Days after flooding in the Texas Hill Country killed 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic—just a portion of the more than 100 already confirmed dead in Central Texas—Immigration and Customs Enforcement shut down a children’s summer camp in Los Angeles’s McArthur Park. The raid is part of Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s plan to flood the city with armored vehicles, drones, and ICE agents dressed for war, who’ve been kidnapping people from street corners, restaurants, and convenience stores. 

Neither of these floods, or the destruction they’ve caused, should be understood as acts of God. While subsequent studies will be needed to determine the specific impact rising temperatures might have had on holiday weekend rain in Texas, researchers have already found that climate change has made those particular types of storms in that particular part of the country both wetter and warmer. The White House’s quest to destroy the Federal Emergency Management Agency will make recovery even more of a painful slog than it would have been otherwise. Republicans, for their part, haven’t shied away from comparing their plans—for FEMA, the administrative state, immigrants, and much more—to a deluge. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon famously told PBS in 2019. “Every day, we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocities.”

Although climate change has fallen out of political debates in the United States over the last few years, rising temperatures have been delivering destruction with muzzle velocity across the country. The Trump administration kicked off as wildfires in Los Angeles devastated homes from Malibu to Altadena. ICE agents prowling the streets of Southern California will find their balaclavas increasingly sweat-soaked as they contend with a

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