The terrifying magnitude of the floods is not in doubt. “We are witnessing the worst flood in the country’s history,” said Dr Fahad Saeed, a climatologist at the Islamabad-based Climate Analytics Group. The obvious reason is the record-breaking rainfall. “Pakistan has never seen an uninterrupted monsoon cycle [rains] so,” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister. “Eight weeks of non-stop floods have left vast areas of the country under water. This is a deluge from all sides.” He said the “monster monsoon was wreaking havoc across the country non-stop”. Since the beginning of the month, rainfall has been nine times higher than average in Sindh province and five times higher in the whole of Pakistan. Basic physics is why rainfall becomes heavy around the world – warmer air holds more moisture. Scientists are already trying to determine the extent to which global warming is responsible for the rainfall and flooding. But analysis of the previous worst flood in 2010 suggests it will be significant. This “super flood” has become more likely due to global warming, which has caused heavy rains. Warmer oceans and warming in the Arctic were involved in the 2010 superflood, according to a study, as these factors affected the jet stream, a high-level wind that surrounds the planet. The jet’s greater meandering led to both prolonged rain in Pakistan and an extreme heatwave in Russia that year. And according to a 2021 study, global warming is making South Asia’s monsoons stronger and more erratic, with every 1C increase in global temperature leading to 5% more rain. Pakistan has suffered regular floods since 2010, as well as heatwaves and fires. “Climate change is really affecting us,” Saeed said. “It’s become the norm now that we’re dealing with extreme events every year.” Current floods would be expected less than once a century, according to Dr Liz Stephens, associate professor of climate risk and resilience at the University of Reading, UK, which is part of a global flood forecasting system. “We can see that this is very extreme flooding and, in many places, it will be worse than 2010, when flooding killed 1,700 people.” Two critical factors in the high death toll are flash flooding and the destruction of river levees, Stephens said. Some of the heavy rains have hit places where water runs off steep slopes. “Flash floods are very difficult to provide good warning and get people out of harm’s way quickly,” he said. River embankments have also been destroyed. “You can’t predict when they’re going to fail, and people who live in an area where they think they’re protected may not expect to have to evacuate.” Stephens said: “We are talking about potentially unprecedented volumes of water – it would be unthinkable that some parts of these catchments would have been affected. People don’t prepare for risks they’re not familiar with.” Deforestation could also have increased the speed of rain runoff in places, Stephens said, while Saeed said dams had been damaged on the Kabul River that flows into the Indus. A natural climate cycle driven by temperature and wind fluctuations in the Pacific may also have added to the flooding in Pakistan, meteorologist Scott Duncan said. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (Enso) appears to be in the La Niña phase, as it was in 2010. “La Niña is behaving very strongly in some metrics and is a major factor in strengthening the monsoon rains in my opinion” , he said. . However, how global warming affects Enso is currently not well understood. Pakistan’s population is particularly at risk from extreme weather events caused by the climate emergency, ranked eighth most at risk in the world by the Global Climate Risk Index. “Pakistan is extremely vulnerable and being hit by unprecedented heat from March to May this year, followed by a strong monsoon makes the impact on society and the economy even more severe,” Duncan said. The extreme heat wave experienced earlier in 2022 was made 30 times more likely by global warming, and another heat wave in 2015 was also made worse by global warming. “What you see today is just a trailer of what poverty, hunger, malnutrition and disease have in store for us if we don’t pay attention to climate change,” said development and climate expert Ali Tauqeer Sheikh. The only silver lining in the current flood situation is that it may not become even more devastating. “Fortunately, no further significant rainfall is expected over the next few days as the end of the monsoon season approaches,” said Nicholas Lee at MetDesk. However, it is clear that the climate crisis is taking a toll on extreme weather across the globe, even with just 1.1C of global warming to date. Pakistan is the latest country where lives and livelihoods are being lost. “It’s a real SOS planet here,” Rehman said.
