A third of Pakistan is underwater from floods, climate chief says
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> Basic physics is the reason rainfall is becoming intense around the world – warmer air holds more moisture.
> Scientists are already trying to determine the extent to which global heating is to blame for the rainfall and floods. But analysis of the previous worst flood in 2010 suggests it will be significant. That “superflood” was made more likely by global heating, which drove fiercer rains.[2]
> And according to a 2021 study global heating is making the south Asian monsoon more intense and more erratic, with each 1C rise in global temperature leading to 5% more rain.
> A natural climate cycle driven by temperature and wind variations in the Pacific may also have added to the Pakistan floods
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/29/monster-...
[2] https://progearthplanetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186...
Climate is not weather, it is about statistics over decades and centuries. If you can’t say global warming is bogus because it’s particularly cold out today, you also can’t blame global warming on it being hot or rainy.
People need to understand it’s not about single events, they don’t when you take every opportunity to mention global warming with bad weather.
There's a clip I remember of an interview with the CEO of an oil company from I think the 90s, where he says something like "They keep saying hurricanes will become stronger and more likely. Where are they? Where are these hurricanes?". IIRC it was several years before Katrina. I wish I could find it on Youtube.
Well, now those extreme weather events are happening with increasing regularity. I think it's reasonable to say, you know those extreme weather events climate scientists have been talking about for decades? There they are!
The increasing frequency of these events is climate change driven, but any given one can't be traced directly to climate change. A 10% increase in hurricanes is climate change driven. A single hurricane hitting a specific spot isn't
Another insurance company is leaving Florida: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/real-estate/os-bz-i...
1/3 of Pakistan is currently underwater: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistan-floods-un-appeal...
Greenland: https://apnews.com/article/science-oceans-glaciers-greenland...
> Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet will eventually raise global sea level by at least 10.6 inches (27 centimeters) -- more than twice as much as previously forecast — according to a study published Monday.
A bullet could have glanced off their head at any point in time. Without proper ballistics, their death can't be traced to the game of Russian roulette they were playing all by themselves in the middle of a field. If anything is to blame, it's the lack of funding for a rural gunshot detection network and helicopter-based emergency services.
I guess that depends on your definition of impressive. It was a Category 5 storm and the 4th most intense hurricane on record to make landfall in the United States. At the time it was the 5th most powerful Atlantic storm on record and the most powerful ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. That season was so crazy that it ended up getting passed by Rita and Wilma later in the year, but it's still the 7th most powerful Atlantic storm by pressure and 10th by sustained winds. Your overall point might be correct, but you're wrong about Katrina just being some run of the mill storm.
I agree the human toll was primarily a systems failure, but the destructive power of Katrina was a major contributing factor. A less intense storm with milder storm surge likely wouldn't have breached all the levees that were breached.
Cascading response failures are definitely an organizational/social problem; any natural disaster is going to be worse where planning is subject to complacency, corruption, or lack of resources.
The basic problem is that most of our infrastructure and governance (including things like building codes and zoning/planning) is set up for a mid-late 20th century understanding and frequency awareness of extreme weather events.
This is not an especially easy concept for the layperson to understand because a simple "caused by" isn't appropriate. Any reduction to global warming would result in different weather. There would still be storms. The best we can say is there would likely be fewer storms and less drastic storms if there was less global warming. But as with the pandemic, people like a nice clean binary cause/did not cause distinction to things that are fundamentally statistical processes.
Most areas will get warmer, some areas will get colder. Sometimes they'll alternate. Some years and seasons will be less extreme than others, some will seem normal, but the trend will be clear.
Systems which were built for the old normal will fail more and more frequently, and at some point they'll stop working permanently.
Early climatologists phrased it as a growth in heat in the planet and that earned the nickname "global warming", which is correct enough on a long enough scale, but the real problem of climate change is that it is a ton of additional energy (per Thermodynamics Laws same thing, different side of the equation) in the climate. (For instance, additional energy in the case of winter storms meaning stronger winds which mean lower wind chill temperatures and more precipitation [snow].)
All you have to do to falsify it is prove this graph is inaccurate.
Good luck.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
I also think this comment makes the parent's point about probability distributions being difficult for people to understand. Global warming doesn't mean every hurricane season will be more intense than the one before it. Just that the probability distribution will shift. That might mean more intense seasons on average it might not. I'm not enough of an expert on it to know, but the consensus seems to be that they will become more intense on average. I could see a situation where a warming environment could lead to more of the wind shear and dry air that is keeping formation down this year though. Either way one below average hurricane season after 2 really active ones doesn't tell you that much.
I agree
To say something like: "of the five recent weather catastrophes (off the top of my head: this Pakistan monsoon, Europe drought, California drought, heatwave in India, heatwave in Spain), we can confidently say at least four were caused by climate change, and perhaps, perhaps one wasn't. Which one? It doesn't matter, and we don't even know if it wasn't." might be correct and understandable enough?
A better explanation is along the lines of "we haven't seen such a drought/flood in 100 years, and climate change makes these extreme events more likely to happen."
