In 2015, Arizona State University professor Stephen Pyne coined the term, Pyrocene, describing a new Fire Age, the opposite of an Ice Age, resulting from our fossil-fuel based combustion economy.
“By burning fuels from deep time, we are redefining the options available for generations to come,” proclaimed Pyne. “We are taking carbon from lithic landscapes of coal and petroleum buried in the geologic past, passing it through today's living landscapes, and releasing it into the geologic future. Little of the planet is unaffected.”
His research shows that human activity has created conditions (extreme heat, superstorms, wildfires, and prolonged drought) that favor fire, turning “the atmosphere into a crock pot and the oceans into acid vats”, sparking a sixth great extinction.
Pyne believes that the excessive amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, in conjunction with the disruption of the natural fire cycle in forests, prairies, and other ecosystems caused by human development, has yielded a “performance enhancer” effect for fire, metamorphosizing moderate fire events into massive catastrophes.
The Pyrocene, he says, “is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns; it's equally about the good fires that have vanished because they are suppressed or no longer lit.”
Even Dante would have been alarmed by Pyne's outlook for the future. He predicts that “we're headed into a no-narrative, no-analogue future. So immense and unimaginable are the coming upheavals that the arc of inherited knowledge that joins us to the past has broken. There is no precedent for what we are about to experience, no means by which to triangulate from accumulated human wisdom into a future unlike anything we have known before.”
Translation: we have surpassed certain carbon emissions and planetary warming thresholds, and the models that climate scientists have been using to predict the future no longer are applicable to today’s realities. So we’re flying blind into the future with no real understanding of how our planet is actually changing, how accelerated the climate feedback-loop will become (meaning, how frequent and intense climate events will be come), and how we can adequately prepare for natural disasters.
Not all Gloom and Doom
Pyne admits to a modicum of silver lining: “Left to itself, it seems the Earth would slowly spin into another glacial epoch. It might be that only our fire habits, however inadvertently, however much entangled in the unsavory bond that joins us to fossil-fuel combustion, are preventing a planetary winter from returning,” he asserts.
In truth, it's hard to find solace when contemplating that global warming may be fending off an ice age, as climate change wreaks havoc on communities and ecosystems across the globe and unprecedented wildfires rage in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, displacing vast populations of people and animals, costing trillions of dollars, and triggering mass extinctions.
When I first wrote about the Pyrocene era, atmospheric carbon dioxide had climbed roughly 25 parts per million over the preceding decade. We had named 430 ppm as the outer boundary, the concentration past which life as we know it becomes difficult to recognize. We have crossed that boundary.
In May 2026, atmospheric CO₂ peaked at 432.00 ppm at Mauna Loa, according to Scripps Institution of Oceanography; NOAA logged the month at 432.3 ppm. Both figures are up 1.8 ppm from the year before, and the June 2026 monthly mean came in at 431.44 ppm.
When Charles David Keeling took the first measurement on that mountain in 1958, the number was 313 ppm. “Atmospheric CO₂ has continued its relentless rise over the past year,” said Ralph Keeling, who now directs the program his father began, “reaching yet another record high and moving us deeper into a high-CO₂ world.”
The heat has followed the carbon. According to Copernicus, 2024 closed at 1.60°C above pre-industrial levels, 2023 at 1.48°C, and 2025 at 1.47°C. Taken together, 2023 through 2025 is the first three-year stretch in human history to average more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial. All eleven of the last eleven years now rank among the warmest ever measured.
Pyne's Pyrocene is no longer a forecast, and it’s not just summer. It’s an all-year round reality.
In Europe, more than a million acres have burned this year, triple the recent historical average, across some 1,400 fires, more than double the norm, according to the European Forest Fire Information Service. Spain is suffering through the nation’s largest single wildfire in recorded history, consuming more than 500 square kilometers. Scientists are describing blazes burning with the energy of atomic bombs and warning that the continent has entered an unprecedented era of megafire.
In Canada, roughly 820 wildfires burned simultaneously this July, 156 of them classified as out of control, sending smoke plumes so vast that air quality alerts went up across more than a dozen U.S. states—a reminder that in a fire age, there is no such thing as someone else's fire.
In the United States, some 2.6 million acres have burned so far this year. Oregon alone has lost 1.78 million acres, closing in on its 2024 record of 1.93 million, at a firefighting cost of $242 million and counting. Across the U.S. and Canada together, burned acreage now runs about 25 percent above the ten-year average and more than double the levels of a few decades ago.
This is what Pyne meant by a performance enhancer. The fires are not new, but their intensity, season length, and refusal to lie down at night are.
Six years ago, I asked whether we had enough imagination, political will, and time to reverse course before we hit a full-blown Fire Age. I would submit that Pyrocene is already here, but there are reasons to be encouraged.
