[hertzrat]

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

[SpaceManNabs]

> 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]

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.

[reaperducer]

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

I think that thinking people massively underestimate the influence that cartoons have on common people.

It seems like 90% of the people who argue against religion on the internet got everything they know about religion from cartoons like South Park. Or everything they know about Texas from King of the Hill.

There was a newspaper article a few years ago about how some massive percentage of Britons thought The Simpsons was an accurate depiction of Americans, and didn't understand that it was a lampoon.

[nebula8804]

The Simpsons humor is funny because it is based in reality...thats how humor works.

Every character and trope is a humorous representation of something in America. Are you American? Because I am and i've met someone like every character in the Simpsons in real life.

[MichaelCollins]

Comedy shows/etc sway the opinions of the general public, but shield themselves from criticism by saying "It's just comedy bro, chill out". Quite a conundrum, but what can you do about it? Newspaper editorials do the same thing, using "it's just an opinion" as a rhetorical shield. Virtually any media does something like this in one form or another.

[hoseja]

They never did that... are you talking about the subsequent ridicule of President Garrison?

They did however walk back on the manbearpig.

[codyb]

They had Mr. Garrison say this

``` On November 8th, you must vote against me and show the world that you didn’t think the new Star Wars was all that good. When you’re in that voting booth, remember that every vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote that shows the world we agree that The Force Awakens was more like a Happy Days reunion special than a movie. The choice is yours, America. Please make the right one. ```

which felt pretty explicit to me.

[yongjik]

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.

[pbronez]

Have you tried Hershey's bars? Hard to call that stuff chocolate...

[MichaelCollins]

That's the joke.

[marcosdumay]

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]

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

[pvaldes]

And like what happened in that film, a baby was killed yesterday by hailstones, sadly.

[ericmay]

heh that episode of South Park is seared into my brain

> Two days before the day after tomorrow

> Bah gawd... that's today

[andrei_says_]

Which episode is this?

[HelloMcFly]

Two days before the day after tomorrow

[throwrqX]

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

[ethbr0]

More people should be aware of countries by relative population: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/12/Population-cartog...

It makes you understand the importance of Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia for things that impact people.

[DoreenMichele]

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

[kshacker]

Nation of Children - sure.

Nation of Refugees - now or always? Now due to floods I can understand. But if always, I do not understand. They have been a "stable" country for half a century. When I say "stable", I mean without any land being lost or won since 1971, which puts the last major change at almost 51 years and 51 years should be a long time for any refugees to be assimilate, no?

[abdullahkhalids]

The majority of the refugees in Pakistan are those from the two Afghanistan invasions by USSR/US, and at their peak were several times the current number.

There was also an internal operation in the last decade to remove the Taliban and such from their strongholds and that caused a lot of innocents to lose their homes.

There were large floods in 2010 and a strong earthquake in 2005 that also destroyed many towns and villages.

And as a historical tidbit, when Mao was in power, a small number of Chinese ran from there and settled in Pakistan.

[MichaelCollins]

50 years is nothing if you're talking about geo-engineering projects to stabilize your community. Dike construction in the Netherlands has been underway for well over a thousand years. 50 years probably isn't even enough time for the importance of such projects to truly permeate a culture.

[kshacker]

I am just trying to understand what the parent commenter meant by "nation of refugees".

[noSyncCloud]

>median age of 19.

This is wild. Google says the US is 38, Germany 45, Japan 48 for some random examples (the top search result for me says Pakistan median age is 22, which is still crazy).

[mistrial9]

some other (often Muslim) countries are like this right now; it is well known in demographic studies

[okdood64]

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

I don't understand. Why can't the government self advocate given it's a nation of children and refugees?

[Loughla]

Maybe I'm jaded, but I take it to mean that the country is poor for the reasons stated. It has neither the global pull, nor the connections to massive corporations to make it anything but a humanitarian issue. This is a harder sell to other countries than a business and industry issue.

[rajman187]

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]

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

[jimjimjim]

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

[vondur]

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]

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]

Yes it is Indus river basin

[3pt14159]

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

Crazy stuff.

[lhorie]

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]

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]

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]

Or mouth/nose height?

[testfoobar]

Lots of videos of this on TikTok. The volume of water in some videos is mind boggling.

https://www.tiktok.com/tag/swatflood?lang=en

[nocoiner]

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]

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.

[ElijahLynn]

100km == 62miles