As we don't have a handle on _all_ weather events, we are prone to think these events are somehow exceptional, when all that is happening is that this is where the media focus is at present.
If the media decided to focus on some other topic, eg siamese twins, or accidents in the military, or whatever, we would soon think we won't get a seat on the bus for conjoined twins, or imagine that every soldier is likely to be killed by friendly fire.
It is impossible for us to faithfully discern truth from the media presentation.
Neither is true. We often have adequate priors and when individual perceptions aren't sufficient statistics offer a base of comparison. Media bias and cognitive biases exist, of course, but uncertainty and bias can also be measured and mitigated. It's notable that sometimes the loudest complaints of media bias come from competing media outlets with lesser or negative commitment to reliability.
People can and do research subjects on their own initiative. Media outlets typically credit expert opinions so people can also look into those experts and see if they're influential in their field, what their publication and citation history is etc. 'The media' is not a monolith, but rather an industry that delivers information with a distribution of timeliness, reliability, and neutrality.
Your approach is less 'don't believe everything you read' and more 'you can't believe anything, everyone is lying, getting at the truth is basically impossible.'
Accreditation, publication and citation mean nothing to me. Experts mean nothing to me. Flattering titles mean nothing to me. I want to hear the argument, and I want to understand how I can verify it for myself.
If I can't verify it - and climate change as presented is unverifiable, unfalsifiable - then what am I meant to do with all these heartfelt beliefs? Should I believe them anyway because everyone else does? What relation do lots of earnest beliefs (and some dishonest, alarmist mouthpieces - the media) have to do with the truth?
Media presentation has nothing to do with it. This is about hard science making verified predictions.
In fact if anything the predictions have erred on the side of understatement and caution, and reality has already far outstripped their optimism.
I don't understand the psychology of deniers. There's ample objective evidence of incoming climate catastrophe, but there's still the party line of "It's not really happening, and even if it is we're not sure why, and even if we are sure why it's too expensive to do anything."
Absolutely none of those are true.
Where is the actual proof humans are changing the climate? Not theory. Not models. But scientific proof? If we are going to make huge policy shifts that affect everyone’s economic prosperity, then it better be more than some computer modeling.
Yes the climate is changing. Does flying on a 747 make it worse? Can you prove it? Conclusively? Because I’m not going to support policy decisions based on a best guess or faith.
And is climate change bad? Any proof of that? If it gets warmer and it increases the growing season in Siberia or Canada, is that “bad?”
And what’s the consequence of batteries everywhere? What are the environmental consequences of that? How about covering the land with solar panels? Can that have a negative effect? Windmills? Any effect on wildlife? Mao tried to exterminate sparrows and it led to a famine.
Debating human caused global warming is like debating fundamentalist Christians.
There is no coming catastrophe. That’s made up. It’s like using Revelation to increase donations to the church.
The only way to get actual proof if is we ran a large number of experiments on parallel worlds. This is impossible. There is no control in climatology, only extrapolation. Climatology is more akin to history or archeology than science.
The submission is for an article from the Washington Post, owned of course, by Jeff Bezos.
There are many reasons to question what is being told. Al Gore's presentation didn't come true in his timelines but no one accused him of making mischief effectively calling fire in a crowded theatre. If course he is heavily invested in alternative technology - he stands to gain a lot. In the 70s Leonard Nimoy was warning us about the 'mini ice age', then it was 'global warming', and now the catch-all term of 'climate change'.
For me, this is a governance control tactic - how to get people to willingly give up their freedoms (of travel, energy, etc) not to mention that this works very well with the micro-management planned with the technocratic agenda. And what I say is supported by the globalist books themselves - that in order to gain greater control they needed to make man in general the enemy, and using the climate as an excuse fitted the bill. Take a look at the club of Rome. Here are some quotes:
"The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."
Alexander King Co-Founder of the Club of Rome, (premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations) from his 1991 book The First Global Revolution
"We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public's imagination... So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
Prof. Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Biology and Global Change. Professor Schneider was among the earliest and most vocal proponents of man-made global warming and a lead author of many IPCC reports. He is a member of the Club of Rome.
"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy."
Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation and member of the Club of Rome.
"The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security."
Maurice Strong, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Al Gore's mentor and executive member of the Club of Rome.
"I believe it is appropriate to have an 'over-representation' of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."
Al Gore, member of the Club of Rome and set to become the world's first carbon billionaire. He is also the largest shareholder of Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which looks set to become the world's central carbon trading body.
Perhaps you are unaware of the replication crisis, where 70% of studies cannot be replicated, even by the authors. Perhaps you are also unaware of what I think is the 'funding crisis', where funds for science are given out by the government, corporations and the military. This triumvirate work together, you see this in technology quite clearly, eg Google was funded by inqtel, and hands over data to the government.
Given the above, do you think it is possible that the governance system we have (corporations and government, aka fascism) works together to create narratives that better support their agenda? Do you see how climate change is supportive of technocracy, and plans to hand over fine-grained control of all resources to nameless bureaucrats? The trick is to get people to cheer for this, and that is what climate change is for.
