As the residents of south Texas continue to struggle with heart-breaking loss of life and homes, the residents of South Asia are also facing catastrophic rains and floods, with 45 million people affected. At least 1,288 people have died, and 16 million children now need lifesaving support, according to UNICEF. There’s nothing unusual about hurricanes in Houston or monsoon seasons in Bangladesh, but the increasing intensity of them is. Climate scientists have long predicted that warming oceans would turn normal weather events into more severe ones, and severe ones into catastrophes.

Of course, people sweating in San Francisco from a record 106-degree day or fleeing the largest fire in Los Angeles history may worry more about North Korea’s methodical drive to be able to deliver nuclear explosions to our homeland and those of our allies. As comedian George Carlin’s routine of the “hippy-dippy” weatherman once put it: “The radar tonight is picking up a line of thundershowers…. However, the radar is also picking up a squadron of Russian ICBMs, so I wouldn’t sweat the thundershowers.”

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This threat from North Korea, which the last two administrations did nothing to alleviate, has now arrived as a Category 6 storm for the most ill-suited president of modern times to handle it. President Trump’s response to the latest North Korea provocation was to chide China and South Korea in a tweet. This, the day after he said he is considering ending our trade pact with South Korea. Good timing.

We had better hope that the soft coup taking place by the generals now surrounding Trump is hard enough to control him. The only options on North Korea are tough, smart, relentless diplomacy. True, diplomacy didn’t work before, but North Korea didn’t have the ability to launch a weapon with roughly eight times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb before, either. That is an opportunity to focus, finally, the world’s attention on solving the problem.