host: Talk about the 2005 Underwriters Laboratories experiment because that is exactly what you're discussing, this concept of flashover.

[00:20:38] John: Everybody who is thinking of building a home who's in the trades should watch that. It's just a comparative video. Anybody can watch it on YouTube. Look at Underwriters Laboratory legacy furnishings or living room fire experiment. Anyone can find this. It's only three minutes. That's what's so terrifying about it. They take two rooms, firefighters.

They took two 12-by-12 rooms and created living rooms in them, one in the legacy format, which is kind of Grandma's house, so the furniture is made of wood. The carpet's made of wool. The sofa is upholstered with cotton and maybe stuffed with horse hair or kapok or cotton batting or something like that. These are organic products. Then they make a modern living room, which has a laminate floor, nylon rugs, nylon curtains, polyurethane stuffing in the sofa, all this kind of thing.

They tip a candle over on the sofa in each room, and they stand back. Very quickly, the fire starts. The sofas start to burn, but very quickly in the modern room, the petroleum-based room, the smoke starts to get really black. That gets worse and worse. Up until about two and a half minutes, you could probably put the fire out with a bucket of water or a small fire extinguisher.

Then right around 3 minutes in the modern room, the petroleum room, the whole sofa is burning, the curtain behind it is burning, and then at 3 minutes and 20 seconds, the whole room bursts into flame. It explodes. It explodes because the heat from that fire is causing all the other petroleum products around it, the rug, the rest of the cushions, the laminated furniture, to off gas, to volatilize.

We can't see the gases, but the fire can sense them, and that's fuel for the fire. There's this moment when this critical mass of petroleum vapor has built up in the room, and then it explodes, and then you have flashover. Meanwhile, in the legacy room, it's still just a sofa fire. I don't recommend this, but you and your six-year-old kid with a bucket of water could put the fire out. You could still control it.

The legacy room, the old-fashioned room, does not burn. It takes 25 minutes before it's burning with the same intensity achieved in 3 minutes and 20 seconds in the petroleum-based room. Frankly, that's the room most of us live in and sleep in, is a petroleum-based room.

[00:23:28] Host: This is why you're seeing these houses go up in five minutes like you mentioned in the Fort McMurray Fire.

[00:23:35] John: That's a real factor. The building industry hasn't reckoned with that. I think the insurance industry is in crisis right now, and no one knows that better than Californians trying to get insurance. There's a reckoning, and it's going to take a while to percolate through, and it's going to require some commitment from citizens and politicians. Given the new administration, I wouldn't look for too much help from Washington, but it's going to have to be regional. It's going to have to be cities and states who look after our safety.

[00:24:11] Host: With homes going up in five minutes, I'm from Napa, and I drove through Santa Rosa after the Tubbs Fire, and I saw the aftermath of these neighborhoods that are gone. We can't fathom destruction like that. If we haven't lived through a war or where there are massive bombings, seeing something like that doesn't connect with our brain. You wrote about, and this comes up a lot in your book, The Lucretius Problem. Would you talk about that and explain because I'm so fascinated by this concept now?

[00:24:59] John: Yes. It goes back to that failure of imagination and our tendency, which is really rational, to base future actions on past experience. What else do you have? You have your lived experience. Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan and some other kind of business-related books, he summed up the Lucretius problem as the fool believes the tallest mountain in the world is the one he himself has seen.

In other words, we're a bit blinkered by our own experience. It's a little bit like doing your own research. It's like, "Well, I know. I looked it up. I saw it. I saw that. I saw one of those." You may have seen the Rocky Mountains, and those are massive mountains, but if you haven't seen the Himalayas, it's hard to believe that there are mountains twice as tall as the Rockies.

Likewise, if you are used to fires from the '90s in your region, and then you get a 21st-century fire, it's going to blow your mind. It is going to be hard to process because it is a real violation on the status quo that we all depend on. We all nurture a status quo of one kind or another, based on our lived experience. What nature is basically warning us to do is we need to get out of that box and imagine scenarios that have happened elsewhere on Earth but could now happen where we live.

In British Columbia, we have to imagine Malibu fires in the Okanagan Valley, which you may have never heard of. It's the Napa of Canada. It's beautiful. Wines are made there. It's very hot and dry, and it's getting hammered by fire almost every summer. The temperature records up there are getting shattered every summer. It's, needless to say, very tough on the grapes. It's also really tough on people and their property.

[00:27:04] Host: I'm also fascinated, you mentioned this with the Carr Fire in Redding, but how fire is able to create its own weather, it creates jet streams of wind. It creates the pyrocumulonimbus clouds, it creates lightning, and these fire tornadoes that it's not enough just to battle the fire; you have to battle the weather the fire is creating.

[00:27:30] John: Yes. These are really unidentifiable fires, and firefighters are learning this the hard way. It is these systems. A pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud system is literally a stratospheric entity. These things are 45,000 feet tall. They turn like hurricanes turn. They generate their own wind. This is all from the fire energy. This is not it mixing with a nearby storm.

It's informed by high-pressure systems and inflow winds and things like that. They happen often on uneven terrain. They build themselves from the energy and the heat in the fire. Once they get going, they can actually generate their own lightning. Think of famous photos and historic paintings of volcanic plumes with lightning in them and things like-- Think of art you've seen about Krakatoa or something like that until around the late '90s, around 2000, fire scientists thought that was the only place that could happen, is over a volcano.

Then right around 2000, they started seeing wildfires that were behaving like volcanic clouds. They're generating lightning, which means they can start new fires 20 miles away from the center of the fire that's generating the pyroCb, as they're called. They produce black hail because all the water, the fire hose water will not go to the houses in a system like this. There's so much energy that it evaporates all the water long before it touches the object you're trying to douse.