Most of us, on the basis of no evidence we can see, will cheer as we lose access to cars, pay more in taxes, are unable to travel, cannot visit distant places, live in small, densely-packed urban areas, as NGOs (billionaire foundations) take control of the world's resources, etc, etc.
PS those quotes are true and verifiable. They have told us what is planned.
These events really are exceptional. As an example, last month the UK temperature record was broken by over 1C, across large regions of the country. Usually, temperature records are broken by small amounts, maybe 0.2C. This heatwave really was extreme for the UK.
7 out of 10 of the hottest days in UK history have been since the year 2000. In a country with particularly long temperature records, this is also pretty amazing, and evidence of a significant change in the cliamte and extreme events.
Did the Covid lockdowns of California have any effect on climate? And if not, then doesn’t that cast question on the premise of zero carbon fixes climate change? The near shutdown of the global air transport system during the peak of the pandemic — did that have any effect at all on climate?
Why must we accept the premise that lowering human-caused carbon emissions does anything to change climate “back” when there is little actual evidence from the real world that confirms that premise?
And why do those most vocal on climate oppose nuclear energy? The answer is simple: it isn’t about climate but about redistribution of the means of production.
Gloal climate change is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. This is now very clear and there is very little evidence of anything else having more than a small impact.
The COVID lockdowns had an effect on the climate, see for example the reduction in high clouds due to a decrease in flying [0]. Stopping GHG emissions only prevents further climate change. It does not fix it, just stops it from getting worse.
To change the climate 'back', we have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, not just stop emitting it.
Many people who want to stop climate change are also pro nuclear energy as a means of doing that. But why would that have anything to do with redistribution of the means of production?
[0] - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abf686
No - because there is a huge lag in the system. That's like turning your house thermostat down and asking three seconds later why it isn't cold. It takes a lot of energy to warm an ocean.
> And why do those most vocal on climate oppose nuclear energy?
It's expensive, slow to build, and if it fails can contaminate enormous areas of the environment including the food supply? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-36112372
When an event is 100 times more likely, you are getting very close to a 'caused by' situation.
Obviously, extreme events existed in the past. But something like the 2022 south Asia heatwave was so extraordinarily rare before, when climate change increased the frequency of similar events by more than 100 times, climate change was responsible (in most reasonable uses of the word).
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...
Climate change doesn't mean that it will consistently get hotter everywhere. Paradoxically severe cold weather can also become more frequent as the temperature increases, usually as a result of Arctic warming, which warms much faster than the rest of the planet.
We got a whole bunch of single "once in a century" event this year, at some point single events become data
I suspect climate change is making the monsoons worse. If that’s true then write an article quantifying how much. Tacking it on to random other stories makes it seem very un-sciencey.
I recommend you read the article. This isn't your average flood, 1/3rd of the country is affected and more than a thousand dead.
Disservice to whom?
> Climate is not weather, it is about statistics over decades and centuries. If you can’t say global warming is bogus because it’s particularly cold out today, you also can’t blame global warming on it being hot or rainy.
This is not as useful as, say, a chart of weather events over the last century, but TFA lists some other events to try to show the pattern:
> Last week, flash floods struck the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Last month, a record-breaking deluge swept through St. Louis before floods in eastern Kentucky killed dozens of people. Outside the United States, a state in Australia observed about 28 inches of rain last month, while record rainfall in South Korea tore up parts of the capital, Seoul, this month.
> People need to understand it’s not about single events, they don’t when you take every opportunity to mention global warming with bad weather.
That doesn't make sense to me. Repetition typically aids recall and understanding, no?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/2...
One or two events is a coincidence, 5 unlikely events within the span of a few weeks is a pattern.
Whether and to what extent these 5 unlikely events is an anomaly depends on the number of measurement locations and the expected year-to-year variability. If there were 5,000 reporting sites, would we be surprised by "5 different 1-in-1000 year flooding events" in one year?
Climate change is real, but so are enthymemes and low quality news reporting.
If global warming makes major weather events 5% more common (that number is made up, I know it’s not that simple), are you supposed to roll Math.random() every time there’s a major weather event and only mention global warming if you get less than 0.05?
Do we know whether this particular event was caused by climate change? Of course not, this is a philosophical question, we'd have to discuss what is causality. But statistically climate change will likely make extreme events more common, so when we do observe an extreme rain even like this, it seems worth mentioning that climate change will make events like this more prevalent.
This is of course in line with your comment, but for specific weather events we can do slightly better than just saying climate change can it more prevalent: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/04/attribution-sci...
It is a disservice to muddy the waters that way every time any weather event is discussed. Yes, there might have been worse floodings about 5000 years ago. Yes, one single event cannot be attributed to climate change and freak monsoons happen from time to time. But we are very confident about the magnitude and frequency of these events being a direct consequence of global warming. Climate change and these events overall are direct consequences of global warming. There is no “yeah but”.
We also know for a fact that global warning is directly responsible for the increase in melt water from receding glaciers, which was a contributor to the floods in Pakistan. It’s completely wrong to say that this would have happened without global warming.
