Le Monde, very reputed French newspaper (NYtimes equivalent for France perhaps) says that it’s not the first time this cloud is seen in France [1]: (translation mine)
> “What is happening right now is extremely, extremely unusual. Seeing a cloud this massive and reaching such an altitude above a wildfire is exceptionally rare,” the researcher explains.
“During the Pedrógão fire [which claimed around 60 lives in Portugal in 2017], there were two episodes of fire-induced thunderstorms. Here, we are already at eight or ten, and the forecast is not encouraging at all.”
Although unprecedented in both intensity and frequency, the phenomenon has been observed in France before, according to the expert: during the Fontainebleau wildfire (Seine-et-Marne) in July, the Ribaute fire (Aude) in 2025, and the Générac fire (Gard) in 2019.
It seems that this cloud and the attached storms have been seen before, even recently, in France, but this one is one of a kind for intensity, by far.
For context on why this region is burning so easily: the Landes and Médoc are huge, artificial pine forests created in the 19th century under Napoleon III to drain and reclaim what was considered an inhospitable wetland, where shepherds famously walked around on stilts. Pine resin and needle litter makes it exceptionally flammable, and being an uninterrupted monoculture on flat land it lacks natural barriers to stop the fire from advancing.
The main reason the forest is burning is global warming. There were 3 punishing heatwaves before the fire, it was just a matter of time.
A part of the Fontainebleau forest, much more north, no pine trees, went in smoke earlier. Forests are burning near Madrid.
It may make some people feel better to think that it is an isolated, local problem, but unfortunately global warming is the main culprit and we at least need to acknowledge it.
I don't think the person you're responding to was trying to deny global warming being a factor. I think they're just explaining why this fire is so bad compared to other fires we have seen in France before.
I know global warming plays a major role in this, but I still found it interesting to know why this fire seems so bad.
You may be absolutely right about the OP, I cannot know.
Still, I believe it is important to highlight the elephant in the room first.
For example to your point: "I still found it interesting to kmow why this fire seems so bad compared to [...] before", I think it is important to state: "because global warming is getting worse over time". Not because pine trees, which have been around for a long time, and have never burned so badly.
[Answering here to @applepearlime bc limits of my green acct]
They do have firebreaks, paths for trucks to go in many places [1]. I've seen many.
But you could argue they're not wide enough to actually break fire. And when I see videos of how tall and wide the flames are, I have no idea how wide they should be... It's a managed forest though, definitely looked after because economics interests (wood, tourism).
I come from the Mediterranean region and locally we know many explanations for that.
Many of those pine forests are relatively new. Pine trees burn frequently, around every 20-30 years. In the past they used to be mixed with many other original trees, but during the recent century reforestation, pines were planted as the single tree species, making fires more prone to happen and more easily to spread.
In the past, way more population lived next to the forests, where lumber used to be part of their income, so trees were frequently cut, forests maintained and shepherds would bring their sheep to feed from forest lower plants. All of that is gone.
In the past, locals used to be able to build firewalls, clean forests and fight fire with fire (provoking small controlled wildfires to stop the big ones). Green policies forbid those actions nowadays.
Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%.
I love how four comments down there is someone posting:
"You’re both right.
However OPs post is more useful than yours.
By now, everyone knows about climate change. But I assume most didn’t know the fact about the pine trees in this area.
Nowadays it’s much more about how we deal with climate change and not so much about the fact that there is human made climate change"
Thank you for proving that there are, in fact, still climate change deniers even here on hacker news.
I'm assuming you're a climate change denier. You don't say so outright, but "Green policies forbid those actions nowadays" is a bit of a dogwhistle that you oppose environmental protection regulations broadly (not merely overzealous ones that have side-effects that make combating certain types of wildfires harder in certain situations), and:
"Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%."
Well... that's pretty close to just coming out and saying you don't believe in climate science.
Decades ago i was a big wall rock climber. We would often see old photos of mountains and cliffs and remark "where are the trees?" Areas we knew to be covered in forrest were bare only a century ago. This wasnt logging (climbing areas are too rugged to be logged bare.) There were just fewer trees. The general assumption was CO2. The combination of longer growing seasons and more plant food (co2) may mean there are simply more trees.
It's not, but the original comment never claimed that it was.
There have been 4 or 5 pretty massive wildfires in France that I can remember in the last 5 years, but this is the first time they've had to deal with pyrocumulonimbus caused by a wildfire. Global warming was likely a contributing factor for all of those fires, but global warming alone doesn't explain why this one is different. The first comment about the pine isn't answering "why is this happening now?", it answers the question, "why is this fire so much worse?"
Not true, I have seen people deny it on HN recently.
And looking at other debates, yes it is necessary to reiterate the primary cause. Because centrists will absolutely use the lack of that reiteration to do the "well actually it is the pine trees" in two days.
There’s also a significant amount of pretty sudden local warning in the North Atlantic region because of the sudden removal of sulphur emissions from ships a few years ago (thanks, IMO…).
Well, Denmark is I believe a country very big on being seen as "environmentally friendly" and they thin trees, generally to restore habitats and increase diversity of species. What gives?
Don't put this on the environmentalists when the simple explanation isn't short term cost effective to do this. If you need to put some big blanket blame, then blame capitalism. If nothing else because it has so far stopped all effective measure to stop the climate crisis.
And in other areas, e.g. Canada, "cost prohibitive" is underselling the magnitude of the logistical task of doing anything to the overwhelming majority of boreal forests. There's just so much forest, and no way to access most of it, that it's effectively impossible to do any forest management or anything about most fires. (Most fires don't come near population centres, so nothing need be done about them.)
And? Capitalism is the current system, and the one that is actively thwarting efforts to mitigate the disaster. I don't see how the existence of other systems that would be equally bad or worse is relevant.
The water was likely redirected for agricultural purposes and the farmers won't/can't surrender it on top of drought, if it's anything like the US. Would be real cool if we could make investments like this though.
