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Guest Essay

By John Vaillant

Mr. Vaillant is the author, most recently, of “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World.”

On Thursday, as flames from the Smokehouse Creek Fire raced eastward across the Texas Panhandle for the fourth straight day at speeds faster than a person can run, a cold front, driving a snow squall, swept southward over the Great Plains. In an elemental collision, the fire and snow met east of Amarillo, the swirling flakes joining, and then melting, into the smoke and ash of the colossal prairie fire.

The snowstorm has passed, but the fire — one among several major blazes active in Texas — keeps burning. As of Friday, the Smokehouse Creek Fire had affected more than a million acres, making it the largest wildfire in Texas history, and one of the biggest in the history of the country. Still only 15 percent contained, it has crossed into Oklahoma, leaving in its wake herds of dead cattle and dozens of burned homes. At least two people have died. The forecast is for what people in the firefighting business call “fire weather” — hot, dry and windy. Under these conditions, the dozen fires in the region could, theoretically, keep burning indefinitely.

Texans know that fires aren’t uncommon in the Panhandle this time of year, and neither is snow. But huge, lethal fires like Smokehouse Creek represent something different. Winter fires on this scale signal a much larger disruption to climate stability that will........

© The New York Times