Pakistan's floods have created 100km-wide inland lake, satellite images
cnn.com
cnn.com
> "And while we understand that the new reality of climate change means more extreme weather, or monsoons, more extreme heat waves like we saw earlier this year, the scale of the current flood is of apocalyptic proportions. We certainly hope it's not a new climate reality."
Pakistan also had major record-breaking flooding in 2010, and rainfall patterns appear very similar to this event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Pakistan_floods
It's probably a safe bet that Pakistan will continue to see these kinds of events at least once every ten years for the foreseeable future, with a likely increase in frequency and severity. Warming the planet means pumping more moisture into the atmosphere, which in combination with more random global atmospheric circulation patterns, means more extremes of flood and drought.
I don't see many gems encrusted in the dams in any case. Do they use cars and fridges in East Indies?
Dams have been extensively used for flood control, and some dam designs are explicitly designed for that specific purpose. Planning them to make things better doesn't make things worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods#Netherlan...
This isn't to say that climate change isn't happening, but: flood plain that has flooded for centuries floods is not surprising. And it is fairly normal in that region for lots of people to live in flood zones because they are fertile agriculturally (due, I believe, to the flooding).
Could you provide evidences of governmental corruption that actually result into this?
Something like: * A given amount of budget were allocated to hire public sector workers to do necessary management work (coordinating, communication, planning of non-flood-hazard residential zones etc.)
* A proof that the above budget meets the required efforts
* Evidences that the people are cooperating with the government, if the government actually carried out such campaingh.
Corruption is everywhere. In the sense that individuals not doing what they suppose because of selfish motivations.
But to blame a government on systematic corruption, there has to be evidences that resources are available, but the government choose to neglect.
The liberal fantasy that "eliminating corruption, then your imagination will become reality" does not exist in reality at all.
Is that a liberal fantasy? That seems pretty bipartisan.
There are a lot of reasons we can come up with to explain this, but it does seem to be a fact that the more control the government has over something, the more inefficient and corrupt the process.
However, this inherent corruption seems to be ignored when (typically liberal) people argue for more government control.
However, this inherent inefficiency and risk for corruption is seen as a lesser evil compared to leaving a matter completely unattended, or in the hands of market structures that have evidenced that they are utterly uncaring about their impact on society at large. Entrenched market structures often exhibit the same behaviors that "conservatives" dislike in governments.
Government control can destroy value on a pretty massive scale, see Venezuela.
Crazy stuff.
The way I ended up explaining it to my kids was that 33M people were affected. San Francisco population is ~800k, so around 40 SFs worth of people are impacted.
That's not to say this isn't shocking or a sign of radical climate change.
It makes you understand the importance of Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia for things that impact people.
Pakistan is the world's fifth-most-populous country.
The population is young: in 2019 34.8% were thought to be 14 or younger
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_in_Pakistan
Pakistan has one of the world's youngest populations.
The country's population structure is relatively young, with a median age of 19.
Pakistan is also thought to have the world's fourth-largest refugee population, estimated at 1.4 million in mid-2021
I don't understand. Why can't the government self advocate given it's a nation of children and refugees?
This is wild. Google says the US is 38, Germany 45, Japan 48 for some random examples (the top search result for me says Pakistan median age is 22, which is still crazy).
Nation of Refugees - now or always? Now due to floods I can understand. But if always, I do not understand. They have been a "stable" country for half a century. When I say "stable", I mean without any land being lost or won since 1971, which puts the last major change at almost 51 years and 51 years should be a long time for any refugees to be assimilate, no?
There was also an internal operation in the last decade to remove the Taliban and such from their strongholds and that caused a lot of innocents to lose their homes.
There were large floods in 2010 and a strong earthquake in 2005 that also destroyed many towns and villages.
And as a historical tidbit, when Mao was in power, a small number of Chinese ran from there and settled in Pakistan.
How deep is it? I mean, I'm sure there are areas that are a few inches deep and others that are dozens of feet, but generally speaking -- is this more or less than the height of a single story?
Edit: And is it generally of similar depth or does it vary greatly from locale to locale?
That will be insufficient for a 100-year flood (~1000 acres underwater by current mapping), and a 200-year or 500-year flood would put significant fractions of the city underwater.
https://eng2.lacity.org/projects/LARIVER_Glendale_Narrows/do...
This entire thing just reminds me of Day After Tomorrow (2004). Although the movie had a lot of bad science, way too many people called the premise and social outcomes of the movie ridiculous. Hell, the South Park criticism of it alone significantly pushed this current batch of climate deniers.
> Two days before the day after tomorrow
> Bah gawd... that's today
It was as if they hadn't realized the amount that people draw from their work.
It was _pretty explicit_, the turnaround. Or at least it felt that way to me.
I think that thinking people massively underestimate the influence that cartoons have on common people.
