Timothy L. O'Brien, Columnist

Mother Nature Is Staging a Climate Intervention

Fire, hurricanes and flooding aren’t really polar opposites in this new era of climate change — they’re manifestations of one another.

September 5, 2023 at 11:47 AM UTC

By Timothy L. O'Brien

Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”

The earth is burning.
Photographer: Konstantinos Tsakalidis/Bloomberg

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For the first time in more than 80 years, southern California was deluged by a tropical storm. A broad swath of the American southwest, including long arid deserts, also got soaked. Lahaina, the picturesque tourist destination on the Hawaiian island of Maui, got burnt to the ground by a fast-moving wildfire that may have left at least hundreds of people dead.