Pakistan’s unprecedented and devastating floods are frequently making headlines for quite some time. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari twitted on August 29, 2022, that floods have killed more than 1,500 people in 4 provinces. The country’s planning minister said that the damages would be greater than $10 billion. An AP news report on August 26, 2022, said that Pakistan’s prime minister Shahbaz Sharif asked for international help in battling the situation and blamed climate change for the tragedy.
A decade ago in October 2012, a superstorm, hurricane Sandy, ravaged the Caribbean countries Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas, and the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States, Sandy caused 72 direct deaths and $81.9 billion in damages. In New York, there were 14.31 feet of tidal waves, 153 km/hour winds, and relentless rainfall for 48 hours. It was unprecedented and unimaginable, and a study published on May 18, 2021, in the Nature Communications journal, attributed it to the sea level rise caused by climate change.
Climate change is happening throughout the world due to global warming which in turn is the result of increased levels of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2), in the atmosphere.
Thus, the two catastrophes mentioned above are by no means exceptional weather events. In the words of Amitav Ghosh, as he remarks in his book ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,’ ‘it appears that we are now in an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normality, highly improbable: flash floods, hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial lakes, and, yes, freakish tornadoes.’
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on September 14, 2022. Please read the full article here or here.