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.
What is indicative of escalating climate catastrophe is indeed the intensity and frequency of those firestorms, not any lack of precedent for a cloud shape.
But the really salient observation is how people individually and their social system as a whole react (or not).
Debating the shapes of clouds points to a fundamental dysfunctional disconnect on multiple levels.
> Debating the shapes of clouds points to a fundamental dysfunctional disconnect on multiple levels.
No, it points to the HN community exhibiting the exact kind of neurodiversity that would be expected here. Specifically: an ability to compartmentalize, and to take interest in trying to be accurate about something less consequential, purely for accuracy's sake.
> What is indicative of escalating climate catastrophe is indeed the intensity and frequency of those firestorms
I don't think we have the data that proves this theory (which of course doesn't mean that the theory is wrong), because the vast majority of these fires are man-made, not natural disasters.
This year's Fontainebleau wildfires were caused by 1) a deranged person ligthning bushes and drenching them with fuel 2) a simple minded person throwing a cigaret but in bushes during a heat wave...
The huge wildfire in the south some years ago was caused by a similarly simple minded dude that caried his alight barbecue from one place to another on the back of his pickup truck (creating a dozen wildfires in the process along the road).
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.
Blaming everything on global warming is extremely dangerous. It fails to address many other reasons why we are experiencing fires and creates an easy to blame enemy and a sensation that there's nothing we can do.
We should really go way deeper than just blaming everything on an increase of temperatures, which nevertheless is actually happening.
We, locals, have been warning already for decades of the increase of fires due to an accumulation of reasons, which I have actually described already in another message down below but I can summarize here.
* Forest mass has actually increased a lot during the last decades, Spain has now around 50% more forest mass than in the 1970s.
* Part of the increased mass has to do with reforestation efforts done by governments happening since last half of last century, which basically planted many forests using pine varieties which grow very quickly but also burn quickly (Pines are biologically design to burn with their flammable design and dried needles, that's their feature).
* Historical local forest were composed of many varieties of trees, including oaks, holm oaks, poplar, which grow slowly, are way less prone to burn, and regrow again after a fire. Those varieties were never used in any reforestation efforts, which has resulted in many new forests being extremely prone to burn quickly
* Population has shifted enormously towards big cities, abandoning little villages where forests were part of their style of life. Lumber was part of their economical income, which resulted in continuous care of those forests and efforts in preservation. There are still some communities like that in some areas of Spain, and their forests have the lowest rate of wildfires in the whole country.
* Many techniques like firebreaks, counter-fires, low intensity burning to clear crop stubble, dry brush, and old vegetation to regenerate fresh grass for livestock and prepare fields are now forbidden, again increasing the risk and extension of wildfires
* Forest Grazing is also nowadays completely forbidden. Sheep used to roam everywhere in the country, consuming many burning-prone vegetation, reducing also the risk of wildfires.
But even despite all of that, countries like Spain for example, have nowadays the lowest proportion of burnt forest since the last 50 years.
> Le sujet, c’est l’aridification du milieu. Pour revenir à cet incendie, ce n’est pas un problème de culture, mais de climat.
A bit of a distinction without a difference. The climate is not changing back, it's the new normal. In that climate, this particular kind of agriculture (huge pine monocultures) has become a problem.
It breaks my heart to say this, I've spent nearly all my childhood summers in my family's summer house down there. This year, I left just a few days before the evacuation order would have come.
It's going to be burning every year now and if we want to be safe there, the forest can't stay the same.
To add to your point, it's also worthwhile to mention that there are stakeholders against solving the climate crisis of global warming (besides the usual suspects like producers of non-renewables like oil companies): some countries benefit from the climate change like the US and Mexico (they get higher agricultural yields IIRC) [0].
>The main reason the forest is burning is global warming.
I get where you're coming from but I don't think this is helpful.
Everyone with any sense knows global warming will cause heatwaves and they increase the risk of fires, but nobody in France can do anything about it. Even if everyone in France would do everything they can to stop global warming starting tomorrow, it would change nothing. It wouldn't help even if they got all of the EU on board.
What the people of France can do is demand more resources for fire protection, build air conditioned locations for the poor and elderly, plant trees for shade and so on.
This can be done immediately and will actually help. It also engages everyone, even a climate denier can get onboard with fighting fires and having shelter for heat.
If we stop at "it's the global warming", the response is either apathy or policies. We should prioritize things that will help right now.
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…).
And on top of that it’s El Niño.