It’s like the discussions about the heat wave in Europe. You’d think people would get the message when 8 of the warmest years on record happened in the last 10 years.
OK.
> ... which was a contributor to the floods in Pakistan.
Can you explain how that contributes to the flooding? I don't see the mechanism.
Yes, but Climate Change absolutists do this /every single time/ there is a drought, or a hurricane, or a bad string of storms, a warm winter, or whatever. If you expect the other side to take the science seriously, you also can't turn a blind eye when politicians and media of a certain persuasion do the exact same thing in reverse.
They will never believe it. Their motivation for not believing in it is not based on facts, it is purely political / indoctrinated.
They will continually pick one thing or another to not believe it, and then when the evidence of change is insurmountable, they will claim humans aren't causing it. I've seen it time and time again here in Florida, it always goes back to 'well humans can't cause this'.
What is a “climate change absolutist”? I am sure you are aware that global warming does not happen just because some people believe in it, right? And that nobody is advocating for it.
Again, there are reasons why this specific event has contributing causes that would not exist in the absence of global warming.
> you also can't turn a blind eye when politicians and media of a certain persuasion do the exact same thing in reverse.
This is a straw man. The media are perfectly able to say exactly what other people have written here (global warming => increase in magnitude and frequency of extreme events), and politicians as well. And they do, more or less. Stop trying to find flaws in specific examples to confirm your political position. You are doing in reverse what others do when they cite Breitbart or OANN as a proof that conservatives are savages that cannot be reasoned with.
Obviously we have had extreme weather before, but many of the extremes we are seeing now are far, far outside normal (in some cases more than 100 times as common).
You might feel that every time an event comes up in the media, it is claimed it is because of climate change. Perhaps most of these extreme events are (or are at last much more common)?
We already know that climate change has an outsided impact on extreme events, particularly heatwaves, making them hotter, longer and more frequent. Many of these physics principles apply worldwide, so we end up seeing the fingerprint of cliamte change in extreme heatwaves across the world.
Dishonest actors exploit this asymmetry to raise large numbers of shallow objections, in the hope that the audience will be excited by the drama of conflict and bored by the effort of overcoming the objections. Clever or charismatic actors can often win such conflicts at a rhetorical level, and are then naively imitated by people who are not acting in bad faith but want to copy a successful-appearing social strategy for their own benefit.
I got an early life lesson in this via a school debate. Assigned to refute the proposition that 'Brand X is the best cat food', I compared the ingredients from many different brands and noted that Brand X had a much higher percentage of 'Ash' - burnt matter following cooking. On the day of the debate I triumphantly presented my findings, and asked the audience why they would want to feed ash to their cats. My opponent then got up and said 'But maybe cats enjoy burning HASH' and got a huge laugh. Was it responsive or substantive? No, but I had said the word 'ash' too many times and his making a joke about that relieved the mild tension I had created with my overly-earnest argument. His team won the debate.
And yet, we care a lot about the impacts of climate change, of which a particularly important and clearly visible category are the extreme weather events. We're not talking about it being hot or rainy, but a third of a county being flooded (Pakistan) or the worst heatwave ever recorded anywhere (China). And we're not just talking about one of these, but a lot of them.
Statistics is not just about averages. In fact those are often not the most interesting numbers to crunch. The chance of extreme events occuring is what matters, and when they occur we can calculate what the odds are now versus what the odss were before global warming: in this way we can 'attribute' to degree to which climate change has contributed to the chance of such events happening.
I don't remember which one, but there was an event which was 100% the result of climate change, which means there was zero chance of it happening before global warming.
It’s important to remember that scientists always focus on the evidence, not on opinions. Scientific evidence continues to show that human activities (primarily the human burning of fossil fuels) have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn have continued to impact Earth’s climate. This is based on over a century of scientific evidence forming the structural backbone of today's civilization [1].
Similar catastrophes and landslides happened in Colombia or Brazil after removing the trees. Pakistan has many very high peaks that provide a lot of potential energy but only the 4% is covered by forests. Maybe is time to increase that surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia#Impact_o...
How does this in anyway whatsoever, relate to the multitude of supposedly rare (outside of “global warming), clearly climate induced events causing the floods in Pakistan right now?
They had extreme drought, now they have extreme monsoon rain, combined with localized issues like melted glaciers and overflowing reservoirs.
If you “can’t say it”, maybe that is because you don’t know what you’re talking about..?
You're right, you can't say explicitly that a single extreme weather event is definitely because of climate change.
But if you're seeing a trend of change in frequency and/or magnitude, then that's the climate changing.
Bjorn Lomborg's whole deal is to take the focus off the frequency/severity of the problem and instead celebrate the quality of our disaster response. He also touts how disaster response/mitigation is but a small part of impressively growing GDP, even though things like forest destruction from wildfires aren't well-reflected in GDP figures.
And also warmer oceans evaporate more.
But... if warm air holds more moisture, sure, there's more moisture in the air. But there's no greater tendency for it to condense out in the form of rain, because warm air holds more moisture.
Can someone ELI5 why warmer air should lead to more rain, not just to more water vapor in the air?
