[HN Gopher] Pakistan's floods have created 100km-wide inland lak...
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Pakistan's floods have created 100km-wide inland lake, satellite
images
Author : pseudolus
Score : 198 points
Date : 2022-08-31 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| When it comes to "climate change", most of the focus is
| unfortunately on the degree to which human activity is involved.
| The fact is that the climate of the earth has been changing,
| drastically and continuously, throughout the history of the
| planet. Just 13,000 years ago the oceans were 360 feet(!!) lower.
| While nobody should have any doubt that pollution from human
| activity has a small influence on the climate (as well as many
| other harmful side effects), we should all keep in mind the big
| picture. The climate _is_ going to change, drastically, in the
| near term (geologically speaking), whether or not our behavior is
| involved at all. If we were a forward thinking society, we would
| be putting our efforts and our resources into preparing for
| inevitable climate changes that will have drastic effects across
| the globe, rather than keeping our heads in the sand and
| believing that the climate will remain stable if we just cut our
| carbon output.
|
| https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-educati...
| enviclash wrote:
| Any urban planner out there with info about the influence of
| urbanisation on the disaster? Increasing climate change and
| increasing urbanisation are a global ticking cocktail.
| amriksohata wrote:
| They desperately need aid however I fear the money will again
| fall into the wrong hands, isi or military to use it to fund war
| and weapons. Be careful who you donate to
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| There is a book called _Salt Dreams_ about the history of water
| in the Southwestern US. One of the things it details is that the
| Salton Sea is something that has come and gone before. This time
| around, it is failing to evaporate and disappear due to run off
| from agricultural irrigation.
|
| 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.
| anon291 wrote:
| The Salton sea is shrinking.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It began shrinking after 1999 when water use became more
| efficient. Without agricultural runoff, it should have
| disappeared decades ago.
| mikestew wrote:
| The Salton Sea shouldn't exist at all. Had arrogance not
| overtaken those thinking they'd bring irrigation to the
| desert, the Salton Sea would still be the bone-dry Salton
| Sink. But after the canal and headgate failure, et. al.,
| and the Colorado River flowed into the Salton Sink for two
| years, now we go from Sink to Sea. (And to be fair, it
| wasn't all due to arrogance; several floods one after
| another didn't help.)
|
| In short, the Salton Sea was the result of what was
| probably one of the worst humanitarian and ecological
| disasters in California history.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The evidence is that this isn't the first time there was
| water there. Regardless of what contribution human
| activity made this time, the area has a long history of
| periodic flooding creating a temporary lake as evidenced
| by geological markers and Indigenous oral traditions.
| mikestew wrote:
| I considered adding "...under current ecological
| conditions", but I though it obvious that natural
| flooding cycles were not responsible for this incarnation
| of the Salton Sea. I guess not. There is a good
| documentary on the Salton Sea entitled _The Miracle of
| the Salton Sea_ that has outstanding old film footage
| from the early days, and explains how the current
| incarnation came about, though the Wikipedia page
| probably gives the same, if less well-presented,
| information.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| My previous remarks about agricultural runoff already
| agree with your observation that this incarnation and its
| duration is substantially influenced by human activity.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kyboren wrote:
| Like all animals, we eat, fuck, and die, but humanity's
| ability to alter the landscape far exceeds that of
| alligators and beavers. Our combined and fantastically
| developed use of reason, tools, and written language have
| elevated humanity to a fundamentally different level.
| We're each of us now demigods and the world is our golden
| goose.
|
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Perhaps you've heard of the lowly ant?
|
| 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/e
| ap....
|
| Ants have big impact on environment as 'ecosystem
| engineers'
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/11013113322
| 7.h...
| wizofaus wrote:
| Pretty sure bacteria made a much more massive difference
| to the earth's atmosphere/ climate than humans ever
| have/will do. Accepted it wasn't a single species.
| hahaitsfunny wrote:
| indus wrote:
| It had a thing called "Bombay Beach" .. LOL.
