I asked a similar question just over a year ago, with regards to Bangladesh’s annual floods. Although Bangladesh has flooded this year, as it does most years, and caused hardship and disruption for many thousands of the nation’s poorest citizens it has gotten off relatively lightly compared to the impact that the monsoons have had on Pakistan this year.
Satellite images from last year (left) and earlier this month (right) give an indication of the extent of this year's Pakistan Floods. Terrible though they are, are they just a taste of things to come?
Really, you’d have to be living in a complete news vacuum to have missed the awful disaster which this year’s monsoon floods have caused in Pakistan; The UN has now declared that the scale of the crisis is greater than the combined effects of the Haiti earthquake (Jan ’10), the Kashmir earthquake (Oct ’05) & the Asian tsunami (Dec ’04) and has left over 14,000,000 without food or shelter and at risk of falling victim to the host of diseases which commonly occur in the aftermath of major flooding.
One bright note is that this disaster has seen an unprecedented response from the public, with donations actually increasing as the crisis entered it’s second, then third week; very different from the usual pattern seen in these kinds of cases, where “donor fatigue” tends to kick in after the first week irregardless of how well the effects of the disaster are being dealt with at that stage.
However, for all that the response, both in the UK and internationally, has been amazingly generous so far there is still much work for the aid agencies to do, and many, many flood victims who still need the help of the international community if they’re to have any hope of returning to a normal way of life any time in the foreseeable future!
Unfortunately there are many despicable scammers in this world, and in particular on the internet, who’ll take any chance to profit from the misery of others, so if you’re planning on making a donation it’s best to go through the DEC, or one of their well known, reputable members such as Oxfam who, like most of the major UK charities, now have a page dedicated to the Pakistan Flood appeal.
Anyway, that was all a bit of an aside, an incredibly important aside, but a tangent none the less.
The real question I wanted to ask in this blog post was whether these floods, described as a “once in a century” event, are another sign that Climate Change is indeed a real and pressing problem which should concern the whole global community?
I understand the principle that climate is a long term pattern, and that it can’t judged by single isolated events, no matter how catastrophic, but it seems to me that we’ve been getting more and more of these “once in century” type of weather events over the past decade or so, and I truly wonder how much longer the climate change deniers will be able to keep their heads in the sand and continue to refute that there is a shift occuring in the planet’s weather patterns?
I can accept that there’s still a lot of debate to be had over the extent of anthropogenic climate change, and, in turn, how much humanity can do to mitigate the global climate change, but surely we’re now getting to a stage where denying the existance of a pattern of climate change is a thoroughly asinine position, and one which is only likely to be held by either the woefully gullible or those who are motivated by profound self-interest.
Tags: climate change, News, Pakistan Floods, Science