Prior disclaimer: IANAC and IANAM
It can lead to either, depending on the local climate and circumstances. For an oversimplified explanation, compare the flooding in Pakistan and the drought in Europe:
- In Europe, abnormally high temperatures have increased the evaporation of top level water, because a greater proportion of water can evaporate into the atmosphere. As a result, even when it does rain, the water is more likely to evaporate again rather than soak into the soil and feed into the local drainage basin and eventually its river.
- In Pakistan, abnormally high temperatures have increased the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere. As a result, when the factors that normally trigger monsoon rains come into play, the amount of water that is released is disproportionately larger than the normal average.
If you have more water around, this process is stronger (as you have more available water to condense and energise the storm), eventually producing more rain.
This is the reason why you see the biggest thunderstorms in the tropics, where it is warm and moist.
We should use averages to build evidence for climate change, not specific weather patterns on any particular day, especially considering monsoons have been happening for millions of years
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/tongas-volcanic-er...
https://twitter.com/oikoweather/status/1338691244470403075
Since 1950, the warming climate has evaporated about twice the volume of Lake Erie - that's a lot more water in the atmosphere to rain hard when it comes down.
> This year we saw that the flood waters are not receding, it's not
> flowing. People are criticizing government that they have allowed
> developers to make the buildings and the residential plaza just on the
> waterways so the water is not going anywhere so this is increasing the
> severity of this flooding in across the pakistan and it's become every
> year it's become very very means a serious problem for pakistan
- Amar Auriro, Environment Journalist in Karachi [0]
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62707435
I wonder if the rain hitting Pakistan is "Spain's water" or if it's coming via a different atmospheric route.
By golly, you might be onto something. If you look at a map, there is a straight line from Pakistan across the Arabian Sea, around Yemen, up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and right across the Mediterranean to Spain.
So it is conceivable the rain in Spain stays mainly in the Balochistan plain!
Hope things revert to normal asap on both fronts
For a useful comparison, the central valley in California would flood regularly and very destructively without modem infrastructure. Entire towns were wiped out (Google it, thousands dead in the 1800s)
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/29/asia/pakistan-flood-damag...
With an average elevation of nearly 3000 ft., one must consider, "what countries are down the hill from Pakistan?"
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2022/08/30/11199799...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Pakistan_Floods
33 million are currently being impacted by the floods. I'm not sure how comparable those two statistics are. However, it seems unlikely that there will only be 300,000 displaced people once the water recedes.
Also, the map you linked shows districts that were hit by flooding in red or orange, and about 33% of the map is colored. I assume that they colored a district if any significant fraction was under water.
That's very different than the current situation, where 33% of the land is under water.
In case anyone interested, UNICEF New Zealand is looking for donations: https://www.unicef.org.nz/appeal/pakistan-flood-emergency?ut...
I cannot imagine living in a population density of of 742 people per mi² (287 per Km²).
[edit/assumed/obvious, as implied by the full quote: ".... and then have a third of the space flooded, i.e. a very sudden change"].
Can't tell from your comment - do you think that is higher-density or lower-density compared to where you are now?
That is high compared to the USA as a whole, but 742/sq mile is low compared to ~50 other countries, and is lower than many states in the USA - i.e. DC, MA, NJ and CT.
Ah. I live in California, population density 254 per mi², so about a third. California is also 2 times smaller than Pakistan - since a lot of California is inhabitable (contrast with Pakistan) and the surrounding areas easily accessible, it translates to a lot of "breathing room", even if you live in a densely populated county like San Francisco or Los Angeles.
> That is high compared to the USA as a whole, but 742/sq mile is low compared to ~50 other countries.
Made me look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Pakistan is a bit of a mix of both: three quarters are pretty empty, but the population is spread somewhat evenly over the rest [3]
1: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-population-de...
2: https://i.redd.it/oz7m4lfy37b51.png
3: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8e/fb/11/8efb11c1d9cc698ddca2...
But nothing at all has changed!
Population density is only one aspect of "what it feels like to live somewhere" - local density, land usage, etc all play into it.
Large scale population densities don't tell you anything, due to the fact that we have this habit of trying to fit as many of ourselves into the smallest places possible. San Francisco city, for instance, has a population density of 18,634/square mile. And while that's relatively dense it's dwarfed by places like Manila (Philippines) with a density > 111,000 per square mile. And if you want to go full on crazy there was Kowloon Walled City [1] in Hong Kong which had a population density in excess of 5,000,000 per square mile! That number's a bit misleading due to verticality, but not by much! That's probably the most densely packed area of a sizable population that there has ever been, and by a pretty wide margin.
I would guess that your number for Pakistan isn't really representative though: it's got dense cities and vast open spaces too.
I'm sure that will need to go sometime in the future but we still have plenty of space in the US to fill so I'm hoping it takes some time. lol
That's a significantly lower than here in Belgium (376/km², and 490/km² here in Flanders).
I'm not sure which country you live in, but although I would absolutely move back home (at about 100/km²) if I could, it's not the urban hell you seem to imagine.
