At lease 46 people were killed in the region when the remnants—the remnants, mind you—of Ida poured through Wednesday night. So far, that’s a higher total than in Louisiana. Historic amounts of rainfall resulted in people drowning in their basement apartments; and the NYC subway system shutting down.
Physics: a hotter atmosphere is a wetter one.
When you know the ship is sinking…. and the captain is piloting it down. The klaxon is sounding. The fireball is clanging. It’s red alert. And full speed ahead into the deep!
Living through global climate disorder is a monstrous thing. We must twist ourselves into the new normal, adjust ourselves to new baselines that were the worst-case-scenarios just decades ago, within my lifetime. Extreme heat, extreme storms, extreme flooding, and… extreme politics. The false messiah of authoritarianism, plutocrats and their thugs governing through fear and terror, grows every day as the fascist international—Tucker Carlson extolling virtues of the Oban kleptocracy, the GOP’s demagoguery, irrationalism, and vigilantism—spreads its tentacles.
Meanwhile, more conventional center-rightists, which includes too many Democrats, carry on serving the carbon-producing industries. Seven of them joined all the Republicans in the U.S. Senate a couple of weeks ago in voting to prohibit an executive branch ban on fracking ban. That anti-democratic bastion that is the Senate is hamstrung by two preening tools of oligarchy, Sinema and Manchin. The House’s hedge-fund caucus, a crew of wreckers the Democrats fought like hell to keep in office against primary challengers, do their damnedest to fuck the future.
Living not just through it, but, quite literally, in it. The air quality disaster days here in New York from smoke from fires in Ontario, the Pacific Northwest, and Siberia make it visceral, bronchial. The world climate is a global system. There is no escape, although the super-wealthy sure are trying. That said, of course the poor will suffer the most. Those least responsible for carbonizing the atmosphere will pay the highest cost.
Backyard and Beyond 
Nailed it.