It seems like 90% of the people who argue against religion on the internet got everything they know about religion from cartoons like South Park. Or everything they know about Texas from King of the Hill.
There was a newspaper article a few years ago about how some massive percentage of Britons thought The Simpsons was an accurate depiction of Americans, and didn't understand that it was a lampoon.
Every character and trope is a humorous representation of something in America. Are you American? Because I am and i've met someone like every character in the Simpsons in real life.
They did however walk back on the manbearpig.
``` On November 8th, you must vote against me and show the world that you didn’t think the new Star Wars was all that good. When you’re in that voting booth, remember that every vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote that shows the world we agree that The Force Awakens was more like a Happy Days reunion special than a movie. The choice is yours, America. Please make the right one. ```
which felt pretty explicit to me.
The entire state would grind to a halt, much the rest of the country would suffer seriously as well.
they have the before and after as a zoomed in image.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150279/devastating-...
Water interacting with otherwise arid landscapes is complicated. It can be simultaneously devastating and life giving.
It is perhaps a thing humans need to get better at interacting with given the state of the climate.
In short, the Salton Sea was the result of what was probably one of the worst humanitarian and ecological disasters in California history.
I will note a pet peeve of mine: humans are animals indigenous to this planet. We didn't fly in from another galaxy for the express purpose of fucking with it for funsies.
Other animals shape their environment and alter the landscape. Alligators help create swamps and keep them alive. Beavers build dams. Etc.
Not saying humans shouldn't be mindful of the consequences of their actions, but it's a tired trope that human activity is somehow fundamentally different from that of other animals.
Only humanity and celestial bodies can kill nearly all life on Earth. Only humanity can so dramatically raise atmospheric carbon dioxide PPM as we've done. Only humanity engineers earth and waterworks on hundred-km scales.
Sure, it's our home planet, too and we have a right to be here and alter our environment to support our existence like every other animal does. But no other animal can fuck up the planet more than humans can and do. No other animal even comes close.
Climate change:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/can-ants-change-the-course-of-c....
As an invasive species fucking things up for others, including humans:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eap....
Ants have big impact on environment as 'ecosystem engineers'
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110131133227.h...
Maybe you mean "Northern California." In Southern California, it's very well known. I knew about it for decades, and I didn't even live in California at the time.
a huge man made natural catastrophe.
People on the internet like to call it a "man made" catastrophe. It wasn't. It was caused by flash flooding that overflowed the Colorado River.
Yes, there was a minor irrigation canal between the two places, but nothing that was large enough to cause this catastrophe. Especially since, geologically speaking, the Salton Sea has existed, evaporated, existed, and evaporated over and over again before any humans even lived in the area.
Humans later took advantage of the natural catastrophe to irrigate farms and build resorts, but that didn't cause the problems. I've been there dozens of times, and those beaches are made of millennia of fish bones, not just a hundred years' worth.
It's a drying saline lake, and toxic dust blowing off of it is normal in a desert environment. People who live in the southwest have known that for centuries. It's even a plot point in a number of old cowboy books. There are hundreds of similar lakes in the surrounding desert. But since you can Google Salton Sea on the internet and someone made a video, people act like it's a one-off. If you're not a tourist, you know it's not.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/06/californias-salton-sea-spewi...
I selected radar because it's really good at detecting standing water on the ground (as blue).
[Disclaimer I direct the PC project at Microsoft]
https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/explore?c=68.0200%2C...
Is the agricultural capacity of this area dependent on periodic flooding, similar to historical patterns of the Nile?
Just trying to categorize this event relative to e.g. Greenland ice sheet melting.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro
[1]https://odishatv.in/news/international/pakistan-floods-damag...
[2]https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/civilization-and-fl...
edit:
Je tussi ek kissan da mundeh ki comment nu downvote kar rehe hai, tenu khuch galt fami hegi. Sindh, Pakhtunkwa, Punjab, Himachal, Jammu, Kashmir, Haryana, Uttarakhand, aur Delhi NCR di kissani saili ta bilkul same to same hege Angrezo aur Environment di whajese.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-educati...
With a high enough warming rate, we might get a chance to see what a "meltwater pulse" looks like :-/
There have also been times when the polar caps melted completely and there were rainforests pole to pole.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-strange-lives-of-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Polar_region_of_the_Cret...
One of the reasons we are in an ice age right now (which refers to a period where you have periodicly advancing and retreating glaciers) is because you have a continent on the pole and a clear sea lane around it, before the Strait of Magellan opened you have a current that circulated between the poles and equater evening out the temperatures allowing for ice free poles.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikarpur_Operation_2021
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazroo_Narejo
[2] - https://tribune.com.pk/story/2370767/dacoits-kidnap-torture-...
[3] - https://www.dawn.com/news/1625938
[4] - https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.47...
(I don't know how it compares to that in Punjab, though, nor whether it is well or badly maintained and managed.)
