"Weird” is the word of the hour in U.S. politics. But it also does a good job of describing how natural disasters are behaving as the planet heats up and the weather turns freaky.
Consider wildfires. Late last month, the Park Fire in Northern California spread at a shocking 5,000 acres, or roughly 8 square miles, per hour to rapidly cover more ground than all of Los Angeles. Within a 72-hour period, it had reached 350,000 acres, an "extraordinary” rate of expansion given the density of the coniferous forest being consumed, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an interview. "I am not sure we’ve seen faster rates of spread on a modern California wildfire,” Swain noted.
The Park Fire has at times been so intense that it created towering plumes of smoke and ash that sucked in wind and extended the fire’s deadly reach in unpredictable ways, making it more difficult for firefighters to react. To add terror to injury, it created vortexes of fire known as "firenados."