"This spring, the Southeast was on fire. Ninety-five percent of the region was in severe drought, and in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas what was burning was what’s called the “blowdown” from Hurricane Helene — the fires tearing through landscapes heavy with trees felled a year and a half ago and left to bake into ready fuel, waiting for a spark.
This is not a climate fable; it is a pattern. Disaster intervals are collapsing, with one catastrophe following another in such quick succession that one bleeds into the next and the old metabolism of disaster recovery fails to keep pace. Climate scientists sometimes talk about whiplash: conditions of extreme drought followed by conditions of historic rainfall, for instance, with flooding made worse because the dirt and soil has been baked into a surface as unwelcoming to water as concrete.
Wildfires often denude hillsides, leading to lethal mudslides when storms come; fires can even be fed by heavy rains, as happened in Europe this summer, when spring precipitation nurtured new vegetation which baked under the continent’s historic heat waves and then burned. When rains hit desert, you can get achingly beautiful floral superblooms in Death Valley or lethal flash flooding in the Grand Canyon. This summer we got both. When decades of glacier loss is followed by an unusually hot summer in the Himalayas, you can get landslides that feel like a magnitude 5.2 earthquake."
David Wallace-Wells reports for the New York Times Magazine September 4, 2026.
