Why are Pakistan’s floods so extreme this year?
nature.com
nature.com
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2022/8/30/23327341/pa...
It seems odd to give a measure of ice as the count of the pieces.
Supercenter, Discount Store, Neighborhood Market?
So many sizes
Yes, this has been strongly predicted by climate models since forever. Mark Lynas' 2006 book Six Degrees, which summarised climate change research up to about 2005, has a section on this.
The prediction was that Pakistan will be wetter (i.e. have higher river flows) than historical averages through the 2020s because of glacial retreat.
Sometime in the late 2030s or early 2040s, the glaciers will be effectively gone, and Pakistan will be without water, except during the monsoon (which may be more erratic - different models still say different things here). The rest of the year, the river beds will be dry.
The time to start planning flood control and water retention structures was 20 years ago. Better late than never, though.
Plus, when you have drought, it damages the soil and plant life which would normally aid in capturing and retaining the rainfall. And when the rain does fall, instead of being absorbed into the soil it just creates erosion instead as the top layer dies.
People think about soil as just dirt, which it is not. Soil is effectively a living organism (or ecosystem of organisms).
So Pakistan, unlike many more developed countries, has a birth rate higher than the replacement rate, but significantly lower than it’s 1950 to 2000 highs over 6 - and trending downwards.
The population would be expected to drop precipitously, but not soon.
As long as birth rate remains above the replacement rate, population will not drop.
Pakistan's birth rate has fallen significantly (but still above the replacement rate), so you will expect population growth to plummet, but not the population number itself
Not sure about Pakistan because a Pakistan of 500 million doesn't seem sustainable.
200M is closer to 37M (+163M) than 370M (-170M).
OP is saying a 10% decrease is more likely than the population staying even.
I disagree - but not as wildly as I would if OP was saying that the population is likely to actually be close to 37M.
200M is quite far from 37M... It's just that 370M is even farther...
Mark my words.
100% think this.
That's my futurology projection.
This is also why many major climate reports tend to inherently be on the conservative side: it's really, really hard to correctly model these interactions so you can only earnestly report the predicted change in individual variables rather than the impact on the system.
And keep in mind this is not the "new normal", we're entering a period of transition that will not end within our life times. The rate of CO2 accumulating the atmosphere is accelerating and the rate of methane in the atmosphere is rapidly accelerating. We will likely see a blue ocean event in the next 20 years and it's really hard to imagine how that will even play out with the global climate, Thwaites glacier could collapse without much warning (very rapidly causing sea level rise beyond our current projections), the AMOC slow down could reach a tipping point, etc.
Everything we're witnessing now will in the future seem relatively mild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Impacts...
–Upton Sinclair, paraphrased
If you love technology. If you love computers. Then global warming is your biggest threat and something you should care about deeply.
And yes, I'm aware that's essentially a paraphrase of the Dunning-Kruger concept. We're all probably making similar assumptions about domains of knowledge we don't know much about, because that's what the brain does. Just like human vision appears solid and complete but is actually a stitched together amalgamation of the small, receptor-dense fovea in the center darting around constantly, and the rest being filled in by the brain instead of direct perception, so is our impression of the world, and we won't know things for sure unless we take time to study them up close.
I no longer expect any thing I say to convince people, but still keep saying what I do so that other people that see it, can feel a little less crazy/alone.
Consider it my, probably futile, struggle against the upcoming wave of cognitive dissonance. As soon as I realized the way things were headed, I also realized that, paradoxically, the more obvious our situation becomes the more aggressively people will refused to see it.
There was a time on HN where downvotes where pretty exclusively reserved for trollish comments and other inappropriate content. I agree with your feeling that this is disheartening, but strangely serves as evidence that these things are happening.
I myself have days where I can't believe my own eyes as I watch events unfolding I thought I would only see at the end of my life if I lived to a ripe old age.
Like you say, this is just the beginning. If floods like this happen in the Indian plains - and they will - the human and social costs will be immense.
It may seem like a non-starter right now, but what about five years from now? What if our best climate models agree that it will do less damage to the planet than allowing the permafrost to thaw?
The pushback comes from the risk. While we know that it'll cool the planet, we don't necessarily know how it'll affect weather patterns. If we can figure that out with some level of certainty, I believe there will be a point where the rewards outweigh the risks.
It's a small point, but the ratio of CO2 on the atmosphere is definitively not accelerating. On the last couple of decades it has been growing steadily, and the noisy few months look like they have negative acceleration.
Does anyone have any evidences of such a thing working?
I haven't seen a list of such measurements from permaculture, but I know it can be used to regreen deserts (as shown in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Arizona and elsewhere). And I assume permaculture vastly increases water infiltration. Geoff Lawton has videos showing Zaytuna Farm happily surviving drought and flood alike.
