> "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:
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.
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).
> 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.
I think the parent comment is referring to how corruption seems to be a given for everything the government is involved in.
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.
Most "liberals" are aware that government structures tend to be inefficient in the best case. This is unavoidable simply because even the most "liberal" people want their government to stick to the rule of Law. Thus, stringent procedures, bureaucracy or political deliberations, and auditing are required.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> This isn't flooding from the sea. Such a wall would make this worse.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
```
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.
```
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.
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.
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?
The majority of the refugees in Pakistan are those from the two Afghanistan invasions by USSR/US, and at their peak were several times the current number.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not to minimize the suffering of a poor country with limited state capacity to adequately address this tragedy, but this exact scenario more or less happened in Houston during Hurricane Harvey.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I lived in northern calif. most of my life so thats probably why I didn't hear much of it. And it is a man made disaster, toxic agriculture runoff from imperial valley is primary the cause of why the lake is so toxic, not the salinity.
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).
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
> 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).
I agree with your claim that this was something that I posted as both facetious and sarcastic.
I apologise.
The word 'inland' in this context just seemed to be a wholly redundant adjective to use to describe a lake, such that it surprised me that the title of an article covering something of such genuinely extraordinary importance would have what seemed to be such a glaring error left unattended to, or at leased not commented upon.
So I sought to attract attention to it in the most attention-catching way that I could come up with at that time, which was to be sarcastic about it.
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.
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.
The US has always done dumb shit but it has two things all other countries lack. Introspection and the capacity to adapt. China is irrelevant in all this. It's a nuisance, not much else. It will do as told.
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.
> the developed world is trending towards the Pakistans of the world, not away
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
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.
At short term, yes, at least until a next rice harvest. Could be alleviated in part if fish invade the areas and start reproducing massively; freshwater ecosystems can be very productive.
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.
> ’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.
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...
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).
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
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.
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]
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
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.
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.
> "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..."
> 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
> "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.