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. 

 

Horrible Northern Hemisphere Summer Already Starting? India Heat, American, Siberian Fires

Record heat has engulfed India and Pakistan for weeks,
and it's only getting worse More than a billion people
will experience life-threatening heat this week.

 We're racing toward summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and if recent weather news is any indication, it's going to be another destructive, record breaking one in many parts of the world's northern half. 

With climate change, summers have gotten hotter and stormier, with terrible results. Witness the big wildfires in recent years,  the record smashing heat wave in the Pacific Northwest last year, all those hurricanes, and flooding in the southern and eastern United States last summer, you get the picture.

Summers have always brought heat waves, droughts, fires, flash floods and hurricanes.  But these issues are getting worse and more long lasting as the world warms.  

We don't even reach the month of May until Sunday, and summer type disasters are already beginning to unfold. The worst of them so far is in India and Pakistan.

INDIA HEAT

In most of India, the most intense heat waves each year usually strike in May, before monsoon rains cool things off marginally later in the summer. 

This spring, though has been off the charts in this densely populated nation. And now the heat is intensifying.'

As CNN reports more than a billion people - 10 percent of the world's population - are subject to life threatening heat over the course of the next several days. 

Once you get into May, daytime temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees in New Delhi. But the forecast this week has that giant city approaching 120 degrees.

Overnight lows will only be in the mid-80s, which makes this heat wave especially dangerous. There's no chance for overheated people without air conditioning to cool down. The longer a heat wave grinds on, the more dangerous it becomes.

Extreme heat has already been going on for weeks, so people are already worn down.  Temperatures starting hitting record levels of over 100 degrees in March and consistently continued at record levels through April.

If by chance your heartless enough to not care if people in South Asia die in this heat wave this probably affects you, too.

India had hoped to boost grain exports to help make up for shortfalls in world grain supply due to the war in Ukraine. (India's motives to do this were aimed to both humanitarian and an economic windfall for the nation).

The long heat wave has stunted wheat crops in India, thereby tightening the world's supply and probably further boosting the cost of Cheerios at your favorite local supermarket. Not to mention a huge portion of the rest of your groceries. 

Don't like inflation? India's heat wave could just make it a bit worse than it already is. 

WILDFIRES

I've been blabbing on about wildfires pretty much all of 2022 so far in this here blog thingy. 

That shouldn't have happened. There should not have been many wildfires to talk about during the first four months of the year. Wild and forest fire season used to be predominantly a summer and fall thing, now it's year round. 

Almost a daily occurrence lately. High to extreme
fire danger in the Southwest today 

As a side note, wildfire and brush fire season in the Northeast is an exception to the summer rule. These fires peak up in the Northeast in the spring, before everything greens up. Brush fires have been reported this week in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut. 

Most of Vermont has a high fire danger today, due to very low humidity, sunshine and stiff breezes.

But, like I said, that's an aside. 

Today, for seemingly the umpteenth time this year, parts of the nation today are facing once-relatively rare extreme fire risk. This time, the worst fire risk is centered in parts of Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. 

With drought conditions and little prospect for rain in much of the west, wildfires have gained a stronghold weeks or even months before what was once considered normal. New large fires broke out in recent days in New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Nebraska, South Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas. 

The yearly spate of wildfires in Siberia have already started, also earlier than normal.  With the Russian military distracted by their war crimes and failures in Ukraine, officials fear there won't be the personnel to deal with those Siberian fires as they inevitably intensify over the summer, notes the Washington Post. 

The Siberian fires are intense enough to bring hazy skies from the smoke to parts of the western United States this week. 

CALIFORNIA WATER EMERGENCY 

Also this week, about 6 million Southern Californians were ordered to reduce water usage and limit outdoor watering to once a week due to the drought there. 

The winter rainy season is sputtering to a close out there, with not much rain having fallen. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California said in a statement that "supplies have been so drastically reduced over the past three years that in some parts of the region, we simply don't have enough water to meet normal demands this year."

All the problems I've cited above are just the opening salvo in what promises to be a long, hot, destructive summer. Maybe I'm wrong and I hope I am, but we're already not off to a great start.

 

Pakistan Snow Disaster Kills At Least 22 People

At least 22 people died when they became trapped in their
cars during very heavy snow in the mountains ]
northeast of Islamabad.

 This seems to be the winter of people being trapped for hours on end on snow clogged highways.  Until now, there has been little loss of life in these incidents. 

Unfortunately, at least 22 people died when they became trapped in cars in a touristy hill town in Pakistan. 

People living in lowlands drove up to the hilltop town of Murree to see the snow. The town is at about 7,500 feet above sea level and sees snow much more frequently than surrounding lowlands.

But the storm turned intense, dumping as much as five feet of snow over several hours. At least 1,000 cars became stuck in the snow.  People in those cars died of the cold, or asphyxiation when the snow buried car tailpipes. 

The BBC said ten children were among the dead, and two whole families - one consisting of five people, the other eight - died in the disaster.  

The BBC reports that authorities are investigating whether there were adequate warnings about the size of the snow and whether too many people were allowed to drive up to the mountain town. 

"According to the BBC's Farhat Javed, who is in Murree, there is space for about 5,000 cars in the town. However, on Friday, 100,000 visitors had been allowed to enter, causing a massive traffic jam as they struggled through the deep snow."

Murree is only about 30 miles away from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, so there's a large population that might want to visit the mountain resort. 

The snow tragedy in Pakistan follows two big traffic tie ups during winter storms in the United States that so far at least, seem to have caused few injuries and no deaths. On January 3-4, thousands of motorists were trapped on Interstate 95 in Virginia for as long as 30 hours dues to heavy snow, numerous crashes and fallen trees blocking the highway. 

On January 6, people were trapped on highways in Kentucky for as long as 15 hours as snow snarled things up and caused crashes there.