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 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.
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.
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).
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>
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Probably a dozen reasons why we cannot that I am unaware of, but from my arm chair it looks good.
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.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/little...
https://xn--incendiosespaa-2nb.es/ (in Spanish)
It is disheartening to see how everything is basically in red.
Greta Thunberg announces she has gone 'net-zero' on swearing after 'f-bomb' furore - https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/greta-t...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your service everyone, these are real life heroes like the ones you see on Star Wars movies but real.
"Witness to Disaster | National Geographic" - https://youtu.be/clTeqIpGBeU
https://youtu.be/clTeqIpGBeU?t=1734
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...
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.
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 )
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.
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.