In 2019, we examined what's now become an annual summer phenomenon in New York, da greatest city in da world, baby! Basically, the new order of operations is that we will see extreme heat waves closely followed by hugely powerful summer thunderstorms that drop biblical amounts of water very quickly in what's sometimes called a "cloudburst." This relationship isn't new, really: thunderstorms have always fed on the energy of the heat system that rolled through the area before. It's just that those heat systems are getting hotter, and also there's more H2o in the air these days.

"The basic thing that makes extreme precipitation events heavier in the warmer climate is that there’s more water vapor in the air," Adam Sobel, professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University, said at the time, "and that’s a pretty unquestioned consequence of warming. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases roughly about seven percent per degree Celsius. And so, the baseline expectation is that heavy rain events get heavier at about that rate also." Total annual rainfall isn't expected to increase a huge amount, at least globally, but the precipitation will be more concentrated in these extreme events that, in New York City's case, overwhelm the sewer systems and cause flash floods.

Speaking of, have you seen these videos out of the Big Apple on Thursday? Here, via the Instagram account @whatisnewyork, is a person navigating a subway platform like it's the Rio Grande:

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And here's an urban waterfall:

And here, if you click through—which you can also do on the two posts above—are a bunch of apartment disasters that are enough to have you wondering whether some of New York's lovely landlords have been keeping up with their maintenance responsibilities during the pandemic.

Personally, I enjoyed the guy plunging his roof. Imagine what these folks are paying in rent only to have all the shoes in their closets smell like mildew.

Anyway, it's great to see all this while the Senate poops its pants over an infrastructure bill, the Bipartisan Compromise Version of which includes some...less than ambitious levels of climate-related investment. We cannot directly attribute Thursday's events to the climate crisis yet, but this is beginning to become a pattern. As we put it in 2019, this is the first summer of the rest of our lives. Well, the third summer now. And while the World's Greatest Deliberative Body debates on how to respond to the many-tentacled effects of a steadily more destabilized climate, from a now year-round fire season out West, to the 20-year droughts—now verging on aridification—in the Southwest, to the Midwest flooding in recent years, to the steadily more destructive storms in the Southeast—we need to reorganize our thinking. It's like we're trying to renovate a house on the cheap, half-assing it on the wood for the cabinets, when the bill coming down the pike promises to be way bigger if we don't take decisive action now. We know these events are bad, yes, but it might be more useful to think of this as a four-billion-year-old planet attempting to regain equilibrium by brushing off a particularly annoying 200,000-year-old species. We need to develop the humility to grasp that we are at risk, not the planet, and act accordingly.

Then again, it's considered totally normal in this country for a sitting United States senator to suggest we're on the verge of "a socialistic government" in which there will be some sort of Kulturboro run by leftists who will ban Taylor Swift from making music, or at the very least mandate that she perform anthems celebrating the glorious American Socialist Revolution. (Even worse, they might raise her taxes!) Never mind that the self-described Democratic Socialists in Congress want to boost public-sector spending on things like healthcare and, yes, our climate response, on the simple premise that markets alone cannot always deliver optimal human outcomes. Oh, and yeah, they want to tax the rich. But even amid the daily neon signs reading, "CLIMATE DYSTOPIA INBOUND," we are subjected to these bird-brain scare stories about how socialism, which is already a feature of the American economy in some respects, is the real existential threat. Better keep the roof plungers handy!

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Headshot of Jack Holmes
Jack Holmes
Senior Staff Writer

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.