It evaporates, gets whipped up the fire column, and around 30,000 feet, it coalesces around bits of burnt house and tree, turns into black hail, and comes back to Earth. These are literally scenes from the Bible. You can find scenes like this in the Old Testament in tales of epic destruction. There were 142 pyrocumulonimbus firestorms in this country of Canada in 2023 alone.

[00:29:49] Host: Jeez.

[00:29:50] John: That has never happened in the history of Homo sapiens.

[00:29:54] Host: We're in a cycle now, too, because as you mentioned before, climate change or the increase, I don't know if we even talked about CO2, that's a whole other conversation. Our climate change, you wrote about the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere reflecting more heat to the Earth, heating up the Earth, and we've known about this for over 100 years. These fires are creating exponential amounts of more CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, which is going to heat up, which is going to lead to more fires, which is going to-- It's this circle that will just keep spinning.

[00:30:42] John: Yes, we're in a feedback loop. I'm really sorry to say that. The Arctic is warming in a way that is also releasing a lot of CO2 and methane that was held by frozen tundra. It's not frozen anymore, so it's releasing it, and there are a lot more fires. In the Arctic, it's really hard to-- What do you even burn in the Arctic? Well, tundra, it turns out it burns if it gets hot enough, and now it's getting hot enough.

We're in a colossal regime change, and everybody, I don't care if you're 85 years old, everyone alive is going to see it. That's how fast it's coming. There have been lots of predictions about these milestones. "We'll be hitting this at 2035. We'll be hitting this at 2050, this at 2100." Based on what I've seen, I'm not a scientist; I'm a journalist who reads a lot and also looks at data and has a pretty good imagination.

If these have happened, then we can probably pretty safely assume this is going to happen. What we've seen is we are hitting all the markers sooner than anybody thought we would. Scientists have to be disciplined. They have to be conservative. No one has yet the technology or the knowledge to understand all the feedback loops that are informing each other.

There's this whole kind of tangle of different systemic changes, including warming oceans warms the air, and warming air causes more water to evaporate, so you're having heavier rain in some areas and more drought in other areas, and that is moving species around. There's all these knock-on effects. This is an incredibly complex system that we are now messing with.

It really is like, "Well, let's take the television apart and see what we can do here." That might've been fun to do back in the '50s, but now, it's creating something, it's breaking something, and it probably will not repair itself in our lifetime. The number one task for humans is to reduce their emissions, so at least to lessen the damage. It's a little bit like, one of my uncles was an internist, and his feeling about long-term smokers was it is never too late to stop.

You could be 75 years old, and as long as you're not on a gurney with terminal emphysema, if you stop smoking, you are improving your chances for a better life in the future, even though you've done this damage. There is no time like the present. There's really no time like yesterday to reduce our emissions. That's a tough sell in a world driven by profit that is leveraged against the future, that's borrowing against the future. That's what fossil fuels are. These are ancient energies that we are burning against the future, so the math doesn't work.

[00:34:01] Host: Yes, and there is no preventing these occurrences, whether it's the fire or these weather occurrences. People will put the blame on PG&E or Edison, but the strength, the weather, the climate, all of it is in place that we can mitigate the damage, and then like you said, try, in the long run, to eliminate what we are doing to the planet itself. There's really no way of preventing these horrific fires from happening.

[00:34:43] John: There's a lot of low-hanging fruit, Jon, that we can pick to reduce risk and damage. We're Homo sapiens. We're capable of complex thought. We can multitask. We can decarbonize like our lives depend on it at the same time that we build houses with metal roofs or remove flammable bushes from outside our window to the way we derive our energy. There's an enormous amount we can do.

I think in most communities, we can reduce the risk of losing our homes by double-digit percentages quite easily. I know Cal Fire has a program like this, and Canada does in some provinces, too, called FireSmart is what it's called up in Canada, where firefighters will come to your community, your cul-de-sac, your backyard, and say, "Okay, let's look at this in terms of fire risk."

You look at the wooden deck. You look at if you have firewood, where you've got that stacked. We'll look at that big conifer tree that's right next to your house that is going to burn like crazy if it is 100 degrees and dry. You might want to cut that down. You might want to create a little bit of a zone of defense. Californians are really dialed into that. We have a lot to learn from Californians who have been dealing with this for decades and have really modeled some really intelligent approaches that have saved lives and saved property. You all are the leaders.

There's some great firefighters in Australia. There's some great firefighters in Western Canada, but I would say the real brain trust and the leading edge of fire response and climate-based fire response was probably in California. That includes partnering with native groups, with First Nations, as we refer to them in Canada, Indigenous People who have a history of putting fire on the land in safe ways. Prescribed burns are increasingly one of the tools that firefighters are using to protect communities and landscapes in general.

Before colonization, before settlement, Indigenous People were burning the land on a regular basis. They had lots of small, low-intensity fires, instead of these huge ragers that are partly drought and partly 100 years of fuel buildup, and then beetle kill, and this and that complicates things, too. What we're seeing now, I know there's been a couple of wonderful podcasts and other shows about partnerships between fire scientists and wildland firefighters and Indigenous burners getting together on a landscape that they all know in different ways and putting their heads together and putting some fire back on there.

That is a really hopeful development. That can save lives, it can help heal the landscape, and get us back to a balance. That's what these fires are expressions of, is a world out of balance.

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[00:38:19] Host: We'd like to thank John Vaillant and Penguin Random House. The Fire Problem is produced by Past Forward and Chapman University. To learn more about these issues, visit us at pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.

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