* this is a common pattern of settlement
* the different geographies of two countries make a very simple (population / land area) density figure misleading, because Belgium is nearly 100% riverbank or floodplain and Pakistan is not
This is such a known problem that the US Census already has a different density measurement method, population-weighted density: https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kobe-Boussauw/publicati...
As a result, the region has a population density of 240/km² (only slightly less than Pakistan) but about 2/3rds of the population is in this valley representing 1/16th of the area of Wallonia. Flanders is mostly flat and more evenly settled.
This is actually more similar than I expected to the population distribution in Pakistan, with Punjab being a flat plain with an evenly distributed population, and the rest of the country being mostly settled along one river. By the way, Belgium also suffered a large flooding event last year in this valley, although nowhere near as deadly as what is happening in Pakistan.
[0] Ourworldindata.org
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...
e.g. More land is peat bogs than is built up.
Macau is amazingly densely populated, but at the same time the same density as Paris, but 1/3 of the size. It's an hour walk from one end to the other according to Google Maps.
India on the other hand is just 10% denser than Belgium, but doesn't feel like that when you look at photos of its cities and trains loaded with people.
How do you know that Pakistan's 'family planning' is not focused on increasing instead of decreasing the population?
What about religion in Pakistan is incompatible with 'family planning?'
* doesn't see 'family planning' as increasing population
* has religious traditions incompatible with any interpretation of 'family planning'
If Pakistan has a strongly increasing population then it will be in good position to take advantage of depopulation in China and elsewhere.
Pakistan too has a trend of decreasing birth rate with increasing economic power across the economic classes of people, even though all ascribe to the same religion.
Is 'family planning' not socially responsible?
0- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-o...
Pakistan's fertility rate has been falling down from 6 kids couple of decades back to now around 3.
And I’m not even saying that’s incorrect, just that there is a reason it’s not talked about.
> The moment you start talking in the terms of the population being already too high, the obvious solutions become terrifying
Perhaps there are good solutions worth talking about, such as what kinds of crops and foods we incentivize and disincentivize, with concomitant impact on the environment and, ultimately, the space we need to thrive. Or another is giving women access to birth control so that they can make decisions about what they perceive to be an improvement to their own lives and that of their families.
The Gates Foundation’s work with vaccination will have a huge impact as longevity increases and child mortality drops, people tend to respond to the lower risk by having smaller families. Plus the general education and empowerment of women is a big strategy to control birthrates as well since it gives women more life options beyond motherhood. You will notice that the overall western narrative is that we have a low birthrate crisis and need to support family life better, but in Africa the effort is to bring that birthrate down. Touchy, touchy subject, especially since a massive population increase in the global south is already baked into the math and is as close to inevitable as it gets.
Zero-sum thinking can get you into a whole lot of trouble here, which is why I am basically a solar punk. If that’s not realistic we are screwed anyway and will tear each other to pieces over the last scraps of the biosphere.
At the rate the climate hysteria is growing, we are going to have wars specifically aimed at culling large populations. Maybe biological sneak attacks, I mean accidental releases.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111
Assuming that the "Spanish Flu" originated in the USA (possible but unproven), it would have spread everywhere even if we never entered WWI.
It is well known that "Spanish" Flu originated in Kansas. It certainly would have spread beyond in the absence of USA military action, but it also certainly would not have killed 100 million people. Exposure rate drives incidence rate, which in turn drives mortality. If only ten people in a location have been exposed and only one of those has become infected, the resources of that location are better able to cope with the epidemic than would be the case if 1M were exposed and 100,000 were infected. Both treatment and isolation are more successful with more resources. This was why Americans were urged to isolate in the initial stages of covid, to prevent a shortage of hospital beds.
A very wrong way to handle an epidemic is to transfer tens of thousands of people to ground zero, expose them for weeks, and then transfer them to various other continents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
And terrifying graph for percentage losses by country:
https://topforeignstocks.com/2016/04/19/chart-world-war-ii-c...
If we want to allow continued population growth, we are saying that 'developing countries' must stop developing, and the wealthy countries need to vastly reduce the quality of not just their middle-classes, but their working class too.
We simply don't have the option of a low-footprint high standard of living right for the masses.
With a little help, most of these nations could jump straight past the pollution of a fossil fuel based economy and directly into a renewable/sustainable economy, while only improving their lives.
This is also completely orthogonal to the fact that if you want less people on the earth all you have to do is send women to school, allow them to start a career, and give them easy access to birth control. Population drops pretty reliably after that.
Better in that many places which have comparable population densities on a national level like the UK or Italy are mixtures of villages, fields, and forests with substantial areas of wild space with a few very large cities set amongst them - though obviously not with the kind of wild space of, say, California.
Worse in that those countries have most of their land area flat, well watered, and temperate and Pakistanis are packed into a few river valleys.
Maybe flat terrains have the downside of flooding. I am not a priest of the climate religion, but maybe it is the case that flat ground doesn't guide the water to that one place, a river or something, and the water spreads all around. I am not familiar with water falling from the sky anyway, maybe a priest of the climate religion is better informed than me.
