This is an interesting video of a fire vortex that has been making the rounds on the web. I’ve seen this phenomenon before in wildfires here in California, but this one is rather dramatic in color, intensity, and longevity. It’s worth a look. Don’t be surprised if we see a “global warming increases the frequency of fire tornados” sometime in the future.
In regards to the issue of seeing more “wild weather phenomena” lately in the news, I’ll point out that the expansion of cheap high quality cameras has made the reporting frequency increase thanks to millions of ordinary citizens being armed with them.
That shouldn’t be confused with a statistical increase of occurrence. For example, one could argue that with more cameras afoot in the field, we’d see more UFO and bigfoot sitings, but the truth is that these have not increased like weather sitings have.
In this video from AP, that also has the “Tornado of Fire”, note the stopped line of cars.
How many photos and videos of this event were taken by people that had cameras? I’m guessing a lot.
Here’s another one just this week:
and another in 2008…
In fact if you search YouTube you’ll find dozens…ten years ago could we have seen these? If one looks at the frequency of “fire tornados” in the last few years it would be easy to conclude they are a rising trend, more extreme weather due to global warming fodder for people like Joe Romm.
But the fact is that the frequency of reporting and sharing has increased.
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As a former Airtanker Pilot, I’ve seen lots of them. Usually in brush or prairie fires.
Saw one up on the high plains of E. Montana that was very similar. When you
get 10-15 mile flame fronts,it can get interesting…
REPLY: I expect you’d see a lot of them, and how many of them were you able to share with the world on video? -Anthony
Rotation on the Hawaii one appears to be clockwise. I cannot tell which way the Brazil one is rotating.
The models did predict, that global warming would make tornadoes combustible.
In the 1983 firestorm across the Otway Ranges (Victoria, Australia) people watching the fire from behing the direction of travel reported a “glowing, pulsing, ball of red” riding above the fire, and likened it to photos of atomic bomb explosions.
But the fact is that the frequency of reporting and sharing has increased.
This may appear to be ‘off-topic,’ but it is eminently ON-TOPIC:
Here’s another STAT:
An associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, Scott R. Maier, conducted research into the accuracy of newsprint, and found that about 50% of 1,220 news stories contained errors. And only 23 of these (about 2%) ever printed a correction.
And ANOTHER:
The Media Research Center’s latest analysis of network TV “news” finds that, for the first seven months of 2007, ABC, CBS and NBC ran 650 stories on homicides involving firearms. They balanced this with stories of guns saving people from crime – twice – for a ratio of 325 to one against the public who defend themselves.
Criminologists have repeatedly found that guns are used to PREVENT crimes far more often than to COMMIT crimes. Of 13 scholarly studies on the issue, depending on time frames and the set of respondents asked, guns stop crime between 700,000 and 3.4 million times every year.
But those fact go against the news media’s “feelings” about guns.
THE MESSAGE HERE?
The MSM publishes ONLY that which fits it current agenda, and THAT INCLUDES the REAL TRUTH™ about climate.
I think James Hansen sees those happening in the Arctic in his dreams. That’s the red up there. 😉
Aldi says:
August 27, 2010 at 8:50 pm
The models did predict, that global warming would make tornadoes combustible.
ROFL!
Roger Carr writes about an observable phenomenon in intense, large fires.
Keep in mind that fire requires fuel and oxygen. When a fire burns, it induces upward convection in the heated surrounding air; an updraught. The updraught draws with it loose, combustible matter that is not fully burnt because of a lack of free oxygen close to the surface fire. However, when the updraught mixes with the freely moving air, oxygen becomes available and, if the temperature is still high enough, it produces an airborne “furnace”.
The surface fire is unable to draw down oxygen against convection, and the surface boundary effect also impairs horizontal airflow. But above the surface fire, there is much less resistance to fresh air being fed into such a furnace.
That’s my hypothesis anyway.
Hmmm … a little more unpredictable and dramatic than the fire-storms they create at Burning Man using propane and big fans in a circular arena (at night) …
Burning man – http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=burning+man&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Nate’s fire vortex – http://images.burningman.com/index.cgi?image=8932
Video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5bd0kSkmSA
.
One of my co-workers, normally a fairly intelligent man, has frequently said that global warming causes more instability in the atmosphere which then causes extreme weather events, including usual cold. Basically “The Day After Tomorrow” theory of climate.
I jut bite my tongue, there’s no reasoning with someone who is convinced he’s right.
BTW, he also fell for the “two moons” hoax about Mars. I did set him straight about that.
Why are you calling them tornadoes? This is a ground effect, surely… nothing more than a dust devil (we call them willy willies).
I understand that “tornadoe of fire” has much more impact, but it’s utterly wrong…
Wikipedia calls them fire whirls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_whirl .
Given that there is no climate change component in their article, it seems fairly balanced and reasonable.
Bernd Felsche says: (August 27, 2010 at 9:28 pm) Roger Carr writes about an observable phenomenon in intense, large fires.
Keep in mind that fire requires fuel and oxygen. When a fire burns, it induces upward convection in the heated surrounding air …
Thank you for that explanation, Bernd. Shame there were generally not video cameras thick on the ground back then so we could study it. (I do have a still shot of my own house burning on that day with a “mushroom” above it.)
Similar tornadoes were observed during the Hamburg firestorm in WWII.
http://www.arlindo-correia.com/040204.html
Wankapedia reports one ~1500 feet high at Hamburg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II
Aldi says: “The models did predict, that global warming would make tornadoes combustible.”
Further proof that Warmists are making this stuff up as they go.
Did someone tell Daniel Nepstad about this fire in Brazil?
