I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the double whammy of extreme weather that besieged the United States this month: first fires, then floods, coming so quickly that there was scarcely a break between them.
For the second time in three years, millions of people are living under hazy skies polluted with wildfire smoke. This is the signature of climate change, as Canada’s boreal forests are growing warmer and drier, becoming increasingly susceptible to massive fires each summer. At the same time, warmer oceans turbocharge storm systems, giving rise to rainfall outside the range of what urban planners designed for. The thunderstorms that finally washed the smoke away brought flash flooding that swamped highways and buildings in the New York area.
This weather whiplash – not one kind of extreme weather, but every kind of extreme weather at once – is a foretaste of what the future is going to be like. It’s too late to prevent climate change, and so we have to start thinking about ways to design our civilization to adapt to it.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
This is weather whiplash playing out before our eyes. Global warming isn’t altering the climate along a single dimension, making it hotter without any other side effects. Instead, it makes every kind of extreme weather more likely.
New York City isn’t the only place suffering these disasters; far from it. Similar climate-change-driven catastrophes have been sweeping over every part of the nation, from the 2018 Camp Fire in California to 2024’s Hurricane Helene in the American South to the deadly Texas floods of 2025.
For those who aren’t wearing ideological blinders, these record-breaking fires and floods are like the Earth screaming at us. They’re undeniable evidence that climate change isn’t a distant future prospect, something we can leave for our descendants to worry about. It’s a crisis of the present, and millions of people who contributed to causing it are suffering the consequences.
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