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Printed lists of the missing were fixed this month to the dry walls of Nepalese buildings not swept away by the boiling tower of mud and boulders so tall, and moving so fast, that it looked like an AI fake.
It wasn’t of course. The Himalayas are warming and melting faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. Flash floods that wreck villages and kill people are common now. In 2014 Circle of Blue reported on the aftermath of a climate change flood that was even more deadly than the one last week. It inundated two river valleys, destroyed dams, wrecked 1,000 kilometers of highways, and killed 30,000 people in Uttarakhand, a Himalayan state in India.
Unlike the Uttarakhand disaster, the Nepal catastrophe is distinguished both by the ferocity of the flood waters and the number of eye witnesses who recorded and posted images on global social media channels. For a moment, at least, the world took notice and sent assistance. Hopefully the attention won’t be temporary, which is a sad and an all-too-familiar feature of climate-related tragedies.
Just as science forecasted three decades ago, Mother Earth is heating up rapidly now. Himalayan snow, ice, and permafrost are melting twice as fast today as they did at the start of the century. Yet while people and some governments, including the U.S., once expressed alarm, signed the Paris Climate Accord in 2015, and promoted low-carbon industrial responses like clean cars and renewable energy, that era has largely passed except in a handful of nations like China, Pakistan (solar installation) and Norway (EV car sales).
Instead, we’ve become a global audience of observers of climate disaster, much of it tied to warming temperatures and the effects on rain and snowfall, storms and water. We watch the drying Colorado River and the burning forests of North America. We witness the worst flooding in recorded history upend northern Michigan. We observe the heat and drought that are causing the collapse of the winter wheat crop on the American Great Plains.
Death Anytime, Anywhere
That’s just what’s occurred this year. Last year extreme heat killed 1,500 Europeans. Wildfire destroyed thousands of homes and killed 440 people in Los Angeles. A flash flood on the Guadalupe River in Texas killed 136 people, including 25 girls at a sleep away camp.
Humanity is now more exposed than ever to all manner of deadly climate-related events. Who can imagine seeking crossing documents at a Chinese border station in the Himalayas and dying under a stampede of water and mud 200 feet tall?
The World Meteorological Organization, a research unit of the United Nations, reported last year that the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide since 1975. The number of people killed by floods, heat, drought, and storms, has nearly tripled. The number of major disasters has grown sevenfold.
The meteorological havoc caused by the warming atmosphere is occurring at the same time that the planet’s population, now 8.2 billion, is growing by almost 70 million people annually. In other words, there are many more of us in the way. The Himalayan region, which encompasses all of Nepal and all or part of seven other nations, has 240 million people, twice as many as in 1970.
Where’s The Response?
Clearly, it’s an emergency. What are we doing about it, though? Not even close to enough. Not long ago the U.S. was a leader among nations in curbing climate changing emissions from industry and transportation. The U.S. is now among the worst offenders. It is a government-wide failure of responsibility and accountability wrought by both major political parties.
Under President Trump the U.S. ended incentives to develop electric vehicles, is paying wind developers not to build their projects, and is preventing utilities from closing coal-burning power plants. The administration cut federal investment in data collection and research on climate change by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, damaging the country’s capacity to assess the effects of warming temperatures and develop effective responses.
Trump even cut funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s program to forecast climate-related disasters and invest in infrastructure to reduce damage.
What are Democratic candidates for governor, senator, representative, and state Legislatures saying about these dangerous forays to cancel climate common sense?
Not nearly enough.
A frustrating example is occurring here in my home state of Michigan. Fossil-fueled cars and trucks, you’ll recall, are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. President Trump promotes gas and diesel guzzlers while eliminating buyer incentives that have curbed electric vehicle sales and seriously eroded the Big Three’s enthusiasm for developing electric cars and trucks.
Industrial Vulnerability
The president’s foolish policies are a genuine economic and environmental threat to the well-being of Michigan. That’s especially relevant as China pivots from fossil-fueled transportation towards manufacturing electric vehicles that are more sophisticated, less expensive, and have much longer ranges than American EVs. One quarter of the cars sold around the world are electric and China manufactures nearly half of them.
The uncompetitive fossil-fueled American auto sector, which employs 631,000 people in Michigan, is in real danger of being put out of business. It’s a vital campaign issue served on a political platter.
How are Michigan political campaigns talking about this threat to the state and the North American vehicle market, the world’s second largest? By backing proposals to ban Chinese-manufactured vehicles from being sold in Michigan, or any other state. In other words, it’s a useless protectionist response to a threat as serious to the environment, the economy, and stability in Michigan as the warming climate is to the Himalayas.
The Hindu Kush Himalayas, spanning 1.7 million square miles or half the size of the lower 48 U.S. states, hold more water in ice than any place other than the Arctic and Antarctica. The deep cold that existed for centuries at high elevations in the Himalayas has weakened its grip on permafrost and glaciers. Nepal has lost 30 percent of its ice over the last 30 years.
Scientists theorize that melting permafrost destabilized the glacier that broke off and plunged thousands of feet into the valley that led to the flooding in the Trishuli River.
Just maybe the images of frantic people running uphill to escape a monstrous wall of water hurtling downhill at the speed of a landing airliner will serve a much-needed purpose: a harrowing fresh start on global action to cool the planet.