Just like how making redlining illegal didn't immediately fix the problems it introduced, moving to a post colonial government doesn't immediately address problems and systems introduced by a colonial past.
Scapegoats are nice because you don't have to fix anything yourself.
The modern day problems are inherited from the colonial history of the region, and moving forward requires reckoning with this.
On the subcontinent, you’d have to go back a millennium, before the British, before the Mughals, and before the Sultanates, to get to institutions that are “indigenous.” Even if you could do that, those institutions would be wholly unfit to modern society.
The way land ownership was stratified, martial races, playing off of groups of ethnicities and religions, how one humbly starts writing a letter, the present arrangement of nations in the Subcontinent, feudal land ownership, government structures into parliaments, these are all examples of colonial legacy that affect the present day. The challenge is for people and societies to find a way through all these; integrating some, discarding some, fusing some, ignoring some, embracing some, etc.
In some ways, there have been successes, in other ways, the legacy of being submissive to Western foreign powers remains. It is for charting a path as a traumatized people.
That usage is incorrect as applied to the subcontinent. Before the British was the Mughals, who were foreign colonizers as well. Before that it's Muslim invaders going back to 1200.
> The way land ownership was stratified, martial races, playing off of groups of ethnicities and religions, how one humbly starts writing a letter, the present arrangement of nations in the Subcontinent, feudal land ownership, government structures into parliaments, these are all examples of colonial legacy that affect the present day.
That's just a way of saying that everything is a product of history, which is a truism. That's just as true of Europeans as anyone else. But again, if I'm a Bangladeshi, how is that actionable information?
The fact is, as others have pointed out, the invaders became the people in the case of Mughals and those before them; they are weaved into what it means to be part of the Subcontinent.
As a Bangladeshi, you can take this information and use it to change how you live your life. It is an attitude, that you do not always have to choose or chase after the Western or British way. That you can be educated and still bring your distinct customs into the workplace, decision making, professional life, etc. You as a people can usher your own institutions, for example educational institutions, without being an inferior copy of a European ideal. Why in some places is the foreign more reliable and trustworthy? Of course it speaks to the degradation and destruction of institutions. To move forward as a society one needs investment in native institutions.
During the colonial history and afterwards, the people of the Subcontinent had to learn their own history from the British, imagine that! Imagine how much was erased in the mind of a person raised to view themselves as colonial.
Is there some fundamental difference between what Muslim conquerors did to India in earlier centuries, and what British conquerors did to India in later ones?
People talk about the historical expansion of the European powers starting in the early modern period as if it was some radically different historical phenomenon from earlier episodes of imperialism/colonialism in human history (the Mongol Empire, the Islamic Caliphates, the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, etc). No doubt there were certain differences – especially when it comes to scale – but was it fundamentally different in essence? In moral status?
> The fact is, as others have pointed out, the invaders became the people in the case of Mughals and those before them; they are weaved into what it means to be part of the Subcontinent.
If British rule had endured longer, could not that have become just as true of the British? And in a lot of ways – legal systems, political systems, education systems, the popularity of English (especially among the elites) – the British did "weave" themselves, and those weaves endure to this day.
Or, suppose that – much like how the Brazilian Empire became independent of Portugal in 1822 – 19th century Britain had fallen into civil war, and Prince Edward of Wales withdrew to Delhi, and declared himself Emperor of an independent India, albeit one where people of British ancestry remained in charge?
How much should our judgement of history turn on its vicissitudes?
Wikipedia’s article on “nationality” [0] defines it as follows:
> Nationality is a legal identification of a person in international law, establishing the person as a subject, a national, of a sovereign state. It affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state against other states.
So, which sovereign state had jurisdiction over them? The Mughal Empire. Hence, their nationality was Mughal.
Colonialism involves looting the wealth of the colonies and shipping it overseas. The difference between Mughals and British is stark. Towards the end of peak Mughal rule India was the most prosperous country in the world. Towards the end of British rule India was one of the poorest countries in the world. Yes, these are extremely different to any other invasions in the world before 1500.
> s there some fundamental difference between what Muslim conquerors did to India in earlier centuries
Kinda like the Aryan conquerors who drove Dravidians down south and subjugated the native tribes - now referred to as "Adi"vasis (translation- the original inhabitants) and forced them to the bottom of the caste hierarchy?
Actually no, the Mughal conquest was very very different.
I'm not Indian.
> Colonialism involves looting the wealth of the colonies and shipping it overseas.
The word "colony" comes from Latin colonia – which is what the Romans called the settlements of retired soldiers they planted throughout their empire, to ensure conquered lands would remain under their control. The Romans were not the first to establish colonies – the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians had all done it before, and at the other end of Eurasia, Han China was doing the same thing around the same time. So, in the original sense, a colony involves not the extraction of resources, but the insertion of a new population–what the British did in North America and Oceania, and the Spanish and Portuguese did in much of Latin America.
The modern European "colonies" in Asia and Africa were different, in that they received few permanent European settlers–and hence were indeed much more extractive in focus–but extraction was hardly a new thing either. The city of Rome was fed by the extraction of Egypt's grain. Empires throughout history have been sustained through the plunder and oppressive taxation of conquered lands.