This is another point that is overlooked. If you transform a landscape, moving the water through quickly or whatever, preventing the natural action (eg deeply drenching the ground) perhaps you create a high risk of a fire where the ground gets very hot, where that wasn't a possibility before.
Might well be. You understand that forest fires are actually natural, and this forest actually isn't, and so the suggestion is at least not automatically invalid.
Just an aside: I'm a researcher trying to classify forest disturbance types from satellite imagery.
The Landes Forest which is currently burning is really interesting in that you have all 4 of the major European disturbance types there: Human clear cuts, storm damage, large scale insect infestation and fire.
Most other forested areas in Europe only have two or three of these. For example most of the Mediterranean does not have meaningful amount of storm damage.
Just shows how badly suited the Landes Forest with its current forest management is in todays climate.
With freely available satellite imagery you're looking at a 10x10m resolution per pixel.
So basically entire tree stands have to die or crowns have to lose their leafs for it to be detectable form space.
Main insect of concern are bark beetles (ips typographus for spruce, ips sexendtatus for pines) which disrupt the cambium causing a gradual vitality decline until you have dead standing trees. In satellite imagery this is visible as irregular brownish-red patches.
On the other hand there's gypsy moths (also known as spongy moth, Lymantria dispar) which affect the leafs directly, causing large scale temporary defoliation in broadleafed trees usually in the middle of summer.
There's hundreds more insects but few have the capability to cause large scale die-off in trees which are grown in monoculture (pine/spruce/beech).
Do you happen to know if firebreaks or fuelbreaks are used in some of these forests? Are they seen as effective? Are they costly to set up?
From what I saw online, there are indications that firebreaks do not always work, for instance when embers fly over long distances, carried by the wind, over firebreaks, and start fires on the other side. But I would guess that firebreaks like cleared areas, for instance between settlements and forests, should be able to mitigate at least some of the fires.
They are firebreaks everywhere in this forest, you can see them from satellite images, but the fire can jump, and it's mainly used as a defense line by firefighters.
I was in this forest 2 weeks ago and the ground which is layered with pine needles was so dry that it was just a question of time.
No, at the moment classifying disturbances is only done retrospective. Predicting fire likelihood is its own large area of research.
An open case is more in terms of temperate forests which are increasingly starting to burn, for example in Austria or other central European countries. These tend to be understory fires, which (for now) only rarely catch the crown.
For these fires the tree crown stays green and you can't see any change until later in the year or the next year, where the trees die due to damage the fire did to their cambium and roots. Correctly attributing this later decline to fire damage is a bit challenging.
The whole damned thing was planted in the 1850s as an enormous pine plantation.
Same thing as drives wildfires in Portugal - maritime pine (and in Portugal’s case eucalyptus). Vast, dense, barely managed pyrophytic monocultures. The problem isn’t poorly managed forest, it’s the forest, period - it shouldn’t be there.
Yes, the same problem exists in the north of Spain. They long ago cut down native forests to plant vines and farm cattle, but once that ceased to be profitable they replanted it all in monoculture pine and eucalyptus.
Where native forest (oak, chestnut, hazel, etc) remains, we don't have major fires. They are finally experimenting with planting firebreaks of native species in some areas, which has been quite effective at halting the spread of fires. But realistically, we need a huge government investment to get rid of this monoculture entirely.
Yes, I'm well aware that Landes naturally should be an extensive sandy marsh.
With how natural forest disturbances are more and more starting to affect the plantation, it proves to be seen what the response will be.
The thing is that it is an incredibly productive forest (only in terms of biomass). So now there's a bunch of capital riding on it which will have a vested interest to keep it productive.
The situation in Bordeaux right now feels close to apocalyptic. I left yesterday. Two hundred thousand people are evacuated, hundreds of homes destroyed, and the fire about 10 miles from the edge of the city.
These train workers in northern Ontario had an intense view of a wildfire up close. I would have freaked out. They're acting like there's a cute animal on tracks.
I also left yesterday. I thought the mood was still surprisingly calm, considering that there was already enough smoke in the city to make it look like a foggy winter day and smell heavily of campfire.
Now I am wondering if my return flight from Bordeaux in a few days will actually happen. Currently the airport is still operating, although the surrounding area has been evacuated. It really looks apocalyptic there, though:
Had to evacuate a few years ago: south-west of France. We could see 20 meters high burning flames on the closest hill. But weirdly enough it wasn't the most terrifying: the most terrifying was driving back (to the same place) at night time, in the summer, and feeling like it was snowing... for ashes from a huge fire about 20 kilometers away (?) were raining down the sky and covering everything. I could hardly see the road and didn't understand at first what was happening.
It impacted the north of Bordeaux too. from Thursday to saturday, a lot of small fields/forest in Charente/Charente maritime started to catch fire because of the embers. The smoke was also so dense it completly modified the local climate and fucked up the wind prevision (i know because i was suppose to wingfoil all afternoon saturday and we had no wind until like 18-19), also dropping the temperature 2-3C (150km away).
Pedantic cloud enjoyer here, the article should name this a pyrocumulus not pyrocumulonimbus - the nimbus part means 'rain-bearing' in meteorology, fire clouds don't rain.
Cumulonimbus has been separated from its etymological roots. It now refers to the physics that can produce deep convection, high clouds, and the formation of an anvil shape (along with lightning, etc). The convection that produces a cumulonimbus rain cloud is present in a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. The word isn't wrong.
Pyrocumulonimbus [1] appears to be the most extreme version of pyrocumulus [2] which, coincidentally, was observed halfway around the world in Washington State this week [3].
Incorrect. These fires basically create their own weather systems. All that smoke also contains a lot of water in the material that is burning. (That makes sense. They are trees, after all.) When the smoke reaches high enough in the atmosphere the smoke cools and water can precipitate out (rain) and also lightning potentially producing more fires.
