Water bombers, the air cavalry of wildfire fighting, buzz the treetops like air show stunt pilots as they save the day with surgical drops of water or orange retardant.
But what happens when those drops have no effect? When, as a pilot working the massive Gironde Fire just west of Bordeaux, France, described it, “The environment above the fire is so hot that my payload of 10,000 liters of water evaporates in the air.”? Mathieu Jomain, a commander and 26-year veteran in Gironde’s fire service, compared the fire’s intensity to “a meteorological nuclear bomb.”
This is the new reality of wildfires in the 21st Century: they hit different. And, too often now, the water doesn’t hit at all.
From America to Algeria, dangerous blazes are occurring around the world, giving us a glimpse into an age ablaze. We should all be asking the question: What will this age entail?
Flames engulf trees as a wildfire burns during overnight in La Adrada, Spain on July 26, 2026. Diego Radames—Anadolu/Getty Images
In Spain, where several massive fires recently began burning with comparable ferocity, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska declared, “We are facing the most significant and aggressive fire in Spain’s history.” Spain is more than 500 years old.
Across France and Spain alone, approximately a third of a million people have been displaced, the largest evacuations since World War II, but that is just the one among many examples. This summer, evacuations are ongoing across Europe, from Portugal to Turkey. Earlier this summer in Germany, evacuations were ordered in record-breaking heat after a wildfire triggered explosions in a nature reserve strewn with leftover ordnance from World War II.
Between drought, heat, and wildfire, much of the world is summering in record-breaking territory. The U.K., its iconic green landscape now parched to desert brown, is suffering one of its worst droughts since record-keeping began. Eight time zones away, Spokane, Washington, endures similarly outlandish temperatures as it continues to battle the most destructive wildfire the city and state has ever seen. With no relief in sight, there is, according to the city’s mayor, Lisa Brown, a years-long recovery already baked in. British Columbia, which has suffered several of the worst fire seasons in its history over the past decade, is bracing itself for the worst one yet. In Utah, fire officials are saying the same thing. In Russia this month, temperatures broke 90°F. at two different weather stations at the Arctic Circle, nearly 3,000 miles north of Miami, where such temperatures are the norm for this time of year.
We are witnessing, live and in person, a terrible convergence of prolonged drought and record-breaking temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere. It is a convergence expressed most emphatically by unfightable fires racing across tinder-dry landscapes, fanned by high winds that are, increasingly, generated by the fires themselves. Just as warm waters fuel hurricanes, hot landscapes alive with roaring fire energize a wildfire’s chimney-like central column by burning all available fuel—grassland, forests, and neighborhoods alike—with explosive speed, and irrepressible ferocity that can produce flames higher than a thirty-story building and radiant heat approaching 1,000°F.
The ultimate expression of such a fire (so far) is the pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud or pyroCb, a colossal fireborne weather system that rotates like a hurricane, can shroud a major city in choking smoke, and puncture the stratosphere, allowing its mushroom cloud to achieve altitudes normally reserved for intercontinental jets. In order to oxygenate themselves, these massive systems inhale huge volumes of fresh air from the surrounding area, much as a hurricane does, and with similar effects on windspeed.
These massive fire weather systems, once an anomaly only seen over volcanoes, did not enter the vocabulary of fire scientists until the late 1990s, when atmospheric CO2 reached 370 parts per million (ppm)—about 30% higher than pre-industrial levels. It was only in the 2000s that wildfires, formerly seasonal events for which there was a well-rehearsed response, became able to generate these self-perpetuating and uncontainable firestorm clouds on a regular basis. Since 2016, they have become a feature of major fires across the North American West, but until the past year or two, they were virtually unknown in Europe. Matchstick-dry pine plantations in Gironde, France generated what is believed to be that country’s first-ever pyroCb just last week. Today, atmospheric CO2 is pushing 430 ppm, more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
This matters to all of us because once a fire generates a pyrocumulonumbus cloud, it can perpetuate itself almost indefinitely by creating its own fiery weather, including ember blizzards and lightning strikes able to ignite fuels well beyond the current perimeter of the fire. Nothing and no one can stop a pyroCb save for a regional change in the weather, or an ocean-sized body of water.
With infernos burning so hot that water evaporates before even reaching the flames, firefighting operations are devolving, increasingly, into lifesaving operations. Whether you’re in the suburbs of Athens, Bordeaux, or Spokane, evacuation is often the only viable option. Over the past decade, millions of unsuspecting people have found themselves in the path of these hyper-scaling flames and, from Valparaiso, Chile to Fort McMurray, Alberta, victims are astonished by the speeds at which these fires move—speeds which photos and even video clips can fail to adequately convey.
This is climate breakdown, and its expressions are manifold. We can now expect everything from yellow and orange air and failed crops to buckling railways and the forced shutdowns of nuclear plants due to low water. When temperatures exceed 110°F, passenger planes must consider lightening their loads. At 120 degrees (an increasingly common summer temperature across the Middle East and the American Southwest), flights are often canceled altogether. Such temperatures also ground firefighting aircraft, leaving cities, towns and forests even more vulnerable to a wildfire’s whims.
Bearing the brunt of our new climate reality, of course, is the simmering countryside, desert dry and ready to ignite from the first mechanical spark, hot muffler, or flying ember. In many parts of the world—such as southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East—many charred and desiccated landscapes are no longer able to support the agriculture they have nurtured for thousands of years. As a result, for instance, wine production is decreasing globally, not just because of changing tastes but because heat, drought, and increasingly unstable weather are disrupting this ancient crop and craft.