> Towards the end of peak Mughal rule India was the most prosperous country in the world. Towards the end of British rule India was one of the poorest countries in the world
The Mughals were the authors of their own decline. Aurangzeb plundered the empire to pay for his ruinous war against the Marathas, and the extravagant opulence of his court. He introduced discriminatory taxes against non-Muslims, which caused resentment among the Hindu majority, and sowed the seeds of later rebellions. His failure to ensure a clear successor left a legacy of civil war from which the empire never recovered.
No denying that the British Raj greatly mismanaged the economy–but so did the later Mughals. How is one inherently worse than the other?
And what difference did it make to millions of malnourished peasants, whether the taxes which oppressed them went to Delhi or to London?
> And what difference did it make to millions of malnourished peasants, whether the taxes which oppressed them went to Delhi or to London?
This is some kind of bizarre apologetics for colonialism. There is no evidence of economic mismanagement by later Mughals. You simply made up that shit. The kingdom split up and fell apart and India was dominated by the Maratha empire. Post Aurangzeb Mughals are of no real significance in Indian history or economics. I know you are just trying to move past the fact that Indias economic peak was under Aurangzeb, until the British pulverized the country. But if you are going to directly discard the actual data, what is the point of responding.
In the Mughal period Indian economic output was at its peak and ordinary peasants had similar economic outlook as their western counterparts. At the end of British rule indian peasants were several orders of magnitude poorer than their western counterparts. How on earth are you equating both situations? If you are not going to leave your absurd bias at the door, what's the point in engaging?
You also conveniently ignore 3000 years of rule by the Aryan derived minority upper castes on native lower castes. These apparently were glorious 2000 years for India, because the plight of the majority lower castes don't actually matter.
After the Buddhist empires, it was only during the Islamic empires that the lower castes weren't ritually forced into slavery and penury by "dharma" which was enforced as law. It is no coincidence that Indias economic peaks came under Buddhist and Islamic rule.
Under Upper caste rule Indians suffered a lot, however British colonialism was significantly worse. The economic data speaks for itself.
As an aside, Aurangzeb was the most austere Mughal emperor- This point is not relevant to the discussion, the fact that you made up a false point clearly shows that this is a fact free Ideological polemic from you. Even when the data directly contradicts everything you claim, you will remain unruffled.
> I'm not Indian.
I never claimed you were. But you have all the upper caste hindu right wing tropes down pat :) congratulations. Inspite of the fact that these gave been demonstrated to be fact free over and over again.
You’re the one doing that. But rolling back the clock 300 years before the British, but not 500 years before that before the Mughals and Sultans is quite indefensible.
> By indigenous I define it as the people of the region who settled there and became native to the land.
By that logic Americans are indigenous to the US but that’s not how we usually use the term. And Mughals weren’t that either. They were a foreign elite that conquered the subcontinent by force. Your average desi has very little Mughal ancestry.
> It’s a contrastive term for distinguishing from the British colonizers.
It’s a paper thin distinction.
> To move forward as a society one needs investment in native institutions
The irony is that Europe itself did quite the opposite. Their society has little connection to that of their Germanic ancestors. Instead it’s a synthesis of a middle eastern religion and Roman/Greek civil society and law.
The subjects of the Mughals adopted their religion, influenced by their culture, famous Mughal monuments like Taj Mahal dot the subcontinent, the legacy of sufism and emergence of Sikhism, all of these are their traces found in the substance of what it means to be Desi. Not all of these are shared by all people under the term Desi, for example the history of a person from Tamil Nadu will differ markedly from the history and view of someone from Punjab. But they are still part of the overarching sense of the Subcontinent. The Mughals and previous Sultans brought a new civilization that fused with the identity of the region over time.
Conversely, despite the British way being heavily influential in the Subcontinent and having had the most recent influence on the makeup of the countries there, nobody will mistake the Buckingham palace as having the same legacy as that of India. The British colonial era was clear in transferring wealth away from the region and the British did not consider India native to them. The Mughals came as conquerers, yes, but they became integrated into the culture they conquered. They also brought wealth to the region. Did the British Monarchs ever marry into the culture of their subjects like the Mughals did?
For the British, India was a profitable "Crown Jewel" but the mission was not to find the new land as a home. See how their presence in the region began as a trading company.
Contrast with the US where Native Americans were forced into reservations and their culture and language has little influence on most of the inhabitants of the US today. But the idea of the US also departs from a lot of ideas about nation, it is its own beast.
Power structures don’t disappear the moment a dominant power leaves a country. Power just shifts to their closest proxy at first.
It can take decades for the locals to vote/throw out these people and elect a government and build institutions that are more aligned with their local way of living.
The fact that there are so few Indians/Pakistanis of English lineage despite 200 years of rule should tell you the intent of the British rule - the land and its people were merely seen as places to exploit, not as places to settle. They were essentially tourists.
How long will you keep blaming colonialism. Since you want someone to blame shouldnt you blame the natives who allowed a foreign power to rule over them because natives could be easily manipulated using divide and rule strategy.