| subsubzero wrote:
| I went there in 2020 to check it out(Salton Sea and Bombay
| beach). Its a place that is not talked about alot in
| California as its a huge man made natural catastrophe. Bombay
| beach was really eerie as there was all this infra there from
| a more prosperous time(signs with ladies in swimsuits being
| pulled by a boat and well dressed people drinking by the
| "sea"). Saw many dead fish and their skeletons littering the
| beach, along with rusting playground equipment. A small
| contingent of artists have taken up residence in the deserted
| town and one of them made a "sothebys real estate" bombay
| beach storefront which I thought was quite funny.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Its a place that is not talked about alot in California_
|
| 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.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| If the Salton Sea were in an "Old World" region settled
| for thousands of years, then the people who live near it
| would have cultural memory of the Salton Sea drying and
| flooding numerous times and would not be shocked when it
| happened again. Developed California is _very_ young;
| most people who live there today don 't have a very long
| family history on the land. Their families arrived in
| California one or two centuries ago, which they consider
| 'a long time ago'. Californians lack much experience with
| their land, so they're shocked when things like this
| happen.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| There are dry lake beds everywhere in SoCal. When it
| rains enough to temporarily fill them, shrimp hatch out.
| samschooler wrote:
| So there is another book called _Where the Water Goes_. In that
| book the author talks about how if the Salton Sea does
| disappear the accumulation of dust, fertilizer and other less
| than great chemicals may be picked up by winds and
| significantly reduce air quality for the region. So we 're
| between a rock and a hard place at this point.
| aniijbod wrote:
| > Pakistan's floods have created 100km-wide inland lake,
| satellite images
|
| Is an 'inland lake' different to an 'offshore lake'?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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).
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Um, I really hope I'm incorrect on this but is the green bit that
| has flooded fertile farmland next to a river? I'm asking if a
| famine will be a down stream result of this catastrophe.
| hedora wrote:
| You're correct:
|
| 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).
| pvaldes wrote:
| Spains drought [1], fueled in part by more than 50 criminal
| mega-wildfires. What happened in Spain in 2022 is not climate
| change, is environmental terrorism.
|
| 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
| kranke155 wrote:
| Incendiaries or people with mental illness that leads them
| to do this have always existed. What makes you think that
| this year something unusual happened? Most likely the
| number of people doing this is the same as ever, but
| droughts have made their consequences more extreme.
| kube-system wrote:
| > turning what were once agricultural fields into a giant
| inland lake
|
| From the article
| erellsworth wrote:
| I don't know about that image in particular, but most likely
| the answer is yes.
|
| https://time.com/6209889/pakistan-food-floods/
| tenpies wrote:
| > 'm asking if a famine will be a down stream result of this
| catastrophe.
|
| 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...
| slt2021 wrote:
| you argument lacks logic. Pakistan is not EU and can easily
| import food from russia, just like India is buying russian
| oil at a great discounts.
| jotm wrote:
| Fuck Russia, but Pakistan does not have sanctions on it. And
| the EU won't do anything to them if they keep importing from
| Russia.
|
| Perhaps use "US" instead of "EU", it works better on the
| morons believing Russian garbage.
| netsharc wrote:
| The poorer countries of the world have taken a "Well... we
| have nothing to say" stance about the invasion because
| that's the issue: they're poor. What if they pick the
| losing side and get punished to hunger and economic
| freezing-out by the winner(s)? Geopolitically, they were
| probably not sure if China was going to throw its weight
| behind Putin - imagine what China would be doing/saying if
| Putin successfully occupied Ukraine and controlled its food
| output - sure today we can say "That was never going to
| happen", but at the end of February, many governments of
| the world didn't know that.
|
| 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...
| vkou wrote:
| > but Pakistan does not have sanctions on it. And the EU
| won't do anything to them if they keep importing from
| Russia.
|
| Exactly. Russia is a pariah state for the EU, but the EU
| does not treat states trading with it as pariah states.
| indus wrote:
| Read it somewhere that the Indus valley water system was the
| setting of the biblical floods. The delta of five rivers used to
| be as big as Alaska.
| hertzrat wrote:
| This is apocalyptic. Imagine something 100km from where you live,
| and that whole span between you and there being under water
| tomorrow. in a movie, that wouldn't feel real no matter how good
| the special effects are, it's too out there
| throwrqX wrote:
| I feel like this hasn't gotten the attention it deserves
| worldwide relative to the amount of suffering it is causing.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Pakistan is a nation of children and refugees. It's not well
| positioned to self advocate on the world stage.