Same stuff as Katrina and many other less-visible disasters related to "sudden" "floods". Californians can remember the Oroville Dam spillway failure - it's all the same, negligence multiple times over, just on a bit less scale.
Is an 'inland lake' different to an 'offshore lake'?
I think it refers to an inland body of water with no access to the sea, sort of like a salt lake [1]. (I upvoted because it's an interesting question. But it would be better received if phrased plainly versus sarcastically.)
The perils of thinking people receive things objectively. I didn't think it was sarcastic; it's phrased about as neutrally as I can imagine.
Try “what is an inland lake?”
It’s the question, plainly. You aren’t levying a guess against a contrived hypothetical (“offshore lake” isn’t a thing, and could objectively be parsed as facetious).
Every year kleptocracy and corruption become more normalized and the “me-first” popular movements that have arisen as a response to elite corruption are wholly unequipped to correct course. I am not optimistic my country will properly account for the long effects of climate change on human well-being.
Think again.
> I am not optimistic my country
You should be tho. Things change and they sure will for pakistan. At least based on the mindset of the people i met from the country i am pretty darn optimistic they will, but they / you need to gain control.
> elite corruption are wholly unequipped to correct course
Sack them.
I don't know the area, but if the climate allows it, their best bet could be to rely on edible aquatic crops that typically grow very fast. Lotus rhizomes are edible, same as Typha stems or the seeds rich on starch of Trapa bicornis that taste like sweet chestnuts. Must be cooked to remove their toxins (and eventual parasites) before eaten.
From the article
https://time.com/6209889/pakistan-food-floods/
tl;dr: This will lead to rice and cotton shortages, compounding this year's wheat shortages (climate, Putin) and olive / sunflower oil shortages (Spain's megadrought).
Last week a woman was caught starting a wildfire in Galicia by a police after seven wildfires occur in the same area.
Environmental terrorism... and maybe even economic sabotage.
If there is a team of puppets, there must be a puppeteer somewhere. Right?. We had a interesting high number of events targeting tourism. More than 6000 wildfires with many very big wildfires in categories rarely seen before, several train sabotages (optic fiber stolen for no reason, and a train exiting from a tunnel directly into a wildfire) in a country with an economy based in tourism. A high number of wildfires also in France, Portugal and Romania but Spain suffered the bulk of the attacks.
[1] I don't think that the mega prefix is justified still
There was already a secular trend of Pakistan having to import ever-larger amounts of food[1].
Unfortunately the minute Putin invaded Ukraine, we saw one of the world's breadbaskets invade another of the world's breadbaskets and the West lost its mind with sanctions. The EU's reaction is "we'll do whatever it takes" which is a nice way of saying "we'll out-bid everyone else for food and energy". From that moment, most of Africa and many Asian countries were condemned by the West to face famines - just so Europe wouldn't face the total consequences of its own sanctions. Pakistan is one of the countries that will be out-bid by the EU.
Pakistan was already expected to raise imports before this flood[2]. I cannot imagine how bad it's going to be now that they have the confluence of terrible flooding and, Putin and the EU exporting famine to much of the world.
Everyone that can should consider donating to Pakistani aid.
---
[1] https://www.dawn.com/news/1630378
[2] https://www.world-grain.com/articles/17140-pakistan-expected...
Perhaps use "US" instead of "EU", it works better on the morons believing Russian garbage.
In any case, do you think if Pakistan said "We join the EU/US in sanctioning Russia", they'd be getting extra help from the EU/US at the moment? I like the EU but they seem to have been running around in internal panic themselves, they're not going to give a crap about Pakistan...
Exactly. Russia is a pariah state for the EU, but the EU does not treat states trading with it as pariah states.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods#/media/Fi...>
Sea level rise used to be talked about in terms of inches. Now, meters.[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/29/major-se...
I DRINK IT UP!
> Killed 1,162 people, injured 3,554 and affected 33 million since mid-June.
Shocked I haven't heard more than tiny references to this before now.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/1/13-0428_article
> "In August 2010, Pakistan experienced major floods and a subsequent cholera epidemic. To clarify the population dynamics and transmission of Vibrio cholerae in Pakistan, we sequenced the genomes of all V. cholerae O1 El Tor isolates and compared the sequences to a global collection of 146 V. cholerae strains..."
Fixable. All European capitals had cholera epidemics in their past. Scientists like John Snow sweated blood and tears and failed and failed again until fixing it. The Pakistani government could find useful to adopt the solutions that the evil UK developed 200 years ago and are freely available for everybody. Not need to reinvent the wheel anymore.
In any case they had twelve years to do something about it, so are probably much better prepared now.
In a desert I would chose having water over dry-to-the-bone land, all the time. Water is money
Water no get enemy
"Yeah, But a lot can kill you"
- Bonnie Hunt, Robin Williams, Jumanji, 1995 (approx 78 minutes in).