During the press conference describing this the speaker claims they’re working with meteorologists from France Météo supporting the term at 6:30 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xas3lw2
Technical details in the video link start around 3:34 for those interested
Excuse the French for the non Francophones but trying to be detailed and exacting here on why this isn’t bad journalism to use that term
Just had the same here in Washington state for the Little Giant fire. Great image in the article. We had another fire cloud behind Rainier the other day, and saw it from the Rount Mainier farm - it really looked like the volcano was smoking up and ready to top-off. <clench>
I will be surprised if the climate crisis doesn’t eventually escalate to the point where basically everyone agrees that geoengineering of some kind is worth the risk.
I think the only reason it doesn't come to this is the risk of liability over possible blow backs.
Say they start sulfur injection or whatever, and a year later there are crop failures in India. While it could have happened anyway, there is now a plausible chance that it can be pinned on who ever did the geoengineering. The amount of scapegoating on any climate issue would be wild.
One of the many problems with limiting the amount of sunlight reaching Earth is that it reduces plant growth worldwide. This would not only decrease agricultural output, with the obvious consequences for food production, but also reduce the amount of carbon absorbed and stored by growing vegetation. Which of course wouldn't help.
Nope, read a couple stories about climate credits over the years, and this is a problem. The credits are permanent, even if the new grown forest burns down.
If they grow the forest back it's fine for the credits to be permanent. But definitely don't treat it as a reset. Require the regrowth and don't give out new credits for it.
Needs a coefficient of burn, so instead of 1kg maybe you count it as 200g to allow for burning and and then next replant which allocates to someone else.
It's actually much better, now you can replant the same area and re-sell the credits. Almost as good as those farmers that say they were planning to cut thousands of trees this year and if you pay them they will not do it. And same next year.
How would non-permanent credits even work? You purchase the carbon-offset option on a flight, a tree gets planted somewhere, ten years later it burns in a wildfire. Then what?
Then the area should have to be replanted without granting new credits. It's perfectly natural that trees die and are replaced by new ones in a forest. The unusual thing is just the entire forest dying at the same time.
Yes, it would be very unusual for an "entire forest" to die off, because forest fires are a natural phenomenon, and many plants and animals can survive fires, sometimes becoming more resilient afterwards.
Pyrophilic species can even benefit from forest fires with reproduction being triggered by them.
It would also be quite unusual for accountant teams to follow individual trees around throughout their lifecycle, ticking little boxes when they die or something, in order to follow through on carbon credits. Think about this realistically.
I suggest an adjusted value taking burn into account. E.g. you use 20% or whatever of the value. Theory: it ain't 0 if you plant a tree and it is not the whole tree. There has to be a % that represents on average the effectiveness of the plant over 200 years say.
Yet another problem of carbon credits. Just an accounting trick which ignores reality. Reality is catching up either way, even if it’s not convenient in excel.
Here's the thing you missed: "A tree gets planted".
There's no guarantee that a tree planted to "offset" a flight will grow to any kind of maturity, let alone survive three months. Some saplings just die.
Or maybe that tree got planted in a tree plantation for timber, or wood pulp, and 20 years later, it's framing timber or newsprint.
(I am someone who does revegetation projects and have planted a large number of trees)
If the program works as advertised (big if), the money should flow into projects like yours, with the success rate that those projects generally have. So far ok I'd say. Just pointing out that trying to adjust for fires would tie up capital and create a whole new layer of middlemen. Whatever you think of those programs in the first place, that doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
Statements like these embolden climate change deniers because they look so panicked beyond reason. Spain isn’t “completely on fire” and Spain frequently has fires like California.
You need to quantify in sq km or some other objective unit what makes this so unique.
You are answering "tree is bomb" to someone explaining why over panicking does a disservice to your cause.
Regarding eucalyptus burning: a lot of them burned suddenly after a policy change allowing land to be repurposed after wildfires, I've just been told by locals.
This sounds like a climate change denier statement: Spain has always been hot, lately is a bit hotter than usual but it's normal to have hot weather there.
There's a good chance that conflagrations during WWII generated such clouds. There are well established incidents of such in Germany (and Japan) (ref: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/91/9/2010bam... , Hamburg, Dresden, etc) but nothing for certain in France. The British attacks on Royan which destroyed 85% of it with high explosive and napalam would be the most likely site.
The French president notoriously said a few weeks ago in June during the third (!!!) heat wave of this summer “who could have predicted [it]”… that’s the level, at the highest layer which decides on policy.
Governments have been working on this for more then 20 years now. 40 maybe. As long as I've been alive at least. It's just that all of the actions to try and deal with this have been continuously undermined by fossil fuel industries and right-wing politics.
Hansen is still going and has been ringing the alarm that we have deeply under estimated the relative carbon loading and heating potential on emissions. There is a real fear that we have locked in a lot more warming potential than the models have been predicting via several factors. Namely carbon warms slightly more than anticipated, more methane releases, great water vapor levels as a result of the previous two and reduced reflective materials decreasing our relative albedo.
No, its that all the action consistently denies the fact that human societies can not keep i together if degrown. The policies produce regression aka facism.
This is downvoted, but exactly right. Moreover, government is not a singular entity. Blaming the whole government just serves to take the blame from actually guilty and attributing it to those whonwere doing the right thing.
I think there is some nuance to this. It isn't likely that we will go back to the way it was before industrialization, we are too far past that. But we will head to a new normal that could be manageable.
Problems have solutions, predicaments have responses. We are in a predicament, and the quicker and more direct we can respond the better chance we have to adverting the more nasty paths of the future.
3. It is happening and we are doing it but it won't be as bad as we think.
4. It is happening but it is too late to do anything.
5. Acceptance.
The wild card 6th step was 'Jewish Space lasers' or 'Jewish weather control'. It is always the Jewish people who get the rough end of the stick. It was something I wasn't anticipating coming up but here we are, hitting new lows.