|
| _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_
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Pakistan
| kshacker wrote:
| Nation of Children - sure.
|
| 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?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| 50 years is nothing if you're talking about geo-
| engineering projects to stabilize your community. Dike
| construction in the Netherlands has been underway for
| well over a thousand years. 50 years probably isn't even
| enough time for the importance of such projects to truly
| permeate a culture.
| kshacker wrote:
| I am just trying to understand what the parent commenter
| meant by "nation of refugees".
| okdood64 wrote:
| > Pakistan is a nation of children and refugees. It's not
| well positioned to self advocate on the world stage.
|
| I don't understand. Why can't the government self advocate
| given it's a nation of children and refugees?
| Loughla wrote:
| Maybe I'm jaded, but I take it to mean that the country
| is poor for the reasons stated. It has neither the global
| pull, nor the connections to massive corporations to make
| it anything but a humanitarian issue. This is a harder
| sell to other countries than a business and industry
| issue.
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| >median age of 19.
|
| 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).
| ethbr0 wrote:
| More people should be aware of countries by relative
| population:
| https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/12/Population-
| cartog...
|
| It makes you understand the importance of Brazil, Nigeria,
| Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia for things that impact
| people.
| rajman187 wrote:
| Suffering has been normalized for some, unfortunately, and
| any devastation striking that region is glossed over almost
| as if calamity is expected to befall. See for instance the
| outcry and support for Ukraine (not diminishing their dire
| circumstances by any means) and immediate call to take
| refugees while sympathy for southern and western Asian states
| has fallen to the wayside.
| steve76 wrote:
| testfoobar wrote:
| Lots of videos of this on TikTok. The volume of water in some
| videos is mind boggling.
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/tag/swatflood?lang=en
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > in a movie, that wouldn't feel real no matter how good the
| special effects are, it's too out there
|
| 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.
| yongjik wrote:
| Saying that _The Day After Tomorrow_ had a lot of bad science
| is a bit of an understatement, isn 't it? It's like saying
| Hershey's chocolate bar has a lot of chocolate in it.
| pbronez wrote:
| Have you tried Hershey's bars? Hard to call that stuff
| chocolate...
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| That's the joke.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The premise and outcome of some large scale disaster you
| imagined being ridiculous does not means that any scenario of
| large scale disaster is ridiculous.
| ericmay wrote:
| heh that episode of South Park is seared into my brain
|
| > Two days before the day after tomorrow
|
| > Bah gawd... that's today
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Which episode is this?
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Two days before the day after tomorrow
| walthamstow wrote:
| I had the same thought when reading about the 4inch
| hailstones that fell in Catalonia yesterday
| pvaldes wrote:
| And like what happened in that film, a baby was killed
| yesterday by hailstones, sadly.
| codyb wrote:
| I thought it was telling when South Park basically walked
| back the whole "The vote's between Shit Sandwich and a Turd"
| or whatever and said "Vote for Hillary".
|
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It was as if they hadn 't realized the amount that people
| draw from their work._
|
| 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.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| The Simpsons humor is funny because it is based in
| reality...thats how humor works.
|
| 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.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Comedy shows/etc sway the opinions of the general public,
| but shield themselves from criticism by saying _" It's
| just comedy bro, chill out"_. Quite a conundrum, but what
| can you do about it? Newspaper editorials do the same
| thing, using _" it's just an opinion"_ as a rhetorical
| shield. Virtually any media does something like this in
| one form or another.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| 100km == 62miles
| daveslash wrote:
| This is mind boggling.
|
| 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?
| tromp wrote:
| Or mouth/nose height?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| It's the kind of story that gets passed down across generations
| and even makes it into holy books.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| underrated comment. semi-localized catastrophe + oral history
| + time => whole world catastrophe for a population
| vondur wrote:
| From the NASA image it looks like the whole area is a flood
| plain. Similar to a large area of the Los Angeles basin. We
| have a paved riverbed system to get rid of water from heavy
| rains which periodically occur. I assume Pakistan doesn't have
| the resources to do something like that.
| mapt wrote:
| You have a paved riverbed system to get rid of moderate rains
| which periodically occur.