If farmers switched from conventional agriculture to some combination of regenerative agriculture and permaculture, most flooding would be prevented. Their own fields would easily infiltrate rain, eliminating runoff that builds up into flooding.
The article mentions that in addition to Pakistan getting double the normal amount of rain, increased glacier melt is filling the Indus river. I assume that in the theoretical situation of all farmers in Pakistan practicing regenerative ag or permaculture, that land on the Indus would flood. But not 1/3 of the country as we're seeing now, and the flooded areas would recover faster.
In the next 20-30 years I suspect we’ll just moderate total solar irradiance as-needed by injecting moon dust into L1.
The only issue is if there are powerful countries that are actually benefiting from the warming and don’t want to cool it down bit.
Read From Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown. He also mentions the first inch (2.5cm) infiltrates in 9 seconds! So his soil drinks up more water in 9 seconds than nearby farms do in an entire hour.
> was this a carefully controlled experiment?
NRCS water infiltration tests.
His neighbor's farm floods, his land soaks it up like a sponge.
Year-on-year his topsoil gets deeper.
Proof: oceans exist.
The key to the whole thing is if you can slow it down enough so that a sudden deluge over a day/week/month has time to slowly drain out.
Getting water into an aquifer takes time depending on how the soil is, but eventually the aquifer would rise to the surface and you'd have a marsh. Or it would rise higher and you'd have a lake.
They have three problems when used as carbon sinks:
1) They tie up land for one, otherwise, non productive purpose (the wild species living in them do not mind that, must be said)
2) Once fully grown they reach a carbon balance. This can happen surprisingly quickly, a few decades.
2) Forests do not simply sit there like a rock. Eventually they will burn unless managed. Then they simply release all that stored carbon into the atmosphere.
Regenerative agriculture is a much better carbon sink. The process of storing the carbon increases the soil fertility so it is a win/win. Soils can get very deep so there is not a natural limit like for forests.
A draw back is measuring the carbon sunk. I do not know of anybody doing that (a market opportunity?). An important part of carbon farming is selling the "carbon credits" (a mad bad and sad idea, but it is a thing) to do that there must be an accepted measure of carbon sequestration, like there is for trees.
Not a short term carbon sink only.
AFAIK they also create a more moderate micro climate, reducing soil temperature, retaining humidity and rain while keeping it in the soil, reducing the risk of draughts.
Of course regenerative agriculture is much better but the effort to implement it at a scale is incomparably greater, while it should not be shunned.
Also agroforestry will help with making agriculture possible in larger areas of land.
I went to check the above sentence, and the first hit was this detailed article from Washington State, which analyses Brown's claims in detail, and explains why the scientific community is skeptical of them:
https://csanr.wsu.edu/regen-ag-solid-principles-extraordinar...
Anyway, even if, as Gabe Brown claims, regenerative agriculture is an order of magnitude more effective than expected, and you applied it to 100% of the land in Pakistan, it would still only reduce flooding by less than a foot.
How do you know that?
How deep do roots go? Do worms dig? Do you know?
I do not. But I am not making assumptions
Informally yes, but the scientific way is to use a ring infiltrometer: https://www.fao.org/3/s8684e/s8684e0a.htm -- Basically instead of digging a hole, you pound a pipe into the ground and then fill the pipe with water.
As for agricultural practices being able to change soil composition multiple feet down, trees and tap-rooted plants are very effective at placing large volumes of organic matter at depth. One example, Lacy Phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia) is an annual plant that produces a dense fibrous root system that reaches a depth of 4 feet; in the fall the Phacelia plants die, and their roots decompose at depth, creating pathways for water infiltration while also increasing soil organic matter at depth. The same goes with other trees and shrubs. The farmer from the "It ain't much but it's honest work" meme, Dave Brandt, has some really enjoyable presentations on youtube about improving soil composition at depth.
In terms of projects whose primary aim is flood prevention / aquifer recharge, John D. Liu, Andrew Millison, and Geoff Lawton all have documented quite a few projects that have been very successful in addressing the problem.
But maybe I'm not understanding the solution. Can you explain more the idea?
Permaculture is: the development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient.
I presume GP meant that by having more persistent vegetation in the area, that vegitation would do vegetation things and help with flood control.
I'm sceptical when I see agriculture wrapped in hype terms. I think that engineering will play a bigger role here. Forest restauration and dams that would retain soil and water and absorb part of the hit will help.
Just to speculate about possible partial solutions, I think that in plain areas subject to frequent flooding they could erect small hills and build the houses over those to defend homes. As floods will increase in the future, the sooner they start, the better.
