"Wildfire smoke is so thick in Prince George, it looks like night, after the sun has risen." That's a description of noon yesterday in the northern B.C. city of 74,003. Evacuations, damaged health, Beijing-like fog, nightmarish infernos. Welcome to the new normal.

It's a scary new normal where a churning tornado filled with fire the size of three football fields whipped up, raging out of the largest wildfire in California history. Extreme conditions and intense heat fueled the plume, Time Magazine writes. "It launched power line support towers, cars, and a shipping container into the air." It left "not a living branch for kilometres." A thousand feet wide, it shot seven and a half miles into the sky, reached speeds of up to 165 miles per hour with temperatures that likely exceeded 2700 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a report by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It took the life of a firefighter who was trying to help people in Redding, California, on July 26th.

It's easy to feel like the world's coming to an end when the landscape you love is going up in flames. Dark humour can be momentarily uplifting. "We'll all leave Earth in a spaceship to settle on Mars! It'll be fun!" But dark humour isn't going to solve things. Reducing global warming is.