|
| 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.
| ..
| boruto wrote:
| Yes it is Indus river basin
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| This is Great Lakes of Canada and the USA type distances here
| ladies and gentlemen.
|
| Crazy stuff.
| lhorie wrote:
| I was trying to figure out a relatable comparison on a map.
| Looking from one side of the flood lake to the other would be
| like trying to spot Niagara Falls from Toronto, or San Jose
| from San Francisco - never mind that the distance is large
| enough for Earth's curvature to get in the way. And that's
| just thinking of it as a cross-sectional view of the lake,
| which doesn't say much about _area_.
|
| 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.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Well, not quite. The great lakes are rather deeper.
|
| That's not to say this isn't shocking or a sign of radical
| climate change.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Is it true that only 30,000 years ago the level of the sea was
| very different? lower in that case, exposing the land bridge at
| Alaska, and connecting the Islands north of Australia.. and
| previous to that, the sea level was much higher? evidence is the
| inland sea that is California Central Valley..
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes, there has been a cycle going on in the most recent era of
| flipping between glaciers growing and shrinking. I don't recall
| the actual date but the most recent maximum glacier coverage
| was on the order of 30,000 years ago. The whole of human
| civilization we know about more or less happened since the last
| retreat of the glaciers.
|
| There have also been times when the polar caps melted
| completely and there were rainforests pole to pole.
| lizknope wrote:
| If you go back tens of millions of years ago there were
| dinosaurs in polar regions. Of course it was much warmer then
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-strange-lives-
| of-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Polar_region_of_the_Cret.
| ..
| cwmma wrote:
| The dinosaurs in the polar reason isn't because it was
| warmer, it's because the Strait of Magellan were closed.
|
| 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.
| monort wrote:
| The same three atmospheric cells exist in the northern
| hemisphere and there is no continent there. Why is that?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation
| cwmma wrote:
| Those are different, this is about water circulation not
| air circulation, water has a much higher specific heat so
| it it's far more important when it comes to temperature
| circulation.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Humans evolved under much warmer conditions than exist today
| nigerian1981 wrote:
| I don't see how given the Earth is only 6000 years old.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| And flat, so any excess water will just run over the edge.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Good thing turtles are OK getting wet.
| munk-a wrote:
| If they can put up with elephants standing on their backs
| then a bit a water is clearly not going to bother them.
| wcoenen wrote:
| The past 5000 years have been quite stable, but there have been
| dramatic changes from melting ice caps before that. See
| https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_L...
|
| With a high enough warming rate, we might get a chance to see
| what a "meltwater pulse" looks like :-/
| thro388 wrote:
| Yes, there is periodic cycle, depending on ice ages.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Modern sea level is the highest it's been in over 100k years.
| Central valley hasn't been anything close to an inland sea for
| about 1.5m years, but that has more to do with deposited
| sediment than sea level.
| Animats wrote:
| For years, there was a lot of political pressure on climate
| scientists to not overestimate future damage. Now it turns out
| that damage was underestimated.
|
| 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...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Pakistan foreign minister:
|
| > "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.
| hertzrat wrote:
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's pretty clear that the increased water vapor in the
| atmosphere, in combination with continued Himalayan glacial
| melt, is loading the dice. Note also that decadal flooding in
| Pakistan has been a trend going back to at least the 1970s.
| killyourcar wrote:
| That's not the causality the parent is drawing. They are
| saying these two events are likely because an increase in
| temperature increases moisture in the air, increases
| flooding. We're seeing more floods as an effect, not a cause.
| petre wrote:
| It's just politicians shifting the blame on climate change.
| Makes you wonder why the Netherlands don't have record-breaking
| floods.
| nicbou wrote:
| The Netherlands are a rich developed nation. It helps. No
| monsoon there either.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What also helps is that they started building dams
| centuries ago.
| ignoramous wrote:
| With the loot from East Indies?
| pvaldes wrote:
| Probably. You only need mud and wood and to stop whining
| about the chilling cold to start. Concrete and iron can
| come later.
|
| I don't see many gems encrusted in the dams in any case.
| Do they use cars and fridges in East Indies?