They could also to dig a system of storm ponds. So will have many soil to build the hills. Moving soil can be done in the same step. The base of the hills should be heavily reforested to retain the soil in place. As a bonus you increase the forested area and help nature to flourish.
The other solution would be to dig concrete canals for as water highways but that would remove the main reason why people lives there: Very rich soil for agriculture plus water. You don't want all of this water lost in the sea
Storm ponds would play a benefit role to store water for the dry season also.
A good example of a similar project in India, as covered by Andrew Millison: https://youtu.be/jDMnbeW3F8A
Sepp Holzer did a similar project in Portugal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUryneCjxV4 ...I believe he also did some pretty large projects in the middle east, but I can't find any vids on them at the moment.
Geoff Lawton has done a ton of projects like this, but maybe not at the landscape wide scales like the projects above.
Probably the best book on the basic principles of how to do it - Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond by Brad Lancaster. Also the book Water For Every Farm by P.A. Yeomans is pretty good as well, but not as accessible of a read.
TLDR - To keep desert monsoons from flooding areas downstream, dig a landscape wide network of swales and basins to catch, soak and sink the water into the soil. Properly dug, such earthworks recharge aquifers while stopping flooding and erosion.
It sounds like that eruption at least changed atmospheric composition by throwing tons of water into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...
Stratospheric water may also set the upper limit on how many launches to orbit can be done per year, since all the propellant consumed in or above the stratosphere makes water that ends up in the stratosphere.
Unlikely. At least a single volcanic eruption is not enough to change the long-term climate trend, you need a clusters of eruptions to persist through centuries for that. HTHH will likely decrease the global mean surface temperatures by 0.004°C in the first year.
Compared to that human activity is a thousand times more significant, everything else is statistical noise next to it, which at least means that it is easy to spot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa
“ The eruption caused a volcanic winter.[17] In the year following the eruption, average Northern Hemisphere summer temperatures fell by 0.4 °C (0.72 °F).[18] The record rainfall that hit Southern California during the water year from July 1883 to June 1884 – Los Angeles received 970 millimetres (38.18 in) and San Diego 660 millimetres (25.97 in)[19] – has been attributed to the Krakatoa eruption.[20] There was no El Niño during that period as is normal when heavy rain occurs in Southern California,[21] but many scientists doubt that there was a causal relationship.[22]
The eruption injected an unusually large amount of sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas high into the stratosphere, which was subsequently transported by high-level winds all over the planet. This led to a global increase in sulfuric acid (H2SO4) concentration in high-level cirrus clouds. The resulting increase in cloud reflectivity (or albedo) reflected more incoming light from the sun than usual, and cooled the entire planet until the sulfur fell to the ground as acid precipitation.[23] “.
Yes, I’m aware of “but many scientists doubt that there was a causal relationship” regarding the rain but the climate has been affected by a single eruption.
There's good evidence this has happened multiple times in history by a single eruption.
It is not impossible that HTHH affected the monsoon, but there is a thousand pound elephant in the room that will make it's effect hard to quantify.
There is a natural carbon cycle, which is quite balanced in that there is barely any radiative forcing, which is the difference between how much energy enters the atmosphere and how much of it leaves. Human activity amounts to all, I repeat all of the radiative forcing in the last century, and more actually, because naturally there would have been negative forcing.
I agree humans are responsible for increasing CO2, but not because of emissions. The earth should act as a buffered system, with utility of atmospheric carbon rising with carbon levels.
There’s another paper in nature describing how the mass slaughter of baleen whales broke the iron cycle at the poles. Mass whale poop fed the krill who are critical to fixing iron…the high iron krill poop is what feeds the plankton blooms. Polar plankton was critical to sinking excess atmospheric carbon.
Unfortunately as it turns out this system can't cope with the extra emissions. Most of it is still absorbed, but a lot of it lingers in the atmosphere, causing trouble. Even the oceans have trouble absorbing the extra emissions. They now threaten the biological pump itself.
This is why people are so depressed when it comes to climate change, because never mind the greenhouse effect, which is in itself substantial, but once you screw with things like the biological pump there is no telling what will happen. This is a big, fine-tuned system, not unlike a spaceship. It is very risky to poke it. Granted it is likely that the system will snap back into working conditions in a few million years, but that's not exactly reassuring for us.
https://www.academia.edu/314989/Southern_Ocean_iron_fertiliz...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=146%20million%20cubic%2...
I think we will find that, even during an increase in anomalous years from climate change, 2022-2023 will be anomalous.
Flooding used to be a much bigger problem in the Western United States and it was solved with dams. Yes, there is thd risk of dam failure but we're weighing up the real and present risk of flooding regardless against the possible risk of dam failure.