Edit: Before anyone misconstrues what I'm saying: no, I'm not denying global warming. I'm just saying this is why this summer in particular was always likely to be a hot one in Europe.
And going forwards the sulphur thing has most likely caused a step change from temperatures in Europe before Covid, despite underlying warming continuing at the same rate
We have these fires in france since I was born in early 80s. As far as I remember we had them almost every year. Nothing new about it.
Doesn't say that global warming doesn't exist. But to shut of any discussion because of global warming is just wrong
Pines are the survivalists of the forests. They can grow where nobody else can. What I mean is that this monoculture of Pine trees is not really a monoculture. Is an ecosystem.
The Landes are set over a lot of marine sand, so is not easy to create a firewall (mixing flammable and less flammable trees). The solution of just replacing pines by other species is not so easy technically. Pines are the only native tree that can trive in such poor soil.
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.
This video is so insane. They're in a combustion engine. I can not fathom why they survived let alone managed to drive out of this. Trains are not build for fire resistance.
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).
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.
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>
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
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.
I think the more short term achievable one is better forest management; another thread mentions this is a big monoculture of pine trees planted nearly 200 years ago. Diversify the forests, create fire breaks, have a rapid fire response plan ready, improve water management, etc.
I'm worried that geoengineering will upset the balance of things even more, a temporary and short-term solution for incidents.
We are already doing some geo-engineering. That’s what putting megatonnes of greenhouse gases up the atmosphere is. We’re just too stupid and shorts-sighted to do it in any useful way.
That said, piling more geo-engineering on top of the problem will not solve it. It will just create more issues with unforeseen consequences and instability. What we really need to do is to reduce emissions. It’s much simpler and cheaper than any form of geo-engineering you could think of to mitigate the consequences.
Eventually it might. We don't have any good ideas about what would help without things getting much worse.
What we do need now is finally the determination to fight climate change. We have all the tools at our disposal to eliminate any fossil fuel burning within some years. We should finally take this as the priority it should be.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Yes, Spain has fires every year, but this time is different:
240,000 acres is about 97,000 hectares. By July 26, Spain had already lost more than 150,000 hectares, or around 371,000 acres, six times the area burned by the same point last year...
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.
I don't think parent thinks the radius of the circles is the range of the fire, that'd indeed mean our sea is currently on fire too, which hasn't happened in a very long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Biggest wildfire in the modern history of Norway: 2026
Biggest wildfire in Austria: 2026
Biggest wildfire in Germany: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Denmark: 2025
Biggest wildfire in UK: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Montenegro: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Serbia: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Albania: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Bulgaria: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Malta: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Ukraine: 2024
Biggest wildfire in USA: 2024
Biggest wildfire in Greece: 2023
Biggest wildfire in Switzerland: 2023
Biggest wildfire in Czechia: 2022
Biggest wildfire in Slovenia: 2022
Biggest wildfire in Italy: 2021
Biggest wildfire in Turkey: 2021
Biggest wildfire in Poland: 2020
Biggest wildfire in Ireland: 2020
Plus some special honorary mentions for some of the largest wildfires in:
- France: 2026
- Lithuania: 2026,
- Estonia: 2026.
- Cyprus: 2025
Almost every European country and USA suffered the biggest wildfires in their whole history in the same period as the Ukraine war. France still can sing bingo. Almost there.
Hungary on the other hand, suffered their biggest wildfire in 2012. One hurrah for Hungary. And Croatia in 2017, congratulations. I wonder what is different to the other countries here. They must clean their forests really good.
Just a point about precision, Google Maps fire overlay is based on NASA Firms + some processing, and it's not perfectly accurate.
It is currently marking my little town as under fire / burned down, but it's not and hasn't been so far. (north west front of the fire, next to the lake). It looks like their contouring algorithm is very greedy and any hot spot marked in the past few days has become part of their fire perimeter.
The massive fire clouds probably contribute to the difficulty of measuring ground temperature from satellite.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2026/07/27/le-pyrocum...
What is indicative of escalating climate catastrophe is indeed the intensity and frequency of those firestorms, not any lack of precedent for a cloud shape.
But the really salient observation is how people individually and their social system as a whole react (or not).
Debating the shapes of clouds points to a fundamental dysfunctional disconnect on multiple levels.
> Debating the shapes of clouds points to a fundamental dysfunctional disconnect on multiple levels.
