John Vaillant Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World-火灾天气

2016年，一场野火席卷了艾伯塔省的石油小镇麦克默里堡，火势大到足以使路灯弯成两半。这也是加拿大历史上损失最惨重的灾难。这本令人震惊的著作追踪了过去一百五十年来火灾在工业中的破坏和作用，以及科学家早在十八世纪五十年代就提出的有关环境的警报。

约翰·威兰特在书中写道：“气候科学与石油和汽车工业同步发展，它们的未来与过去息息相关。”面临与麦克默里堡类似命运的地方正在迅速增加，尽管“我们对工业二氧化碳排放的思考”前行得极其缓慢。
 
书名：Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World《火灾天气》

作者：John Vaillant

简介：A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation that modern forest fires wreak, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. His urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.