Unfortunately, there has been increasing opposition from the environmental lobby against building dams in the developing world in recent decades (eg [1]) and this matters when such countries are usually dependent on the World Bank and/or IMF to fund their construction.
Dams not only reduce the risk of extreme flooding but also provide cheap hydroelectric power, which is of incredible value to a developing nation.
Pakistan has some dams but clearly not enough. Given these extreme events that led to this catastrophic flooding are increasingly common and that no action in climate change will change this in the short or even medium term, it's time to build dams. Lots of them.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
So basically we need genetically engineered super beavers that are adapted for high altitude mountaineering.
On another note I find it hilarious and also cruel that beavers are apparently absolutely obsessed with stopping the sound of any running water. To the point that if one wanders near your home and can regularly hear water running inside of pipes it drives them crazy.
Dams are unlikely to help here and pose a serious risk if they break - which they can in a region prone to earthquakes.
Longer durations of 'no rain' cause the ground harden to a much less porous, concrete-like surface that cannot absorb the rain, when it does come, fast enough. So the water pools and flows, causing flood conditions.
edit: glaciers melt in summer, I am surprised why they are melting in rainy season. No matter how you vote, just explain why this odd behavior.
The ancients even created a name for it: La Nina.
That said, back in 1992 this only affected 3 million people, and now it's 30 million. The population of the country only doubled over the same time span, so it seems like this year's flooding is easily five times worse than before
Or the distribution of people living in the flood plane drastically changed in that period. See my other comment @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32653203
e.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-environment-fore...
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/wmo-forecasts-f...
“Last hundred years” for the former interpretation.
(Because there is no year 0 in the AD/CE calendar, so the first century in the calendar starts in year 1, the second in 101, etc...)
We had a triple dip in 1998, and before that 1976.
"I'm gonna go with A. Climate change "
Natural disaster? Climate change. More or less insects/birds/rodents than usual? Climate change. More or less rain/snow/hail/heat/cold/storms/floods/droughts than usual? Climate change. Wildfire? Climate fire. Crypto currencies using record breaking amounts of electricity year over year? Climate change (impoverished countries ravaged by climate change turn to crypto currencies to escape their local inflated currency which further exacerbates climate change in a positive feedback loop - see what I mean?).
In all of these cases climate change may indeed be a piece of the puzzle, but due to intellectual laziness it has become the vast majority of the pie and we don't bother to understand if there are other factors more influential than climate change.
As long as half of America continues to engage in such dangerous denialism there is no amount of drum beating that is excessive.
> most of us live in a country
No we don't
> here half the political body actively denies
By actively deny, you mean that they force everyone like you? If you mean that, then it's factually wrong.
> no amount of drum beating that is excessive.
Umm, as a suggestion you should look for more effective way of convincing people.
Usually people do go and verify, it's probably you that are not prone to looking. Almost always, it is global warming. This one time, we are not waiting for anybody to verify, because 50 years ago people were already predicting that global warming would almost certainly cause floods on the South littoral of Asia.
Way longer that 1-2 weeks intense monsoon downpour.
Back in the 90s, never above 90-91 in Sept.
In the last 10 years we started seeing 94-95 in Sept.
Coincidentally air travel has doubled in that time period; from 2.25 billion people flying in 2010 to 4.56 billion in 2019. Of course that cratered since 2020.
Thanks AirBnB and other apps that make burning fossil fuels a thoughtless, trivial thing?
Your outrage is misdirected to something you probably personally relate to. Leisure travel is a minuscule component of the carbon in the atmosphere. Leisure travel is a fly hitching a ride on the beast that is global logistics, and AirBnb making leisure travel slightly cheaper and easier is a drop in the bucket for all leisure travel in general.
Your qualification of my emotions is way off.
2.4% when talking tonnes may be a small percent relative to the “big picture” but it’s not 0 tonnes, it has an impact, and production of machines to produce planes, production of more planes to keep up with rising demand are not included in that 2.4%. Leisure travel across the planet is not exactly a requirement for the survival of the species.
It’s still pushing our choices onto future humans.
Since statistics are what matters to you; you’re one of seven billion; your perspective is not that important.
Probably best to avoid overly reductive rhetoric, the basis of which (statistical relevance) can be easily used against you. More co2 is released in service of the airline industry than just planes flying. The world is not made of singular statistical objects in a vacuum.
There’s an industrial pipeline of machines to mine materials and machines to produce planes, all the travel to and from airports. The drink service carts don’t just fall from the sky or grow on trees, they too have an entire industrial pipeline required for their production. Making travel easier puts more strain on planes necessitating more parts and net new planes sooner.
The world is a miasma of statistics making up “the big picture”.