Massive Pakistani Flood Might Be Worst Of This Year's Epic Floods

Screen grab of extreme floods roaring
through a Pakistani city recently.

Epic heat waves and epic floods have been in the news all year. Pakistan has had the worst of both. 

After months of record heat in March through early June, Pakistan is enduring some of its worst flooding on record.  It's certainly the worst of the mega floods we've seen globally in 2022. 

The official death toll in Pakistan is nearing 1,000, but has already probably exceeded that figure. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes. Many more have faced evacuations and other hazards. 

The Pakistani floods have affected more than 30 million people since July. Pakistan's climate change ministers said the situation is a "climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions," reports Reuters.

Social media videos shows immense rushes of water collapsing buildings or simply sweeping them quickly away.

As Al Jazeera reports:

"Fida Hussain Shahani, a laborer from a remote village in Sindh, is grieving for his son who was swept away in the deluge. 

'Yesterday, the flood water kept rising and entered our house. While trying to reach high ground, my 17 year old son was left behind. I only managed to find his body this morning,' Shahani said from Shahani village on Friday.

The 42-year old says his family of 12 has not been provided with any relief or aid from the government and only volunteers came to his help. 

He said the magnitude of this year's rains was unprecedented. 'Things were not so bad in the 2010 floods. We never had to leave our village but this time, everything is destroyed,' he said."

The monsoon season in Pakistan usually causes at least some flooding.  In a typical year, the monsoon comes in three or four waves, each with a spell of torrential rains.  This year, they've already had eight cycles and might have a ninth in September. All this extra water has turned seasonal floods into an epic disaster. 

The floods come after immense heat waves that effectively canceled spring in Pakistan and brought them right into the heat of summer, starting in March. The heat caused water shortages, power outages and temperatures as high as 122 degrees. 

The heat also melted glaciers high up in the Himalayas, causing water and debris flows that destroyed homes and bridges in higher elevations. I guess that was a preview to the monsoon season. 

International aid is flowing into Pakistan.  Even that will be problematic, though. The country has corruption, pockets of hard line Islamic militancy and remote areas with poor communication.  How much of this aid will actual get to the people who need it?

Disaster responses, handled poorly, can easily lead to additional political unrest. Which is precisely what the world does NOT need right now. 

If climate change leads to more disasters, and some of the responses to these are inept or worse, you can see how the world's tenuous stability can disappear fast. 

Climate change doesn't cause just bad weather. It can start wars. A flood isn't the only way people die from the climate crisis.