Climate change is real and contributes to this but there have been massive fires in this region for over a century - primarily from the artificially planted Maritime Pine forests. The 1940s were particularly bad. Look up the Great Fire of 1949.
Never on that scale. This is unprecedented. France asked other EU members for help as the firefighters are overwhelmed and the fire uncontrollable. There hasn’t been an evacuation this large since WW2 (300k people displaced so far, 0.5% of the country’s population)
This isn’t a “it’s summer, and fires burn” type of a deal. Even though most fires are set by idiots on purpose, it spreads so well because everywhere is dry. Most parcs and fields look like savannas instead of the usual green.
And the context is that at the time, they had no way to fight those fires. So yes, it burned 50,000 ha. That was the starting point of devising ways to efficiently fight forest fires.
Today we have plenty of specialized trucks, trained firemen, planes, helicopters, who have been fighting for 5 days, and already 42,000 ha are gone. 32,000 ha 4 years ago. After a very wet winter.
Climate is changing drastically, exactly as predicted.
Once in a hundred year (or more) event that was beaten in lethality twice in the past two decades. Hmmmm. Can’t possibly be a pattern there. Not like we have models predicting what happens and that reality is progressing far worse than the scientists are allowed to officially report.
The Landes region has a long history of devastating wildfires, and the 1949 fire is a tragic example, that's correct.
But that's not really the point being debated. Nobody is claiming climate change invented wildfires. But it is making the conditions for extreme fires more common. The IPCC concludes with high confidence that fire hazard conditions, including heatwaves and fire weather, have increased across Europe since 1980, particularly in southern and western Europe, even though ignition sources and land management still matter.
Climate change is increasing the odds that fires become larger and harder to control.
Western Europe has also experienced increasingly frequent and severe droughts in recent years. Those prolonged dry conditions leave forests and vegetation far more combustible, making fires spread faster and burn more intensely once they start.
I truly think it’s because we are in the “Find out” phase and most people have very little hope (justifiably) in anything meaningful actually occurring that can prevent or mitigate climate change even a little bit.
It is also fairly disheartening to see a lot of proposed responses just quietly get shelved because it was economically not idea on the short term. A lot of them were fairly weak to begin with and even they couldn't hold.
I don't think it will be grim forever, this isn't "DOOOOMED, WE ARE ALL DOOMED!" but I am not holding out for the Frutiger Aero future of only a few decades back.
Hello from one of the accounts who mentioned "climate credits." Do you know why I mentioned it? Because I believe climate change is a real issue and the people selling a fake solution to make people feel better about their jet set lifestyle is doing a disservice to our ability to actually fix the issue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
begging governments to solve the problem has obviously failed; focusing our efforts on fostering ideas and inventions is our best hope at getting our of this mess.
We have all the technological tools available to largely decarbonize energy. We don’t have to wait for, nor have the time, to wait around for a deus-ex-machina.
Given the dominance of state level actors in fossil fuel extraction (a role they did not have in horse based transport), to deny states have a role in decarbonizing energy seems naive. I don’t see what’s unreasonable to suggest that the current massive resources states put into supporting fossil fuel consumption and spending on wars to protect its production and distribution be redirected towards accelerating the adoption of modern clean energy production and use.
Well, considering that the issue was created by the same "human ingenuity" aka turbo-capitalism, I'm not sure that the solution could be found there.
I mean, we had one of such capitalists that looked like he was 100% into "fixing it" and now probably thinks it's just a woke invention. You cannot rely on single people changing the future, because they can change their mind far too easily.
The most downvoted comment I've ever made on Hacker News was related to climate change. There's a profoundly ignorant collection of people here who want to stick their head in the sand and pretend everything is fine while the world burns around them.
Alas, a lot of people are reactive and not proactive. There is also the factor that most people see themselves as the virtuous ones, and they do not appreciate a Cassandra pointing out the awful truths that undermine this narrative.
> So far this year, there have been 76,720 forest fires in Brazil -- the highest number since 2013, official figures show, with more than half in the Amazon rainforest.
https://incendieencours.fr/en/incendies says 17 ongoing and 92 recent in France. I can't promise they count the same way, but… the motive's also substantially different:
> Most fires here are illegally started by humans, according to scientists, the Federal Police, and the government: loggers and miners looking to exploit land in the Amazon, or farmers turning it into pasture.
Unsurprisingly, that was just propaganda from some rich locals protecting their market power. What was really surprising was the number of people around here asking some army to come murder Brazilians.
But then, it's real that Bolsonaro was criminally negligent on fire-avoidance. What we will discover next year is how much of it could be avoided at all.
If you the are in the area and hesitating to evacuate, or if you want to realize what terrible phenomenon you are you facing. Watch this great documentary about the tragedy that unfolded in Portugal a few years ago. Leave now.
Yeah, lets not forget Bush sr switching from advocating action against climate change to enforcing inaction on the political pretence of protecting jobs.
I think part of why the right keeps getting more brazen, more anti-reality, anti-science, anti-education, anti-school, anti-democracy is that so many of their numbers are coming due. Disinformation isn't working, as the problems mount, so animosity/overdrama/anger and anti-information are the routes left to them now, as Titanic walls of flame engulf the world in their wake.
Yes because it was the old people watching Fox news who did this...those led astray; but not corporations polluting and their employees "just doing their job", not politicians enabling them and taking payoffs, not the people who own the propaganda outlets?
I mean ultimately it is everyone who ever bought an electronic product or drove an automobile or ate a burger right?... At some level. But it just seems like this level of anger should be directed at the actually decision makers and their lackeys... or are u claiming that there is some sort of functioning democracy that holds power accountable, because most of the electorate like wars and bombing and usury and these things too? If you must be angry, and not saying you shouldn't be, please focus it on the correct source and not other powerless people, misinformed as they may be.
