Across south Asia there are more than a billion people whose livelihood and lives are utterly dependent on the annual Monsoon rains. The severe impacts of climate change on their hydrological lifeline has left them reeling. This week Pakistan was hit by massive flooding that took their own weather services by surprise.
“We kept quivering with fear the whole night and could not sleep even a wink,” recalled Salma Zehra, a mother of five teenage children. The family trembled to think that the roof of their mud house could cave in at any time, as the rain lashed down in a huge thunderstorm.
By early morning on July 22, the house in Mehtabpur village in northeast Pakistan’s Sialkot district was waist-deep in water. The torrential downpour had left Zehra’s two buffaloes dead, the 45-year-old said in a shaky voice.
Mujahid Sherdil, director-general of the Punjab Provincial Disaster Management Authority ...said the torrential rainfall had caused breaches of irrigation canals, streams and natural dams, and the floods had washed away crops, livestock, roads, bridges, buildings and even entire villages.
Farmers say surviving cattle in flood-hit areas are now at risk.
“Besides paddy, maize and vegetable crops, fodder fields are also underwater. This has created an acute shortage of fodder, and it is barely possible to save our cattle from the looming threat of hunger and disease,” said Zehra’s husband, Ghulam Abbas.
“Last month, we predicted that this year monsoon rains across the country would remain normal with no possibility of flooding. But unexpected heavy rains in the northeastern districts are startling for us,” said Ghulam Rasul, a senior weather scientist at the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) in Islamabad. “This shows how monsoon rains have become erratic and unpredictable in timing, volume and intensity.”
In June 2012, scientists argued in the Nature Climate Change journal that global warming would make understanding changes in the South Asian monsoon more difficult.
They said the impacts of short- and long-term monsoon shifts would affect the lives of over a billion people in the region, who rely on rainfall for agriculture, hydropower generation, economic growth and basic human needs.
The purpose of this post is to drive home the point that the industrialized, First World - the major greenhouse gas emitters - is wreaking havoc among the people of the Third World with the global warming impacts we're continuing to fuel. It's not just Calgary and Toronto that are flooding, a relative inconvenience in the greater scheme of things. In distant corners of the world, peoples' lives are being snuffed out, their chance of eking out an existence being imperiled by our excesses.
And we just don't give a tinker's dam.
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