No, it points to the HN community exhibiting the exact kind of neurodiversity that would be expected here. Specifically: an ability to compartmentalize, and to take interest in trying to be accurate about something less consequential, purely for accuracy's sake.
The fires being large enough to create their own thunderstorms is a proxy for intensity, hence the significance.
> What is indicative of escalating climate catastrophe is indeed the intensity and frequency of those firestorms
I don't think we have the data that proves this theory (which of course doesn't mean that the theory is wrong), because the vast majority of these fires are man-made, not natural disasters.
This year's Fontainebleau wildfires were caused by 1) a deranged person ligthning bushes and drenching them with fuel 2) a simple minded person throwing a cigaret but in bushes during a heat wave...
The huge wildfire in the south some years ago was caused by a similarly simple minded dude that caried his alight barbecue from one place to another on the back of his pickup truck (creating a dozen wildfires in the process along the road).
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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.
Article explaining when pine tree forest resist well or not to fire. https://www.sudouest.fr/faits-divers/incendies/incendies-en-...
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.
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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.
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Blaming everything on global warming is extremely dangerous. It fails to address many other reasons why we are experiencing fires and creates an easy to blame enemy and a sensation that there's nothing we can do.
We should really go way deeper than just blaming everything on an increase of temperatures, which nevertheless is actually happening.
We, locals, have been warning already for decades of the increase of fires due to an accumulation of reasons, which I have actually described already in another message down below but I can summarize here.
* Forest mass has actually increased a lot during the last decades, Spain has now around 50% more forest mass than in the 1970s.
* Part of the increased mass has to do with reforestation efforts done by governments happening since last half of last century, which basically planted many forests using pine varieties which grow very quickly but also burn quickly (Pines are biologically design to burn with their flammable design and dried needles, that's their feature).
* Historical local forest were composed of many varieties of trees, including oaks, holm oaks, poplar, which grow slowly, are way less prone to burn, and regrow again after a fire. Those varieties were never used in any reforestation efforts, which has resulted in many new forests being extremely prone to burn quickly
* Population has shifted enormously towards big cities, abandoning little villages where forests were part of their style of life. Lumber was part of their economical income, which resulted in continuous care of those forests and efforts in preservation. There are still some communities like that in some areas of Spain, and their forests have the lowest rate of wildfires in the whole country.
* Many techniques like firebreaks, counter-fires, low intensity burning to clear crop stubble, dry brush, and old vegetation to regenerate fresh grass for livestock and prepare fields are now forbidden, again increasing the risk and extension of wildfires
* Forest Grazing is also nowadays completely forbidden. Sheep used to roam everywhere in the country, consuming many burning-prone vegetation, reducing also the risk of wildfires.
But even despite all of that, countries like Spain for example, have nowadays the lowest proportion of burnt forest since the last 50 years.
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> Le sujet, c’est l’aridification du milieu. Pour revenir à cet incendie, ce n’est pas un problème de culture, mais de climat.
A bit of a distinction without a difference. The climate is not changing back, it's the new normal. In that climate, this particular kind of agriculture (huge pine monocultures) has become a problem.
It breaks my heart to say this, I've spent nearly all my childhood summers in my family's summer house down there. This year, I left just a few days before the evacuation order would have come.
It's going to be burning every year now and if we want to be safe there, the forest can't stay the same.
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To add to your point, it's also worthwhile to mention that there are stakeholders against solving the climate crisis of global warming (besides the usual suspects like producers of non-renewables like oil companies): some countries benefit from the climate change like the US and Mexico (they get higher agricultural yields IIRC) [0].
[0]: https://youtu.be/eRoU3whzX_Q?t=450
ETA: clarification
Agree about global warming.
However, Fontainebleau forest has many pine trees.
In fact there is an invasive caterpillar there that lives in pine trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_processionary
The caterpillars are also a consequence of warming.
Can confirm from my own experience that Fontainebleau forest is partly pine forests (40% according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Fontainebleau#Fauna,...).
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>The main reason the forest is burning is global warming.
I get where you're coming from but I don't think this is helpful.
Everyone with any sense knows global warming will cause heatwaves and they increase the risk of fires, but nobody in France can do anything about it. Even if everyone in France would do everything they can to stop global warming starting tomorrow, it would change nothing. It wouldn't help even if they got all of the EU on board.
What the people of France can do is demand more resources for fire protection, build air conditioned locations for the poor and elderly, plant trees for shade and so on.
This can be done immediately and will actually help. It also engages everyone, even a climate denier can get onboard with fighting fires and having shelter for heat.
