Might be time to revert it back to wetland.

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

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...

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.

What resources would you recommend to follow this event as it continues?

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.

The term used by the UK Royal Meteorological Society is pyrocumulonimbus: https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/pyrocumulonimbus-clouds

It rains ash. While it’s a metaphorical use of “rain” it’s physically accurate.

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).

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.

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.

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.

acceptance; the problems identified. efforts now should focus on innovative solutions that dont rely on nation state investment.

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.

Must…

Build…

More…

Datacenters…

But seriously, hacker news routinely denies the obvious when it comes to climate crisis.

From what I read in another comment this was caused by Napoleon.

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 loses ~240,000 acres to wildfire every year. this is larger than normal, but fire is normal there

Bold to assume that buying emission offsets actually leads to anything tangible being done.

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.

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?

They should go negative because the gigantic amount of CO2 being released right now because of the obvious incompetence of the authorites is criminal.

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.

Could start with Sulphur spray into atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

Wonder how much 2020 Bunker Fuel ban contributed.

> 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.

Wow, the audacity of that guy. When is the rest of the world sanctioning France for these fires?

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.

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.)

on average, 240k acres burn every year in Spain. this is somewhat larger, but not abnormal. it's just near people this time.

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.