It's The End of the World As We Know It

 

Welcome to the Pyrocene

Five years ago, I wrote an essay about a succession of catastrophes that had struck British Columbia.

First came the heat.

In June 2021, a heat dome settled over western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. In the village of Lytton, British Columbia, the temperature reached an almost unimaginable 49.6°C. The following day, Lytton burned. Within minutes, fire raced through the community, eventually destroying roughly 90 percent of the village.

Then came the floods.

Only months later, an atmospheric river poured extraordinary amounts of rain onto the same region. Highways and railways were severed. Communities were evacuated. Vancouver, one of Canada’s largest cities and its principal Pacific port, was temporarily cut off by land from the rest of the country.

At the time, these events seemed almost apocalyptic. Five years later, they look more like a preview.

Something larger is happening now. Something that becomes difficult to recognize if we continue treating each heatwave, drought, flood or wildfire as an isolated “natural disaster.” We may be witnessing the end of an epoch.

Consider July 2026.

Across the contiguous United States, the average temperature reached 76.9°F, making July not merely the hottest July in the 132-year instrumental record, but the hottest month ever recorded in the lower 48 states. Every state was warmer than its twentieth-century average. Perhaps even more telling, nighttime temperatures were the highest ever recorded for any month. The atmosphere was not releasing its heat after sunset.

Across the Atlantic, western Europe experienced its hottest June–July period on record. Persistent high-pressure systems repeatedly trapped hot air over the continent. Heat dried the soils; dry soils lost their capacity to cool the atmosphere through evaporation; the hotter atmosphere then dried the landscape further. Heat created drought, and drought amplified heat.

By July, soil moisture across parts of western Europe had fallen to extraordinary levels. France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom experienced severe rainfall or soil-moisture deficits. Rivers including the Seine, Rhine and Danube ran exceptionally low. Western Europe endured its third and fourth heatwaves since May.

And then came the fires.

Prolonged heat and drought created conditions for exceptional wildfire activity across western Europe. France was on course for one of its most extreme fire-emission years in the twenty-four-year Copernicus (EU) record, while Spanish wildfire emissions were running well above average. Climate scientists warned that the conditions favouring large, high-intensity fires in southern Europe are extending northward.

Meanwhile, the oceans were heating too.

In July 2026, the average sea-surface temperature across the extra-polar global ocean reached 20.96°C, the highest ever recorded for July. Marine heatwaves spread across the Atlantic and western Mediterranean. From June 19 through the end of July, daily extra-polar ocean surface temperatures were the highest observed for those respective calendar days.

And atmospheric carbon dioxide continues its relentless climb. When systematic measurements began at Mauna Loa in 1958, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations stood near 315 parts per million. In July 2026, the monthly Mauna Loa average was 429.12 ppm.

The numbers change every year. The physics does not.

We Left the Holocene Behind

For roughly 11,700 years after the last ice age, human civilization developed during an extraordinarily favourable climatic interval: the Holocene.

Climate certainly fluctuated during that period. Civilizations rose and collapsed. Droughts occurred. Forests burned. Rivers flooded. But within the broad geological picture, Earth’s climate remained unusually stable.

That stability provided the environmental platform upon which agriculture, cities, states, global trade networks and eventually industrial civilization arose. We built our civilization assuming that platform would remain beneath us.

It hasn’t.

Beginning with industrialization, humanity discovered an extraordinary source of concentrated energy buried beneath the Earth’s surface. Coal, then oil and natural gas, allowed us to mobilize energies unimaginable to previous civilizations.

We learned to burn the ancient biosphere.

Fossil fuels are, after all, stored sunlight captured by organisms millions of years ago and transformed through geological processes into concentrated carbon. When we burn them, we release that ancient carbon into the contemporary atmosphere. The industrial revolution therefore represented more than a technological transformation.

It was a planetary event.

For convenience, we have called the resulting era the Anthropocene: the age in which human activity became a force capable of altering Earth systems. But perhaps the Anthropocene is better understood not as our destination, but as a transition.

