Uninhabitable Bharat
South Asian air incompatible with human life.
Particulates in large cities in Bharat, the artist formerly known as India, and Pakistan, have been double the highest numbers I’ve ever seen with a California wildfire. The app I use to track smoke plumes here is Purple Air and the worst one ever sees with outdoor sensors is around 600 PMI 2.5. Lahore, Pakistan hit 1,100 a week or so ago.
That’s a satellite view and we can compare it to the distribution of humans, color coded into blocks of a billion of us each.
This is a map showing the density of people exposed to deadly urban heat. There are a LOT of maps like this out there, combining heat effects, geography, and perhaps population. South Asia is always a sum of all fears environment.
The Indus river valley is the only place on Earth where two countries with a history of conflict and nuclear weapons share a border. Their arsenals are relatively small, only about 170 warheads each. But even an exchange involving just a third of their capacity would cause global famine due to the nuclear winter that would follow.
California is full of people from Punjab. The ones I’ve talked to have all been here for a while, but it’s things like this - a third of their country being under water, that are one of the drivers of migration. This has happened twice in the last fifteen years.
The land is desiccated … except when a year of rain falls over a single weekend. The city air is bad on the good days, and unlivable on the bad. And a “small” nuclear exchange there would get somewhere between one eighth and one quarter of the global populace.
The famine predictions were made prior to 2020 and thusly do not include the dramatic changes that began in 2022 - things like all the major rivers in Europe running dry and impacting grain transport costs. The same thing is happening in the U.S. right now - 1,500 ton barges on the Mississippi are only loaded to the 900 ton mark due to low water.
I can’t speak for the population of that part of the world, but I know I’m unduly sensitive to wildfire smoke. I don’t need an app to know when particulates exceed 50 PMI 2.5, because breathing it feels like being on the edge of a panic attack.
Hopefully they’ve got HEPA filters for the people who sit next to their respective big red buttons …