Might cheer him up…..
“Don’t be surprised if we see a “global warming increases the frequency of fire tornados” sometime in the future.”
Anthony you have to stop giving the warmers ideas.
I was waiting for a biblical reference, you know, about the pillar of fire.
I’ve been trying to point this same thing out to people for a while. Things aren’t happening more often as much as they are being recorded. I’m fairly sure there was a quote from as recently as the 80s that there did not exist a film or video of a real world car crash happening. Now I can see a bunch on youtube on demand.
Camera phones are only 7 years old, and video even more recent. Almost everyone has one with them at all times these days. I’d be surprised if I didn’t see interesting things once in a while. Heck, I even recorded a few seconds of hail whacking my car the other day.
I haven’t believed the “wacky weather” claims for a while. Nothing is new, it’s just that we can hear about it instantly. Even 100 years ago news took days to get anywhere. How long did it take for people to hear about the San Francisco earthquake? Live reporting around the world only became possible once there were a bunch of satellites flying, so late 60s (The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” was played live on the world’s first global satellite TV link).
That’s a bit misleading. It reads like bits of combustable solids are drawn up into the updraft. That’s not how it works.
The combustible “matter” is actually a combustable gas variously called wood gas, syngas, and producer gas. It’s a mixture of CO2, CO, and H2. It is a normal intermediate product in the combustion of biomass and usually ignites rather close to the source where the CO grabs an oxygen atom and becomes CO2 and the H2 grabs an oxygen atom to become H2O, both of which are exothermic and thus release heat.
This is why if you closely examine a burning log the flame begins away from the wood not directly on it. The gap between the wood and the flame is where the wood gas is mixing with enough oxygen to ignite. In an oxygen deprived situation it will ignite whenever it gets far enough away to get some oxygen. In the case of these fire devils (they remind me of dust devils not tornadoes) the wood gas swirls upward to quite some height before it gets enough oxygen to burn up.
I see smaller versions of these fire devils quite often when I’m burning landscape waste due to the way I burn it – I accumulate the burn pile one fork-full at a time with a tractor (about 500 pounds each) and mash it down close to the ground using the bottom side of the front loader bucket. About six or eight of those will make a 20′ by 20′ burn pile about 24″ high and level. Depending on how I light it and how the wind is blowing and how dense (percentage of logs vs. looser stuff) I often get a few fire devils. They appear most reliably when the wind is blowing enough to spread the fire across the whole square patch with a light ash layer all across it. The ash keeps oxygen from mixing fast with the underlying unburnt stuff and the intense heat of the coals makes for a nice updraft sucking that wood gas up through the ash where it ignites in a twister that dances around the fire.
Wood gas is neat stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
Fire is a funny thing.
Norman McLean (author of “A River Runs Though It”) alludes to the forest fire “blowup” phenomena in his remarkable study of the deadly 1949 Mann Gulch fire, “Young Men and Fire.” All three of the video clips seem to show a variant of blowup behavior.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/500616.html
“There they could see what is really not possible to see: the center of a blowup. It is really not possible to see the center of a blowup because the smoke only occasionally lifts, and when it does all that can be seen are pieces, pieces of death flying around looking for you—burning cones, branches circling on wings, a log in flight without a propeller. Below in the bottom of the gulch was a great roar without visible flames but blown with winds on fire.”
For whatever it’s worth, the Wikipedia page about “Young Men and Fire” states:
“Maclean and Laird came to new conclusions on the fire’s events: that the wind went in the opposite direction than was originally thought possible, and once the fire got started, it created its own unique weather system (which few thought possible before this research)…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Men_and_Fire
Personally, on this “fire tornado” phenomena I’d much rather listen to the opinions of a USFS forest fire investigator or a genuine smokejumper out of Missoula than the idiotic bloviations of a “climate scientist.”
For anyone interested, “Young Men and Fire” is a superb narrative discussion of forest fire behavior, and of course Norman Maclean was a great writer.
I am a 50 year long serving member of the nsw rural fire service in sydney australia I have seen so called fire tornadoes in many fires I have attended over the years ,thay are normal in australia fires .my message to the global warmists just wake up you are being used in a big way
Anthony…
“In regards to the issue of seeing more “wild weather phenomena” lately in the news, I’ll point out that the expansion of cheap high quality cameras has made the reporting frequency increase thanks to millions of ordinary citizens being armed with them.”
Exactly right!
In fact if you search YouTube you’ll find dozens…ten years ago could we have seen these?
Not unless today’s technologies had been available — but if you’d been physically present, yes, you’d have seen them.
NJ got the National Guard involved with aerial firefighting back in 1980 — the most spectacular fire-whirl I ever saw was in the early ’90s when a portion of the front we were fighting *jumped* across a four-lane road, hit the woods on the other side, then spiraled higher than I was flying, and I was at 300 feet AGL. It lasted less than a minute, but it was a genuine “Oh, snip” event…
You can see dozens of these close up and personal every year at Burning Man, minus the “fire in the hole” effect from sucking combustion up off the ground. However, once the Burning Man folks get the idea, I bet it won’t take long before we see it there too.
In my line of work (prescribed burning & wildland fire fighting), fire whirls are actually quite a common occurrence. Since most people don’t have regular exposure to the phenomenon, they consider it something out of the ordinary. (Heck, most people consider any fire, much less a tree torching and throwing off embers or a fire whirl zipping around, to be “something out of the ordinary”.)
Anthony, I’ve got thousands of pictures of fire if you ever need any for your blog(s). (Provided gratis, of course.)
PS: Remember, you don’t check your “climate forecast” before lighting or fighting a fire— you check your “weather forecast“. 😉