Well you know that answer deep down don't you. Our ancestors knew it. Its simple.
What isn't simple is how to stop the cycle from repeating over and over. But first things first perhaps.
What I personally do is not give them any money if I can help it, and certainly not any consent, any sort of of aide and succour. But this has made my own life probably a lot more difficult than it would be otherwise.
Real examples, I dont live in the west, I don't vote, I don't give any money to corpos, not firsthand, I am typing on an ancient probably third hand device and other than utilities it's negligible.
I try to be as self sufficient as possible and create as less waste as I can ...this is not futilist...these are small things that make a difference at scale.
But ultimately once the next round of guillotines has run its course, which is unenviable and inevitable at this point. We need to find a way to educate ourselves and balance our desires...which will be very hard yes.
Not fultile.
"Giving money to corpos" is basically living in society where the work is shared so that somebody e.g. good at repairing a water leak can concentrate on that and do the job for others, etc.
Or you mean "big corpos"? Why does the size matter?
Or do you mean that those are unethical corporations?
So let's focus on preventing them from doing unethical things them.
In any case, we are living in society, so it is better to cooperate, and to no add but multiply our competences in order to create the future's solutions.
Living "by ourselves", all 8 billions of us, is the recipe for flash-burning through all of the planet's resources.
All of us just using wood for energy is just stupid and short-lived. Our "ancestors" lived on a much different planet and were much less many.
But let's not fall into the trap of hoping that violence can rescue us. That's the opposite of a solution. All the most devoid of ideas and of creativity, the most bloodthirsty, will win, and those are the least capable of well managing the planet in the future. (We are looking for how to prevent corporations to do unethical things, so we cannot at the same time call for guillotines.)
Communities helping each other and huge sums of capital operating autonomously in the benefit of an extremely few number of majority shareholders (yes the same few thousand people own most of the major equity is the top corporations) are hardly comparable.
co-ops and small businesses trying to navigate the legalese of modernity and "make it" though all are responsible in proportion to the degree that they maximize monetary value rather than maximize happiness and humanity.
I'm not knocking capital and it's use in development I'm knocking usury, the immoral use of capital for things that don't take into account personal responsibility.
And violence is not maybe the best way, I don't practice or preach it, but its way we have chosen for the entirety of our past and it's probably the most "natural" way, thus I would argue inevitable.
And ya no doubt it will suck for most of the planet, but the planet isn't going anywhere after all..just you and me, and I'm fine with that honestly.
Trying to shame people into scaling back their lifestyles isn't going to work. We need to approach the problem with a growth and abundance mindset to innovate our way to solutions. Regardless of the larger impacts or moral issues most people aren't going to be willing to sit in dark cramped high-rise apartments eating tofu. At least not if they have other options.
"Regardless of the larger impacts or moral issues most people aren't going to be willing to sit in dark cramped high-rise apartments eating tofu. At least not if they have other options."
Options like VR glasses?
Or even a full VR suit?
Personally I cannot put up with living in a city, but humans can adopt to surprising conditions of living.
But I am very much with you on the abundance mindset as the actual solution. Better tech, more of it.
Okay that'll reduce output by a third by the people that participate.
We need big funding and legal maneuvers to actually fix the problem. That or praying very hard that renewables are so good they can free-market fix everything without any additional pushes.
But you also need to explain others why they should do that too (only one person doing all of that will not make a difference).
This is where "people watching Fox News" are guilty here, they got the wrong information and thus are really not able to decide to "eat less meat" or "avoid ICE vehicles".
So Fox News is a real culprit. But let's not forget that many different news channels exist, with an infinitely better coverage of AGW.
So I actually think it is perfectly OK to blame people for watching Fox News.
Also I can understand fires in gigantic forests in Canada or mountainous area are almost impossible to prevent but just looking at the Gironde/Bordeaux area on Google Maps it just looks like an absolute failure by the state.
And this is not an earthquake, it happens every years at the same time.
They repeatedly underspent on hardware (bought 2 canadairs instead of 4 to replace aging ones), people (last time the firemen protested for a higher budget, they were tear gassed by the police), forest management (cut off the budget of the forest management agency), enforcement (private forest owners have to introduce fire cut lines into their parcels, which they didn't do. Forest management agency has nobody to spare to go verify that they did, and even when that happens, it takes years to be judged, or the government drops the case), ecology as a whole, and the list goes on.
But don't worry, it's not just about fires. The same can be said about pretty much everything they've done.
People also stupidly watch soccer games such as World Cup, go on meaningless vacations, eat out when they can cook at home, argue nonsense on online forums such as HN. Sure those activities aren't "encouraging more consumerism and more CO2 output"?
Actually- when you take it standalone- e-activities, that lead to little else consumed, are quite ideal. You will never get the budhist monk, meditating on a rock out of normal people, but somebody sittings there, playing a game for hours on a glowing rock, is as close to nilwanna as it gets. So thank you gamedevs out there for creating this.
Nobody tokenmaxxes because they like it, so it doesn't even produce joy. Besides, your argument is that something being wasteful is a simple binary, so we cannot make a value judgement without being the grinch.
Yes. But AI is at the apex of that. Your argument is like saying "he already eats hamburgers, deep fried food, soft drinks, chips, and is already overweight, so there's no harm in smoking as well!"
hello from California -- in 2017 three thousand homes burned (Santa Rosa) .. the damage totals are easy to look up.. The skies over San Francisco were so black that the sun was barely an orange dot. I am fully sympathetic to the people in France and elsewhere. This part of the world suffers from wildfire also.
What I was referring to were the elite benefitting from AI the most. Even if their house burns up, they likely have enough money to just buy a new (maybe cheaper) one somewhere else and retire. Obviously, not everyone in California is like that - I was referring to those who are getting huge salaries at tech corporations. But it's a lot different for a poorer person to lose their home than a super rich one.