First, we’re getting better at fire management. Here is possibly the most counterintuitive statistic of 2026: while Europe and North America burn, global fire emissions hit a record low in the first half of the year—roughly half the levels of the early 2000s, according to Copernicus. More than three-quarters of the world's biomass burning happens in Africa and Asia, and fire activity across sub-Saharan Africa has fallen dramatically over 25 years through changed agricultural practice and better fire management. The lesson is not that the climate crisis is overstated. It is that fire is a governance problem as much as a physics problem, and governance is something we know how to change.
“Good fire” is coming back. Pyne's sharpest point was about the good fires that vanished. Those are finally being addressed. In February 2026, California introduced the Good Fire Act to dismantle the liability, permitting, and insurance barriers that have kept prescribed and cultural burning at a fraction of the scale the landscape requires, building on years of advocacy by Indigenous practitioners whose stewardship kept these ecosystems in balance for millennia. Restoring good fire is the rare climate solution that is ancient, proven, and available now.
Clean energy has decisively won the capital argument. For the first time in history, clean energy is on track to attract nearly twice the investment of fossil fuels: $2.2 trillion versus $1.2 trillion in 2026, per the International Energy Agency. Solar alone is pulling in $365 billion—about a billion dollars a day—after an 80 percent cost decline over the past decade. Grid investment has climbed to $550 billion, up nearly 20 percent, and battery storage has crossed $100 billion for the first time. The world added a record 800 gigawatts of renewable capacity in 2025, with solar responsible for three-quarters of it. Solar PV posted a 600 TWh increase in generation—the largest single-year increase from any energy source, ever—and met roughly 70 percent of global electricity demand growth on its own. Renewables and nuclear combined more than covered the year's entire increase in electricity supply. Electric vehicle sales climbed past 20 million units, up more than 20 percent, and now represent about one in four new cars sold worldwide.
Emissions are decoupling from growth. Global energy-related CO₂ emissions rose just 0.4 percent in 2025 even as the economy expanded. China's fossil fuel emissions from energy and industry actually fell 0.3 percent while its energy consumption rose 3.5 percent. Renewables now supply 40 percent of Chinese power, up from 37 percent the year before, and the country's emissions have been flat or falling for nearly two years. India's held flat for the first time since the 1970s. Neither is a victory lap, but the curve that governs everything has finally started to bend.
The U.S. grid is transforming underneath the politics. Renewables provided 25.7 percent of American electricity in 2025 and 36.3 percent of installed capacity. Wind and solar together, at nearly 19 percent of generation, now out-produce both coal and nuclear. Utility-scale solar added more than 27,700 MW and batteries nearly 15,800 MW, while coal capacity shrank by roughly 4,400 MW. EIA projects solar, wind, and battery additions in 2026 will run 62 percent above 2025, and expects renewables and storage to account for essentially all net new utility-scale capacity this year.
We are learning to build with fire risk mitigation in mind. This is where our industry earns its place in the story. In June 2026, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) rounded out its Wildfire Prepared program with new Neighborhood and Multifamily standards alongside updated Home requirements, now available across 14 states and piloted at the community scale with KB Home in California. The research underneath it is unambiguous: ember-resistant assemblies, defensible space, and hardened materials determine whether a house survives. “The decisions you make to protect your home can directly affect the homes around you during a wildfire,” says IBHS senior wildfire director Steve Hawks. Resilience, in other words, has stopped being an individual gamble and started becoming a system.
The Pyrocene has arrived—over budget and ahead of schedule. What Pyne could not have modeled is how quickly the alternative would become the cheaper, faster, more investable option, or that the same species capable of turning the atmosphere into a veritable “crock pot” would, in the same decade, build the largest energy transformation in its history.
Both things are true. The fires are worse than we predicted, and the transition is faster than we dared hope. Which one defines the next decade depends entirely on how much velocity we are willing to add to the second while we adapt to the first by hardening the homes and communities in the path of the flames, by putting good fire back on the land, by measuring our built environment by what it protects in the long term rather than just by what it costs upfront.
I don't write about any of this from a distance. I live in a small, remote mountain town in southwestern Colorado, and as I write, two major fires are burning around me — one within thirty miles, one only ten miles away. I check containment percentages the way I used to check the forecast. I know which way the wind has to blow for the valley to clear, and I know the particular quality of light that means that it’s a stay-inside day.
Fire and smoke are not an emergency here anymore; they simply define summer. That is the part that unsettles me most — not the fear, but the adjustment, how quickly the extraordinary becomes the ordinary.
It is also, I think, the reason to keep working. If we can normalize the fear, we can normalize the opportunity: hardened homes, good fire back on the land, an energy system that stops making the problem worse.
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