One hundred years ago, when CO2 was less than 300 ppm, and more than 50 ppm less than Hansen’s “safe and stable” 350 ppm.
More than 1,700 forest fires were burning at the same time.
It was the largest forest fire in American history. Maybe even the largest forest fire ever. No one knows for sure, but even now, it is hard to put into words what it did. For two terrifying days and night’s – August 20 and 21, 1910 – the fire raged across three million acres of virgin timberland in northern Idaho and western Montana. Many thought the world would end, and for 86, it did. Most of what was destroyed fell to hurricane-force winds that turned the fire into a blowtorch. Re-constructing what happened leads to an almost impossible conclusion: Most of the cremation occurred in a six-hour period. A forester named Edward Stahl wrote of flames shooting hundreds of feet in the air, “fanned by a tornadic wind so violent that the flames flattened out ahead, swooping to earth in great darting curves, truly a veritable red demon from hell.”
Depending on who was doing the counting, there were either 1,736 fires burning in northern Idaho and western Montana on August 19, or there were 3,000.
No official cause was ever listed for the 1910 fire. A bad electrical storm the night of July 15 touched off more than 3,000 fires in District One, but by August 19 – the night before the big blowup – the worst seemed to be over. But 1910 was also the driest year in anyone’s memory. Snows melted early and the spring rains never came. By August, normally swift?running rivers had slowed to a crawl and many streams had simply disappeared into bedrock.
“There was a burning dryness in the air,” Orland Scott would recall years later in Pioneer Days on the Shadowy St. Joe, a book he wrote about turn?of?the-century northern Idaho. “Everywhere the heat was intense and stifling.”