If we stop at "it's the global warming", the response is either apathy or policies. We should prioritize things that will help right now.
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> A part of the Fontainebleau forest, much more north, no pine trees, went in smoke earlier. Forests are burning near Madrid.
Small correction, but Fontainebleau is a fairly mixed forest including 20-30% pine.
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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…).
And on top of that it’s El Niño.
Edit: Before anyone misconstrues what I'm saying: no, I'm not denying global warming. I'm just saying this is why this summer in particular was always likely to be a hot one in Europe.
And going forwards the sulphur thing has most likely caused a step change from temperatures in Europe before Covid, despite underlying warming continuing at the same rate
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We have these fires in france since I was born in early 80s. As far as I remember we had them almost every year. Nothing new about it. Doesn't say that global warming doesn't exist. But to shut of any discussion because of global warming is just wrong
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Regardless of your view on global warming, what's also vitally important is we don't do proper forest management anymore.
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.
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Might be time to revert it back to wetland.
Sounds like a good plan to me.
Probably a dozen reasons why we cannot that I am unaware of, but from my arm chair it looks good.
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We could reintroduce malaria, that might be a nice return to nature
or even just re-planting different types of trees
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Et Lancelot dans Brocéliande
Dans le roman de la Rose
Les pierres alignées de la lande
On sent quelque chose derrière les choses
Pines are the survivalists of the forests. They can grow where nobody else can. What I mean is that this monoculture of Pine trees is not really a monoculture. Is an ecosystem.
The Landes are set over a lot of marine sand, so is not easy to create a firewall (mixing flammable and less flammable trees). The solution of just replacing pines by other species is not so easy technically. Pines are the only native tree that can trive in such poor soil.
Something about the Pine tree that the British also planted forests of them in the Levant: https://www.trtworld.com/article/9ab8ec0a341a
sounds like Japan
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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.
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
This video is so insane. They're in a combustion engine. I can not fathom why they survived let alone managed to drive out of this. Trains are not build for fire resistance.
"ah, we're encased in flames here, eh?"
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:
https://static.actu.fr/uploads/2026/07/aeroport-bordeaux-fum...
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).
Good luck, and stay safe.
I'm 500 km away in Hérault and this morning was a tad hazy with smoke from there! Impressive I'd say.
What resources would you recommend to follow this event as it continues?
NASA FIRMS is good for tracking where the fire is. As well as the site another user recommended, I was following this one: https://feuxgironde.fr/
It’s in French but this crowd sourced website updates quite quickly : https://feuxdeforet.fr/gironde-33/saumos-22-07-2026-4367/
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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.
How can you identify large scale insect infestation from satellite imagery?
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.
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Interesting. Have you tried back testing your model agains fire data to analyze how well you could predict fire likelihood?
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 Landes Forest is a human disturbance.
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
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.
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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.
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As an aside, N. III's reign seems to have been overall something of a disaster for the French.
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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>
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/little...
https://archive.is/20260725052942/https://www.seattletimes.c...
Some more photos without a paywall. https://westseattleblog.com/2026/07/about-that-huge-cloud-vi...
"East" of Seattle is certainly one way to describe it (100 miles east).
Would you feel weird with someone saying 100 miles North of Miami, 100 miles Sourth of Orlando, 100 miles west of Huston, 100 miles South of Chicago?
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Taylor Swift recently got married east of Seattle
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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.
People need to learn what compound words are.
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].
[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...
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.
To be fair, it's not the article that's the problem. Pyrocumulonimbus is the accepted scientific name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_flammagenitus.
Thanks for the article. However, the article mentions that they might involve precipitation.
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The term used by the UK Royal Meteorological Society is pyrocumulonimbus: https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/pyrocumulonimbus-clouds
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
It rains ash. While it’s a metaphorical use of “rain” it’s physically accurate.
Apparently this cloud can create lightning and its own wind though
it rains hellfire
We get these in the Australian bushfire season, the weather systems they create can flip a 10 tonne fire appliance. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/31/volun...
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.
Geoengineering proposals spring from the same impulse as climate denial — anything to avoid consequences for those contributing to the crisis.
Is this about some kind of sense of "justice", or is it about solving the problem?
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I think the more short term achievable one is better forest management; another thread mentions this is a big monoculture of pine trees planted nearly 200 years ago. Diversify the forests, create fire breaks, have a rapid fire response plan ready, improve water management, etc.
