California’s Fire Tornado Is What Climate Change Looks Like

The massive Carr Fire, still burning mostly uncontained near Redding, California.  At last count, 1,555 homes have burned — one of the most destructive fires in California history.  Six of the state’s 20 most destructive fires on record have occurred in the past 10 months.

If it looks to you like a giant fire tornado, you’d be right.  And living through it was just as terrifying as you’d expect.

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Governor Jerry Brown said simply, “We are in uncharted territories.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why he’s right.  July was the hottest month ever measured in Redding.  Burnable vegetation in the area is at the 99th percentile.  These are ideal conditions for a megafire.  The Carr Fire alone is more than four times larger than the city of San Francisco; its smoke is setting records for the worst air quality in history as far away as 200 miles away in Reno, Nevada.

But perhaps the most unusual thing about the Carr Fire is the incredibly strong winds it created:

The heat from the fire was so intense that it created a towering, rotating cloud six miles high — meteorologists call them pyrocumulus, but this one effectively was a giant tornado.  The wind damage from the Carr Fire is consistent with speeds in excess of 100 mph ...

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