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hertzrat | 3 years ago

This is apocalyptic. Imagine something 100km from where you live, and that whole span between you and there being under water tomorrow. in a movie, that wouldn’t feel real no matter how good the special effects are, it’s too out there

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SpaceManNabs|3 years ago

> in a movie, that wouldn’t feel real no matter how good the special effects are, it’s too out there

This entire thing just reminds me of Day After Tomorrow (2004). Although the movie had a lot of bad science, way too many people called the premise and social outcomes of the movie ridiculous. Hell, the South Park criticism of it alone significantly pushed this current batch of climate deniers.

codyb|3 years ago

I thought it was telling when South Park basically walked back the whole "The vote's between Shit Sandwich and a Turd" or whatever and said "Vote for Hillary".

It was as if they hadn't realized the amount that people draw from their work.

It was _pretty explicit_, the turnaround. Or at least it felt that way to me.

yongjik|3 years ago

Saying that The Day After Tomorrow had a lot of bad science is a bit of an understatement, isn't it? It's like saying Hershey's chocolate bar has a lot of chocolate in it.

marcosdumay|3 years ago

The premise and outcome of some large scale disaster you imagined being ridiculous does not means that any scenario of large scale disaster is ridiculous.

walthamstow|3 years ago

I had the same thought when reading about the 4inch hailstones that fell in Catalonia yesterday

ericmay|3 years ago

heh that episode of South Park is seared into my brain

> Two days before the day after tomorrow

> Bah gawd... that's today

throwrqX|3 years ago

I feel like this hasn't gotten the attention it deserves worldwide relative to the amount of suffering it is causing.

DoreenMichele|3 years ago

Pakistan is a nation of children and refugees. It's not well positioned to self advocate on the world stage.

Pakistan is the world's fifth-most-populous country.

The population is young: in 2019 34.8% were thought to be 14 or younger

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_in_Pakistan

Pakistan has one of the world's youngest populations.

The country's population structure is relatively young, with a median age of 19.

Pakistan is also thought to have the world's fourth-largest refugee population, estimated at 1.4 million in mid-2021

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Pakistan

rajman187|3 years ago

Suffering has been normalized for some, unfortunately, and any devastation striking that region is glossed over almost as if calamity is expected to befall. See for instance the outcry and support for Ukraine (not diminishing their dire circumstances by any means) and immediate call to take refugees while sympathy for southern and western Asian states has fallen to the wayside.

hotpotamus|3 years ago

It's the kind of story that gets passed down across generations and even makes it into holy books.

jimjimjim|3 years ago

underrated comment. semi-localized catastrophe + oral history + time => whole world catastrophe for a population

vondur|3 years ago

From the NASA image it looks like the whole area is a flood plain. Similar to a large area of the Los Angeles basin. We have a paved riverbed system to get rid of water from heavy rains which periodically occur. I assume Pakistan doesn't have the resources to do something like that.

mapt|3 years ago

You have a paved riverbed system to get rid of moderate rains which periodically occur.

That will be insufficient for a 100-year flood (~1000 acres underwater by current mapping), and a 200-year or 500-year flood would put significant fractions of the city underwater.

https://eng2.lacity.org/projects/LARIVER_Glendale_Narrows/do...

boruto|3 years ago

Yes it is Indus river basin

3pt14159|3 years ago

This is Great Lakes of Canada and the USA type distances here ladies and gentlemen.

Crazy stuff.

lhorie|3 years ago

I was trying to figure out a relatable comparison on a map. Looking from one side of the flood lake to the other would be like trying to spot Niagara Falls from Toronto, or San Jose from San Francisco - never mind that the distance is large enough for Earth's curvature to get in the way. And that's just thinking of it as a cross-sectional view of the lake, which doesn't say much about area.

The way I ended up explaining it to my kids was that 33M people were affected. San Francisco population is ~800k, so around 40 SFs worth of people are impacted.

boppo1|3 years ago

Well, not quite. The great lakes are rather deeper.

That's not to say this isn't shocking or a sign of radical climate change.

daveslash|3 years ago

This is mind boggling.

How deep is it? I mean, I'm sure there are areas that are a few inches deep and others that are dozens of feet, but generally speaking -- is this more or less than the height of a single story?

Edit: And is it generally of similar depth or does it vary greatly from locale to locale?

tromp|3 years ago

Or mouth/nose height?

nocoiner|3 years ago

Not to minimize the suffering of a poor country with limited state capacity to adequately address this tragedy, but this exact scenario more or less happened in Houston during Hurricane Harvey.

senectus1|3 years ago

Perth, the capital of Western Australia is 100km long.

The entire state would grind to a halt, much the rest of the country would suffer seriously as well.