| boruto wrote:
| I wonder why pakistan doesn't have a sea barrier like
| Netherlands
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| This isn't flooding from the sea. Such a wall would make
| this worse.
| boredpudding wrote:
| We literally had that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods#Netherlan.
| ..
| dekhn wrote:
| The Netherlands has some of the best water policy and
| technology in the world and they staked the land of their
| country on that. But, they did have a number of floods and
| they continue to be at risk for out-of-distribution flooding.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| They have been happening for the last century. The reason why
| is simple: that part of the country is very fertile,
| agriculture is a big part of the economy, lots of people build
| houses in an area that they know will almost certainly flood
| within a few years (and the reason the govt doesn't do anything
| about it despite flooding being a major political issue is
| corruption).
|
| 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).
| throwaway123989 wrote:
| > and the reason the govt doesn't do anything about it
| despite flooding being a major political issue is corruption
|
| 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.
| random314 wrote:
| According to some commenters here (eg rayiner) this is simply
| called monsoon. The damage that conservative, right wing thinking
| does to the society, environment and a person's brain is
| preposterous. Not even the example of Nazi Germany can cause
| conservatives to course correct.
| rch wrote:
| > turning what were once agricultural fields into a giant inland
| lake. It's a shocking transformation
|
| Is the agricultural capacity of this area dependent on periodic
| flooding, similar to historical patterns of the Nile?
| sa1 wrote:
| Periodic floods bringing down alluvial soil are definitely part
| of what made these regions fertile and highly populated. But I
| do not know if floods are continually needed to maintain the
| fertility, or how this flood compares to historic floods.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Some amount of flooding is expected in Kaccha/Katcha Doaba
| land, but this level of flooding was very anomalous due to
| Climate Change plus some questionable urban planning. Add to
| that the fact that ongoing local elections in Sindh has
| paralyzed the state's civil service and this became a horrible
| calamity.
|
| 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.
| icemelt8 wrote:
| First comment in Punjabi on Hacker news :) ... You right, we
| are together in this climate change disaster
| alephnerd wrote:
| Agreed! There needs to be much more coordination at the
| SAARC level to solve these issues. Honestly cross-border
| trade would be amazing for Northern India, Pakistan, and
| Afghanistan. The Partition and instability of the 70s-90s
| really destroyed the economic potential of the region.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Translation: Those of you who are downvoting a farmer's
| (Edit: son's, munda can be more generic term for person too)
| comment are misinformed. Farmers of Sindh, ..., and Delhi NCR
| are in the same boat because of the British and the
| environment.
| alephnerd wrote:
| * son of a farmer. never lived on a farm myself (grew up
| here in North America) but my dad did growing up and during
| summer vacations we'd often help my grandfather as well
| with the kharif crop.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| doubtful that it's depending on this level of flooding.
| rch wrote:
| It could be unprecedented on 100-1000 year timescales, and
| still be within geologic norms.
|
| Just trying to categorize this event relative to e.g.
| Greenland ice sheet melting.
| dwringer wrote:
| Reading this thread got me to pull up a map and notice the
| Mohenjo-Daro site[0] is evidently being damaged by the
| current flooding, particularly in excavated areas[1]. It
| would appear that in the 1960's there was a flurry of
| publications arguing about the idea that perhaps the
| Mohenjo-Daro civilization declined precisely because its
| cities had been destroyed by catastrophic floods. There's a
| lot to read, but I found this article[2] from 1965 that
| goes into a lot of detail about studies of flooding in the
| area, and mentions some of the research of the time.
|
| [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...
| sporkland wrote:
| From the article for those that don't click:
|
| > 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.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Poor management, corruption and a careless society amplify
| disasters times over. I am sorry for the people of pakistan, but
| this will happen again, and again. With climate change it will
| get even worse.
| munk-a wrote:
| It's important to specify where that blame of corruption and a
| careless society are placed - if Pakistan lived in a vacuum
| this flood wouldn't have been nearly as devastating. Countries
| that produced outsized amounts of pollution, deny climate
| change and refuse to act to address it deserve to be in the
| spotlight as well. China still has their head buried in the
| sand on this issue and the US is politically divided and all of
| the actions that have been taken have happened despite strong
| resistance from half of the political institution.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| I don't disagree with the analysis but the thought that crossed
| my mind reading it is that the developed world is trending
| towards the Pakistans of the world, not away.
