The most intense firestorms in the world

This is not new. Pyrocumulonimbus (misspelt in the article) clouds were observed starting fires through lightning in the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia, most of which were nowhere near the coast. It was reported at the time in the local mass media, although possibly not by that name.

Here's what Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has to say about pyrocumulonimbus:

http://media.bom.gov.au/social/blog/1618/when-bushfires-make...

Chasing the links there, it appears there are academics involved in research into this scattered around the country. The BBC article does mention a couple of collaborations, but makes it sound like Castellnou is a one man band going around the world "investigating".

Back to the BoM article, which was from 2018, and I think the "future" supercomputer it mentions for better modelling is now funded.

I did not really understand how hot a forest fire gets until I explored the aftermath on a friends mountain land.

The first thing I noticed is there was almost no ash. The firestorm winds blew all the light ash away so it is like entire trees just evaporated.

The next weird thing were the holes in the ground where you could look inside and see the voids where all the roots used to be. You see the negative image of the root system baked into the soil.

I'm not sure the title is accurate. We've known about fires like this for well over a century. The military wondered if it could weaponize them to destroy the enemy.

The first real world use of such a weapon was in WWII when the USA firebombed Dresden with a quarter million incendiary bombs, decimating a city, sending a vortex of fire a mile into the air visible 500 miles away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...

It traumatized Kurt Vonnegut for life and he wrote Slaughterhouse Five about it, among other sci-fi works.

I'm surprised the article didn't mention it, but it should be known. It might be a like a lot of the climate change stuff that thinks all this is new, but it's not. Makes ya wonder. Makes me wonder anyway.

The darkness of humanity scares me way worse than some wild fires which are natural and necessary for the cycle of life. We are control freaks to some degree and encroaching more into mother nature's territory.

Just because these things are having a bigger effect on human life, doesn't mean they haven't been around for a long time. There are more of us, so it's just math.

Every predator species exhausts the environment of prey. We've reached a tipping point for sure. We aren't immune to the laws of nature. Too many livestock will destroy their habitat eventually too. Too many foxes will eat all the rabbits. Keep thousands of birds confined to small spaces, they'll die of viral infections too.

We are animals too. We can over run our environment too. We've done it over and over. Just... now, there's nowhere left to go and we've created all these artificial boundaries around areas. Walling them off from natural migration. Koalas die that way. Deer and wolves die that way too. Artificial boundaries.

The atmosphere is a pretty hard stop. Sure, there's the moon and Mars, but there aren't many rabbits there either. Or potatoes.

You know I realized tonight, we have this natural instinct I think to get sick of ourselves. Forge ahead to new worlds. Get away from the oppressive people sapping us of our productivity and labor. We want to be free!

But there's no where left to go. And now we are stuck with ourselves. And we can't get along. Some people want to oppress and some people want to be free. And there's no where to go. So, there's going to be a fight.

Like those foxes over that last rabbit.

This kind of firestorm was the result of bombing raids against Dresden, famously, but also in dozens of Japanese cities including Tokyo, where 100,000 people died in a single day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

That was a scary read. Somehow I don't think that we've seen the end of them!