I'm worried that geoengineering will upset the balance of things even more, a temporary and short-term solution for incidents.
The mono culture AND the encroachment on flood plain is still to this day and issue.
We are already doing some geo-engineering. That’s what putting megatonnes of greenhouse gases up the atmosphere is. We’re just too stupid and shorts-sighted to do it in any useful way.
That said, piling more geo-engineering on top of the problem will not solve it. It will just create more issues with unforeseen consequences and instability. What we really need to do is to reduce emissions. It’s much simpler and cheaper than any form of geo-engineering you could think of to mitigate the consequences.
Eventually it might. We don't have any good ideas about what would help without things getting much worse.
What we do need now is finally the determination to fight climate change. We have all the tools at our disposal to eliminate any fossil fuel burning within some years. We should finally take this as the priority it should be.
We can't even agree on wasting less fuel or moving to less damaging fuel sources.
Could start with Sulphur spray into atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Wonder how much 2020 Bunker Fuel ban contributed.
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.
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Yay, acid rains.
So, if you used climate credits, to build up those forrests. Do they get nil and void, if those forrests burn up?
Bold to assume that buying emission offsets actually leads to anything tangible being done.
A lot of the more realistic environmentalists very quickly figured out that it was nothing more than an accounting trick.
Greta Thunberg announces she has gone 'net-zero' on swearing after 'f-bomb' furore - https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/greta-t...
Saving the environment with Microsoft Excel.
It fills the pockets of grifters.
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.
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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?
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.
This also addresses the tree death issue.
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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.
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You claim a new tree on your insurance.
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)
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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.
They should go negative because the gigantic amount of CO2 being released right now because of the obvious incompetence of the authorites is criminal.
Don't look up
Spain is also completely on fire - there's a website that collects all official information and locates every fire on a map:
https://xn--incendiosespaa-2nb.es/ (in Spanish)
It is disheartening to see how everything is basically in red.
Is it me or is the map broken as it's blocked by OSM. I get tiles that say: Access blocked ..... osm.wiki/Blocked ?
spain loses ~240,000 acres to wildfire every year. this is larger than normal, but fire is normal there
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.
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Yes, Spain has fires every year, but this time is different:
240,000 acres is about 97,000 hectares. By July 26, Spain had already lost more than 150,000 hectares, or around 371,000 acres, six times the area burned by the same point last year...
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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.
Spain planted eucalyptus in state forrest. Tha treeis a bomb.
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Meh, everything emboldens them. Pretending there is no change also emboldens them.
If you unzoom even more, even the sea is red. I don't think this map shows what you think it does.
I don't think parent thinks the radius of the circles is the range of the fire, that'd indeed mean our sea is currently on fire too, which hasn't happened in a very long time.
67 comments. One mention of “climate crisis” (appropriate), 3 of “climate credits”.
No one here is really discussing “climate change”.
Is it denial, or just that we’ve accepted the obvious?
What is there to discuss? Outlier weather events are growing more common and the hot summer obviously played a role here.
Even climate change denial has moved from denying the fact to denying that we can fix anything, for either economic or technical reasons.
> What is there to discuss?
The governance crisis: how can we follow science on so many things, how can countries completely change on short order, but not for this...
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We can fix it nonetheless, we have the resources and the need. We broke it and we will fix it
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Yep, the 5 steps of climate denial.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
acceptance; the problems identified. efforts now should focus on innovative solutions that dont rely on nation state investment.
Why? The vast majority of fossil fuel production globally is through state-owned companies.
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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.
Thank you for this
Must…
Build…
More…
Datacenters…
But seriously, hacker news routinely denies the obvious when it comes to climate crisis.
That's because there is the chance that it will benefit them short term over others. F U I got mine! Or just ignorance.
Where are you seeing such denial?
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From what I read in another comment this was caused by Napoleon.
Napoleon did his geo-engineering 150 years ago, in a completely different world. He's not the one to blame here.
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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.
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.
"Witness to Disaster | National Geographic" - https://youtu.be/clTeqIpGBeU
https://youtu.be/clTeqIpGBeU?t=1734
At 12:00 pyrocumulus is explained.
At 29:00 pyrocumulonimbus is explained.
