A Glowing Future

The Claim
The dramatic photo shows the California wildfires of August 2018. The radiance of the California conflagration glows through a stitched deck of altocumulous. Cloud cover lit by fire gleams psychotic orange, cherry red. What the photograph signals depends on social mindset and ranges from a dire warning of climate change to a harbinger of Biblical end times.
The Lie
The photograph is a Hawai’ian sunset. It was taken in July 2018 by U.S. Air Force aviator Nathan Province from a C-17 at 30,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean near Oahu. The low-angle setting sun lights a mid-level cloud layer from below. The result is remarkable, but the image is not California, not fires, not volcanoes, not the end of the world.