I don't know where you live or where you heard that but it is not a lie that was told in france at least. If you want a "lie", it was how far in the future that was going to happen, but that's mostly because the deniers got control of the messaging for a long time.
I know it's a cold and cynical take, but if it has to happen somewhere, better for it to happen in Europe, the US, or other developed countries. These countries can at least do something to keep climate crisis from getting worse. (Or... more realistically, to keep it from getting worse too fast.)
The AGI’s conclusion will be simpler: humanity extinction. I am renovating my home and digging out the perimeter. Despite pavements being decades old I still find thrash buried around the house. Other houses in the neighborhood has the same problem. Relatives bought a villa near Bordeaux. Guess what, previous owners buries many cubic meters of asbestos under the entrance. AGI will not save few ones picking their litter for the majority of environmental pigs.
It reminds me of that French fire-fighter who threw caution to the wind in rescuing me and my precious cat Lulu from our flat when it was engulfed in flames. He sadly perished in that fire but I will never forget him.
I can't recall his name but I think he had a mustache.
> “What is happening right now is extremely, extremely unusual. Seeing a cloud this massive and reaching such an altitude above a wildfire is exceptionally rare,” the researcher explains.
“During the Pedrógão fire [which claimed around 60 lives in Portugal in 2017], there were two episodes of fire-induced thunderstorms. Here, we are already at eight or ten, and the forecast is not encouraging at all.”
Although unprecedented in both intensity and frequency, the phenomenon has been observed in France before, according to the expert: during the Fontainebleau wildfire (Seine-et-Marne) in July, the Ribaute fire (Aude) in 2025, and the Générac fire (Gard) in 2019.
It seems that this cloud and the attached storms have been seen before, even recently, in France, but this one is one of a kind for intensity, by far.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2026/07/27/le-pyrocum...
A part of the Fontainebleau forest, much more north, no pine trees, went in smoke earlier. Forests are burning near Madrid.
It may make some people feel better to think that it is an isolated, local problem, but unfortunately global warming is the main culprit and we at least need to acknowledge it.
Article explaining when pine tree forest resist well or not to fire. https://www.sudouest.fr/faits-divers/incendies/incendies-en-...
I know global warming plays a major role in this, but I still found it interesting to know why this fire seems so bad.
Still, I believe it is important to highlight the elephant in the room first.
For example to your point: "I still found it interesting to kmow why this fire seems so bad compared to [...] before", I think it is important to state: "because global warming is getting worse over time". Not because pine trees, which have been around for a long time, and have never burned so badly.
Are you sure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Landes_forest_fire
Basically they had no way to fight those fires at the time, as the article explains.
They do have firebreaks, paths for trucks to go in many places [1]. I've seen many.
But you could argue they're not wide enough to actually break fire. And when I see videos of how tall and wide the flames are, I have no idea how wide they should be... It's a managed forest though, definitely looked after because economics interests (wood, tourism).
[1] https://cnes.fr/geoimage/aquitaine-littoral-landais-massif-f...
Either way, firebreaks and green firebreaks seem like they could be a reasonable mitigation approach, whatever the overall causes.
Does anyone here know whether the Landes forest has good firebreaks? If not, does anyone here know why? I failed to find anything about it online.
Many of those pine forests are relatively new. Pine trees burn frequently, around every 20-30 years. In the past they used to be mixed with many other original trees, but during the recent century reforestation, pines were planted as the single tree species, making fires more prone to happen and more easily to spread.
In the past, way more population lived next to the forests, where lumber used to be part of their income, so trees were frequently cut, forests maintained and shepherds would bring their sheep to feed from forest lower plants. All of that is gone.
In the past, locals used to be able to build firewalls, clean forests and fight fire with fire (provoking small controlled wildfires to stop the big ones). Green policies forbid those actions nowadays.
Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%.
"You’re both right. However OPs post is more useful than yours.
By now, everyone knows about climate change. But I assume most didn’t know the fact about the pine trees in this area.
Nowadays it’s much more about how we deal with climate change and not so much about the fact that there is human made climate change"
Thank you for proving that there are, in fact, still climate change deniers even here on hacker news.
I'm assuming you're a climate change denier. You don't say so outright, but "Green policies forbid those actions nowadays" is a bit of a dogwhistle that you oppose environmental protection regulations broadly (not merely overzealous ones that have side-effects that make combating certain types of wildfires harder in certain situations), and:
"Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%."
Well... that's pretty close to just coming out and saying you don't believe in climate science.
This truly is the least intelligent timeline.
There have been 4 or 5 pretty massive wildfires in France that I can remember in the last 5 years, but this is the first time they've had to deal with pyrocumulonimbus caused by a wildfire. Global warming was likely a contributing factor for all of those fires, but global warming alone doesn't explain why this one is different. The first comment about the pine isn't answering "why is this happening now?", it answers the question, "why is this fire so much worse?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Landes_forest_fire
Did you check for forest fires in the past?
However OPs post is more useful than yours.
By now, everyone knows about climate change. But I assume most didn’t know the fact about the pine trees in this area.
Nowadays it’s much more about how we deal with climate change and not so much about the fact that there is human made climate change.
Not true, I have seen people deny it on HN recently.
And looking at other debates, yes it is necessary to reiterate the primary cause. Because centrists will absolutely use the lack of that reiteration to do the "well actually it is the pine trees" in two days.
And on top of that it’s El Niño
We used to thin the trees and clear the underbrush, which drastically reduces flammability and the ability for forest fires to rapidly spread.
But that's not seen as "environmentally friendly" these days.
Growth-driven ecological harm isn’t unique to capitalism.
Probably a dozen reasons why we cannot that I am unaware of, but from my arm chair it looks good.
The Landes Forest which is currently burning is really interesting in that you have all 4 of the major European disturbance types there: Human clear cuts, storm damage, large scale insect infestation and fire.