An interregnum.

A bridge between the Holocene and something else. Fire historian Stephen J. Pyne has proposed a name for what comes next: the Pyrocene.

Welcome to the Age of Fire

Pyne asks us to understand human history through fire.

Humans first learned to manipulate living fire: burning grasses, forests and wood. Fire cooked our food, protected our camps, reshaped ecosystems and eventually powered furnaces and cities.

Then we made a consequential transition.

Instead of burning contemporary biomass, we began excavating and burning fossil biomass — coal, petroleum and natural gas.

Pyne calls this a new kind of fire.

By burning geological stores of carbon accumulated over immense periods of time, industrial civilization liberated energy on a scale unavailable to societies dependent upon living landscapes.

And in doing so, we changed the atmosphere.

Pyne describes the Pyrocene as a Fire Age comparable in planetary significance to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Our alliance with fire, he argues, helped take humanity to the top of the food chain and now threatens to destabilize the planetary systems upon which we depend.

The irony is profound. We burn fossil fuels underground, in engines, power plants, furnaces and factories. The resulting greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. That warming produces hotter landscapes, greater atmospheric thirst, longer periods of drought and more combustible vegetation.

And eventually the fire emerges above ground again: Forest fires. Grass fires. Peat fires. Tundra fires. Megafires. In Pyne’s memorable formulation, industrial fire has created conditions for more fire. The combustion hidden inside industrial civilization returns to us as combustion across the landscape.

There Will Be No “New Normal”

One phrase increasingly bothers me: the new normal.

After every record heatwave, every unprecedented wildfire season, every “once in a century” flood that arrives only a few years after the previous one, someone inevitably declares that we must adapt to the new normal.

But there is no new normal. A normal implies stability. We are moving through a changing system.

If greenhouse-gas concentrations stabilize, global temperatures can eventually stabilize as well. But as long as humanity continues adding large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, additional energy accumulates within the climate system.

This is not ideology. It is physics.

The greenhouse properties of carbon dioxide were understood in the nineteenth century. Increasing atmospheric CO₂ changes Earth’s radiative balance. More energy remains within the Earth system.

That additional energy expresses itself in complicated ways because climate is a dynamic system: altered rainfall, changing circulation patterns, melting ice, warming oceans, drought, extreme precipitation and shifting ecosystems. But the basic direction of travel is remarkably simple.

More Greenhouse Gases Mean More Warming.

And more warming increasingly loads the dice toward extreme heat. Extreme heat dries vegetation and soils. Dry vegetation increases fire danger. Hotter and drier conditions lengthen fire seasons. Longer fire seasons create more opportunities for ignition during dangerous conditions.

And fires occurring under extreme conditions can burn with greater intensity, generate their own atmospheric behaviour and appear in landscapes previously considered marginal to major wildfire risk.

Copernicus scientists are already observing the northward extension of conditions favouring large, high-intensity fires in Europe.

The traditional idea of four seasons begins to lose some of its ecological relevance in fire-prone landscapes. Increasingly, there may be another calendar: the fire season and the off-season.

From Wicked Problem to Predicament

Years ago, I thought of climate change as a wicked problem.

Wicked problems are extraordinarily difficult to solve because they involve competing interests, enormous complexity, incomplete information and solutions that create additional problems.

Climate change certainly qualifies. But I increasingly wonder whether the more appropriate word is predicament.

Problems have solutions. Predicaments have consequences.

A person trapped aboard a sinking ship does not “solve” the ocean. The available choices concern how much damage can still be avoided, what can be saved and how survival can be maximized.

That does not mean mitigation is pointless. Quite the opposite. Every fraction of a degree matters. Every tonne of carbon dioxide not emitted matters. Every forest protected, wetland restored, fossil-fuel plant retired, transportation system electrified or building made more efficient alters the trajectory.

But there is no longer a pathway back to the climate of the eighteenth century within human timescales. The consequences already set in motion must be managed while we attempt to prevent far worse ones. And increasingly we must pay attention to another danger: the possibility that parts of the Earth system that have been helping us begin helping us less.