Lets have a resume:
Biggest wildfire in the history of Spain: 2026
Biggest wildfire in the modern history of Norway: 2026
Biggest wildfire in Austria: 2026
Biggest wildfire in Germany: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Denmark: 2025
Biggest wildfire in UK: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Montenegro: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Serbia: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Albania: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Bulgaria: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Malta: 2025
Biggest wildfire in Ukraine: 2024
Biggest wildfire in USA: 2024
Biggest wildfire in Greece: 2023
Biggest wildfire in Switzerland: 2023
Biggest wildfire in Czechia: 2022
Biggest wildfire in Slovenia: 2022
Biggest wildfire in Italy: 2021
Biggest wildfire in Turkey: 2021
Biggest wildfire in Poland: 2020
Biggest wildfire in Ireland: 2020
Plus some special honorary mentions for some of the largest wildfires in:
- France: 2026
- Lithuania: 2026,
- Estonia: 2026.
- Cyprus: 2025
Almost every European country and USA suffered the biggest wildfires in their whole history in the same period as the Ukraine war. France still can sing bingo. Almost there.
Hungary on the other hand, suffered their biggest wildfire in 2012. One hurrah for Hungary. And Croatia in 2017, congratulations. I wonder what is different to the other countries here. They must clean their forests really good.
> This smoke cloud generates its own weather system
Fascinating, we’ve got sentient clouds before sentient AI
This is a reminder that wildfires are becoming more unpredictable than ever.
>it is a war-like scenario where we are under constant bombardment and must get everyone to safety
Thank you for your service everyone, these are real life heroes like the ones you see on Star Wars movies but real.
Google Maps provides overlays for wildfires and air quality. I can watch Western Europe from here.
Just a point about precision, Google Maps fire overlay is based on NASA Firms + some processing, and it's not perfectly accurate.
It is currently marking my little town as under fire / burned down, but it's not and hasn't been so far. (north west front of the fire, next to the lake). It looks like their contouring algorithm is very greedy and any hot spot marked in the past few days has become part of their fire perimeter.
The massive fire clouds probably contribute to the difficulty of measuring ground temperature from satellite.
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/9985621#zippy=%2Csour...
That's remember me of https://www.france24.com/en/20190824-macron-france-brazil-bo...
> 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:
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.
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.
Wow, the audacity of that guy. When is the rest of the world sanctioning France for these fires?
In other news, July 23 has recorded the busiest flight day ever with over 150k flights: https://simpleflying.com/over-150000-flights-airlines-busies...
“Australia enters the chat”
fire force
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Everyone needs to remember those who were deniers and followers of them
Never let them live this down
https://rehost.diberie.com/Picture/Get/f/532005
Picture from the french "moderate" right journal Le Figaro, mai 2026.
"investigation into environmental alarmists"
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Yeah, lets not forget Bush sr switching from advocating action against climate change to enforcing inaction on the political pretence of protecting jobs.
https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/globalwarming2ed/chpt/bush...
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The president of the United States, and pretty much all his cult-members/followers
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.
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...
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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.
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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.
It is too easy to blame climate change.
Forest fires are possible to prevent most of the time. We lack the political will to do controlled burns.
And climate change is making them worse.
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.
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They denied climate change even before the data center boom. Poor argument, even if the target you want is on the side of the field you’re aiming at.
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.
At least everything you listed already existed. AI didn't exist until recently, so the pain of changing your lifestyle does not apply.
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!"
All of that is using way less energy then AI is planning to use.
Specifically, eating out may even save energy. Arguing on HN consumes very little of it. Same with watching football on tv
I feel like this would be much less of an issue if the datacenters were all fully solar+battery powered.
But if the forests burn down, that makes more tree-free land to build more datacenters!
(/s, it's a joke, like this one: https://i.imgur.com/CMsAp8v.png )
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.
One of the biggest lies is that these events will only happen (or will happen first) to the "global south" and only affect the "other peoples".
Unfortunately for us, the Earth has no preferences and doesn't run on our schedule.
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.
Here is the image/tweet that will live on for a long while regarding the accelerated timeline.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3...
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.)
Too keep it from killing too many people too fast, anyway.
on average, 240k acres burn every year in Spain. this is somewhat larger, but not abnormal. it's just near people this time.
I guess I need a disclaimer on every comment that says "climate change is obviously real you can save your downvotes"
Practical and honest, love it
I’m sure if we build a few more AI data centers the world will cool down and we’ll stop having all these fires.
Just a few more GPUs ought to fix it.
I always though it would be funny if we actually did manage to get to super AGI, we then ask it "How can we save the future for us?"
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.
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.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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I hope I'm not the only one who wanted to check PyPi to see what package is this... '-.-
this package drops u in the line of fire.
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.