|
| 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.
| pvaldes wrote:
| water can kill but brings new life also.
| daveslash wrote:
| _" Well, a little rain never hurt anybody..."_
|
| _" Yeah, But a lot can kill you"_
|
| - Bonnie Hunt, Robin Williams, Jumanji, 1995 (approx 78 minutes
| in).
| pvaldes wrote:
| Don't build your home in the middle of the dry riverbed is an
| old but still surprisingly valid advice
| nomel wrote:
| It brings fleeting new life, if it's not consistent.
| black_knight wrote:
| If water kill your child, na water you go use
|
| Water no get enemy
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Yes, I imagine a lovely bloom of _Vibrio cholerae_ is likely to
| arise from mass flooding of this sort.
|
| 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..."
| pvaldes wrote:
| > I imagine a lovely bloom of Vibrio cholerae is likely to
| arise from mass flooding
|
| 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
| lstodd wrote:
| That's what you get when you refuse to maintain and develop
| infrastructure and then build over floodable areas, as many in
| this thread said.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| brunosan wrote:
| You can use this link to see the appalling scope of this flood.
| The layers you can toggle in the bottom right: 1) Lastest radar,
| 2) Last year radar for reference, 3) nighlights as a proxy of
| population.
|
| 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...
| buescher wrote:
| Yes, but how deep?
| NonNefarious wrote:
| California needs a looooooong straw to drink up that milkshake.
|
| I DRINK IT UP!
| acomjean wrote:
| I always like the Nasa "earth observatory" pages:
|
| they have the before and after as a zoomed in image.
|
| https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150279/devastating-...
| sremani wrote:
| I heard the Punjab has a great irrigation program and that is the
| reason why they do not suffer floods like Sindh, outside of the
| usual regionalism are there any constraints in developing similar
| irrigation and flood control apparatus in Sindh.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Disclaimer - I'm not from that area, but I was talking with a
| buddy of mine from Larkana about this and the region of Sindh
| and Punjab that was badly affected is basically a badland with
| bad governance [0][1][2][3][4]. Also fits in line with the
| Saraiki folk songs I've listened to. On the northern and
| central Punjab side I'm not surprised that it was not badly
| effected thanks to the Canal colonies that the British built
| out there [5]. My mom's side of the family is from the Jhelum
| Colony originally before Partition
|
| [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...
|
| [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjab_Canal_Colonies
| jfk13 wrote:
| Sindh does also have a pretty extensive irrigation network;
| e.g. see https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=21
| 082183d1....
|
| (I don't know how it compares to that in Punjab, though, nor
| whether it is well or badly maintained and managed.)
| alephnerd wrote:
| Based on the GIS dataset it's mostly Wahs, Distis, and
| Nullehs. You need an actual high capacity canals and locks
| to mitigate the kind of flooding seen in over the past few
| days. But the law and order situation in that region is a
| bit erm, lacking, compared to Northern+Central Punjab where
| industrial level canals the Brits left behind appear to be
| maintained. A lot of these regions where the flooding
| happened are also former princely state areas, so there
| wasn't that much infrastructural investment.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They reline the canals, but other than Taunsa barrage it
| feels like they haven't put as much effort into new
| drainage/catchment. Sindh has firmly resisted new
| upstream dams due to salinity concerns among other
| things.
| alephnerd wrote:
| That makes sense. There really needs to be more
| investment in canal infrastructure in Northern Sindh and
| Southern Punjab. These kinds of floods were common in
| East Punjab/Himachal/Jammu back in the 70s and 80s
| (especially the 1988 flood [0]), but a lot of investment
| was put into meteorological forecasting, drainage, and
| disaster preparedness in the 90s and 2000s to try and
| mitigate something like that from happening again.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Punjab_floods
| selimthegrim wrote:
| My mother spent some time in Guddu growing up, down the road
| from Kashmore. My cousin who lives nearby to me now grew up
| in Daharki around the same time early to mid 70s. His bandit
| stories are a little hair raising. Larkana looked a little
| rough when I went there about a decade ago but I think there
| has been substantial highway construction there at the very
| least since.
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