When the Sinks Begin to Weaken

Until now, humanity has enjoyed an extraordinary subsidy from nature. We emit carbon dioxide, but not all of it remains in the atmosphere. Forests, soils and oceans absorb enormous quantities of carbon. The ocean alone has absorbed roughly 29 percent of human CO₂ emissions during the past decade. Without these natural carbon sinks, atmospheric CO₂ would be rising much faster. But they cannot simply be assumed to behave forever as they have in the past.

The 2025 Global Carbon Budget reports that the ocean carbon sink has been essentially stagnant since 2016. Climate change and climate variability are already reducing ocean uptake relative to what it otherwise would have been, partly because warmer water holds less dissolved CO₂ and changing circulation affects the movement of carbon into the deep ocean.

This does not mean the oceans are “full.” They continue absorbing enormous quantities of carbon. But it does mean that one of the great uncertainties of our future concerns the efficiency of that absorption in a hotter world.

The same concern applies on land.

And nowhere is that more unsettling than in the Arctic. Northern permafrost contains roughly 1.4 to 1.6 trillion tonnes of carbon, accumulated over thousands of years in frozen soils. As permafrost thaws, microbes begin decomposing organic material that had previously remained frozen. That decomposition releases carbon dioxide and methane.

The feedback is obvious: warming thaws permafrost; thawing releases greenhouse gases; greenhouse gases produce additional warming; additional warming produces additional thaw. This is no longer entirely hypothetical.

NOAA reports that, when wildfire emissions are included, Arctic tundra has shifted from being a long-term carbon store toward becoming a net source of carbon dioxide, while the region remains a consistent methane source.

We should be careful here. Science does not support the simplistic idea that one day the entire Arctic suddenly “melts” and releases all its methane in a catastrophic burst. The danger is slower and, in some ways, more disturbing.

Feedbacks can progressively make our task harder. Natural systems that have buffered industrial emissions can weaken. Some can shift from sinks toward sources. The hill we are trying to climb can become steeper while we are climbing it.

The End of the World as We Know It

When people hear language like “the end of an epoch,” they sometimes imagine apocalypse. A sudden ending. Civilization one day; wasteland the next. That is probably the wrong metaphor. Earth is not about to become Venus.

Human beings are not likely to disappear suddenly because the global average temperature crosses some magical numerical threshold. Something more complicated is happening.

The climatic envelope within which human civilization developed is shifting. Some regions become harder to farm. Some become harder to insure. Some become dangerously hot for outdoor labour.

Water systems become less reliable. Coastlines retreat. Wildfire zones expand. Infrastructure designed for twentieth-century conditions begins encountering twenty-first-century extremes. Food systems experience simultaneous shocks across different regions. Migration pressures increase.

Governments and economies are forced to spend increasing amounts of their resources repairing yesterday’s disaster while preparing for tomorrow’s. Habitability does not disappear everywhere at once. It contracts unevenly. And civilization becomes increasingly expensive to maintain.

That is what an epochal transition might look like from inside it. Not a trumpet announcing the end. A succession of broken records. Until eventually we realize that what we had thought were extraordinary events were actually markers along a trajectory.

Five years ago, watching the village of Lytton burn and British Columbia subsequently disappear beneath floodwaters, I thought I was witnessing climate change. Today, I think I am witnessing something larger.

I am watching one geological regime give way to another.

For thousands of years, civilization flourished inside the climatic stability of the Holocene. Industrial civilization disrupted that stability during the Anthropocene. And now the accumulated consequences of our combustion are becoming visible across the atmosphere, oceans and landscapes.

The Pyrocene Is Arriving.

Not because fire suddenly appeared. Fire has been part of Earth for hundreds of millions of years. It is arriving because a fire-wielding species discovered how to excavate the buried carbon of ancient worlds, burn it at planetary scale and alter the atmosphere sufficiently to create conditions for yet more fire.

That is the predicament.

And this summer is not the new normal.

It is simply where we are now.