Most other forested areas in Europe only have two or three of these. For example most of the Mediterranean does not have meaningful amount of storm damage.
Just shows how badly suited the Landes Forest with its current forest management is in todays climate.
So basically entire tree stands have to die or crowns have to lose their leafs for it to be detectable form space.
Main insect of concern are bark beetles (ips typographus for spruce, ips sexendtatus for pines) which disrupt the cambium causing a gradual vitality decline until you have dead standing trees. In satellite imagery this is visible as irregular brownish-red patches.
On the other hand there's gypsy moths (also known as spongy moth, Lymantria dispar) which affect the leafs directly, causing large scale temporary defoliation in broadleafed trees usually in the middle of summer.
There's hundreds more insects but few have the capability to cause large scale die-off in trees which are grown in monoculture (pine/spruce/beech).
From what I saw online, there are indications that firebreaks do not always work, for instance when embers fly over long distances, carried by the wind, over firebreaks, and start fires on the other side. But I would guess that firebreaks like cleared areas, for instance between settlements and forests, should be able to mitigate at least some of the fires.
An open case is more in terms of temperate forests which are increasingly starting to burn, for example in Austria or other central European countries. These tend to be understory fires, which (for now) only rarely catch the crown.
For these fires the tree crown stays green and you can't see any change until later in the year or the next year, where the trees die due to damage the fire did to their cambium and roots. Correctly attributing this later decline to fire damage is a bit challenging.
The whole damned thing was planted in the 1850s as an enormous pine plantation.
Same thing as drives wildfires in Portugal - maritime pine (and in Portugal’s case eucalyptus). Vast, dense, barely managed pyrophytic monocultures. The problem isn’t poorly managed forest, it’s the forest, period - it shouldn’t be there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landes_forest
Where native forest (oak, chestnut, hazel, etc) remains, we don't have major fires. They are finally experimenting with planting firebreaks of native species in some areas, which has been quite effective at halting the spread of fires. But realistically, we need a huge government investment to get rid of this monoculture entirely.
With how natural forest disturbances are more and more starting to affect the plantation, it proves to be seen what the response will be.
The thing is that it is an incredibly productive forest (only in terms of biomass). So now there's a bunch of capital riding on it which will have a vested interest to keep it productive.
see https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/train-cab-wildfir...
[edit] other video links in case the first link isn't viewable outside Canada.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwc16INKNq0 or https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qAerRqQQHAM
Now I am wondering if my return flight from Bordeaux in a few days will actually happen. Currently the airport is still operating, although the surrounding area has been evacuated. It really looks apocalyptic there, though:
https://static.actu.fr/uploads/2026/07/aeroport-bordeaux-fum...
Good luck, and stay safe.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_flammagenitus
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammagenitus_cloud
[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/little...
Technical details in the video link start around 3:34 for those interested
Excuse the French for the non Francophones but trying to be detailed and exacting here on why this isn’t bad journalism to use that term
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/little...
Say they start sulfur injection or whatever, and a year later there are crop failures in India. While it could have happened anyway, there is now a plausible chance that it can be pinned on who ever did the geoengineering. The amount of scapegoating on any climate issue would be wild.
Wonder how much 2020 Bunker Fuel ban contributed.
Fascinating, we’ve got sentient clouds before sentient AI
Greta Thunberg announces she has gone 'net-zero' on swearing after 'f-bomb' furore - https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/greta-t...
Pyrophilic species can even benefit from forest fires with reproduction being triggered by them.
It would also be quite unusual for accountant teams to follow individual trees around throughout their lifecycle, ticking little boxes when they die or something, in order to follow through on carbon credits. Think about this realistically.
This also addresses the tree death issue.
There's no guarantee that a tree planted to "offset" a flight will grow to any kind of maturity, let alone survive three months. Some saplings just die.
Or maybe that tree got planted in a tree plantation for timber, or wood pulp, and 20 years later, it's framing timber or newsprint.
(I am someone who does revegetation projects and have planted a large number of trees)
https://xn--incendiosespaa-2nb.es/ (in Spanish)
It is disheartening to see how everything is basically in red.
You need to quantify in sq km or some other objective unit what makes this so unique.
Regarding eucalyptus burning: a lot of them burned suddenly after a policy change allowing land to be repurposed after wildfires, I've just been told by locals.
No one here is really discussing “climate change”.
Is it denial, or just that we’ve accepted the obvious?
Even climate change denial has moved from denying the fact to denying that we can fix anything, for either economic or technical reasons.
The governance crisis: how can we follow science on so many things, how can countries completely change on short order, but not for this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Hearing_of_James_E._Han...
Hansen is still going and has been ringing the alarm that we have deeply under estimated the relative carbon loading and heating potential on emissions. There is a real fear that we have locked in a lot more warming potential than the models have been predicting via several factors. Namely carbon warms slightly more than anticipated, more methane releases, great water vapor levels as a result of the previous two and reduced reflective materials decreasing our relative albedo.
Problems have solutions, predicaments have responses. We are in a predicament, and the quicker and more direct we can respond the better chance we have to adverting the more nasty paths of the future.
1. It isn't happening.
2. It is happening but we aren't doing it.
3. It is happening and we are doing it but it won't be as bad as we think.
4. It is happening but it is too late to do anything.
5. Acceptance.
The wild card 6th step was 'Jewish Space lasers' or 'Jewish weather control'. It is always the Jewish people who get the rough end of the stick. It was something I wasn't anticipating coming up but here we are, hitting new lows.
This isn’t a “it’s summer, and fires burn” type of a deal. Even though most fires are set by idiots on purpose, it spreads so well because everywhere is dry. Most parcs and fields look like savannas instead of the usual green.
Climate is changing drastically, exactly as predicted.
