Yes, in this era of hotter, dryer, fired-up weather we need a new vocabulary. Pyrocumulus describes those mushroom clouds of smoke, ash and steam rising from huge wildfires like the one near Redding. Turns out not just the clouds, but the firestorm behavior is similar to a natural thunderstorm, complete with lightning.
Here’s CNN’s summary of the many fires–sixty uncontained–burning across our land.
Just to be sure we aren’t going to stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon, our government and all of us taxpayers are paying large subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Not something we can brag about to our grandkids who will live in a hotter, more dangerous, perhaps hungrier world.
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