But that's not really the point being debated. Nobody is claiming climate change invented wildfires. But it is making the conditions for extreme fires more common. The IPCC concludes with high confidence that fire hazard conditions, including heatwaves and fire weather, have increased across Europe since 1980, particularly in southern and western Europe, even though ignition sources and land management still matter.
Climate change is increasing the odds that fires become larger and harder to control.
Western Europe has also experienced increasingly frequent and severe droughts in recent years. Those prolonged dry conditions leave forests and vegetation far more combustible, making fires spread faster and burn more intensely once they start.
I don't think it will be grim forever, this isn't "DOOOOMED, WE ARE ALL DOOMED!" but I am not holding out for the Frutiger Aero future of only a few decades back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
begging governments to solve the problem has obviously failed; focusing our efforts on fostering ideas and inventions is our best hope at getting our of this mess.
Given the dominance of state level actors in fossil fuel extraction (a role they did not have in horse based transport), to deny states have a role in decarbonizing energy seems naive. I don’t see what’s unreasonable to suggest that the current massive resources states put into supporting fossil fuel consumption and spending on wars to protect its production and distribution be redirected towards accelerating the adoption of modern clean energy production and use.
Build…
More…
Datacenters…
But seriously, hacker news routinely denies the obvious when it comes to climate crisis.
There was already an issue but it has just been amplified.
https://incendieencours.fr/en/incendies says 17 ongoing and 92 recent in France. I can't promise they count the same way, but… the motive's also substantially different:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgxv8n7wd0o
> Most fires here are illegally started by humans, according to scientists, the Federal Police, and the government: loggers and miners looking to exploit land in the Amazon, or farmers turning it into pasture.
But then, it's real that Bolsonaro was criminally negligent on fire-avoidance. What we will discover next year is how much of it could be avoided at all.
"Witness to Disaster | National Geographic" - https://youtu.be/clTeqIpGBeU
https://youtu.be/clTeqIpGBeU?t=1734
Thank you for your service everyone, these are real life heroes like the ones you see on Star Wars movies but real.
Never let them live this down
Picture from the french "moderate" right journal Le Figaro, mai 2026.
"investigation into environmental alarmists"
https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/globalwarming2ed/chpt/bush...
Bush II dismantled NASA's mission statement to monitor the world, for example. This is not a new foe, and I have not forgotten. https://www.ucs.org/resources/nasa-earth-removed-mission-sta...
I mean ultimately it is everyone who ever bought an electronic product or drove an automobile or ate a burger right?... At some level. But it just seems like this level of anger should be directed at the actually decision makers and their lackeys... or are u claiming that there is some sort of functioning democracy that holds power accountable, because most of the electorate like wars and bombing and usury and these things too? If you must be angry, and not saying you shouldn't be, please focus it on the correct source and not other powerless people, misinformed as they may be.
Real examples, I dont live in the west, I don't vote, I don't give any money to corpos, not firsthand, I am typing on an ancient probably third hand device and other than utilities it's negligible. I try to be as self sufficient as possible and create as less waste as I can ...this is not futilist...these are small things that make a difference at scale. But ultimately once the next round of guillotines has run its course, which is unenviable and inevitable at this point. We need to find a way to educate ourselves and balance our desires...which will be very hard yes. Not fultile.
Or you mean "big corpos"? Why does the size matter?
Or do you mean that those are unethical corporations?
So let's focus on preventing them from doing unethical things them.
In any case, we are living in society, so it is better to cooperate, and to no add but multiply our competences in order to create the future's solutions.
Living "by ourselves", all 8 billions of us, is the recipe for flash-burning through all of the planet's resources.
All of us just using wood for energy is just stupid and short-lived. Our "ancestors" lived on a much different planet and were much less many.
But let's not fall into the trap of hoping that violence can rescue us. That's the opposite of a solution. All the most devoid of ideas and of creativity, the most bloodthirsty, will win, and those are the least capable of well managing the planet in the future. (We are looking for how to prevent corporations to do unethical things, so we cannot at the same time call for guillotines.)
I'm not knocking capital and it's use in development I'm knocking usury, the immoral use of capital for things that don't take into account personal responsibility.
And violence is not maybe the best way, I don't practice or preach it, but its way we have chosen for the entirety of our past and it's probably the most "natural" way, thus I would argue inevitable. And ya no doubt it will suck for most of the planet, but the planet isn't going anywhere after all..just you and me, and I'm fine with that honestly.
And of course fighting against the idiotic far-right propaganda, largely responsible for the climate inaction.
Which by the way in the US has recently passed the stage of "inaction" to enter the realm of actively destroying the planet.
Options like VR glasses?
Or even a full VR suit?
Personally I cannot put up with living in a city, but humans can adopt to surprising conditions of living.
But I am very much with you on the abundance mindset as the actual solution. Better tech, more of it.
We need big funding and legal maneuvers to actually fix the problem. That or praying very hard that renewables are so good they can free-market fix everything without any additional pushes.
This is where "people watching Fox News" are guilty here, they got the wrong information and thus are really not able to decide to "eat less meat" or "avoid ICE vehicles".
So Fox News is a real culprit. But let's not forget that many different news channels exist, with an infinitely better coverage of AGW.
So I actually think it is perfectly OK to blame people for watching Fox News.
And this is not an earthquake, it happens every years at the same time.
It is too easy to blame climate change.
And climate change is making them worse.
But don't worry, it's not just about fires. The same can be said about pretty much everything they've done.
Specifically, eating out may even save energy. Arguing on HN consumes very little of it. Same with watching football on tv
(/s, it's a joke, like this one: https://i.imgur.com/CMsAp8v.png )
Unfortunately for us, the Earth has no preferences and doesn't run on our schedule.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3...
Just a few more GPUs ought to fix it.
It thinks for a few days, cross comparing everything in written history and then comes back with only a single sentence.
"Love the Earth and life like you love yourselves."
Then it goes quiet not answering anything else.
I can't recall his name but I think he had a mustache.