The terrible disaster in Nepal, which has seen hundreds of people killed is a warning of what may well be coming down the line as the Climate Crisis intensifies. How many more will be killed by climate disasters before governments take meaningful action?
It was reported on 2 September that a week after the flash flood in Nepal, over a thousand people were now confirmed dead, with more than 4000 still missing. Writing about the flood, the renowned climate scientist Bill McKibben has written that this was a disaster that he saw coming. He talks of how he had been in Tibet twenty years previously to report on what was already becoming a major threat; the melting ice on glaciers in an area that has become known as the world’s third pole. This is confirmed by the reporting of Jonathan Watts who stated the following soon after the catastrophic flood occurred:
“The devastating flash flood that has ripped through the border communities of Nepal and Tibet has heightened fears that the climate crisis is destabilising the geology of mountain and polar regions, threatening millions of people.”
McKibben also notes that ground temperatures in the area of the ice collapse had hit their highest for two years, just two days before the collapse. Dr Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, whose team had sensors 6 miles (10km) away from the site was reported to have told the Science Media Centre:
“These high temperatures would have weakened the snowpack, filled crevasses with water and thawed the bonds between ice and rock that hold these glaciers in place.”
Caused by Climate Change
Meanwhile in another article, another well respected climate scientist Michael Mann has warned that while the high peaks of the Himalayas have been held together by permafrost for many thousands of years, this glue is beginning to turn to water. Mann goes on to explain that the ice collapse and subsequent flood in Nepal and Tibet was not caused by a freak weather event, but rather,
“…was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming.”
He went on to warn that it was: “the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action.”
Mann tells us that the flood was caused directly by climate-change induced melting of the glacier, which set in motion a high velocity wave of debris and mud, dumping millions of tons of rock in the process.
Mann finished his piece by stating this:
“Donald Trump and enabling congressional Republicans continue to double down on policies favouring fossil fuel extraction and dependence at the very time we need to be moving even more quickly away from fossil fuels toward clean energy. These extreme events underscore the urgency of taking action now, and – while there are many things we can do – one of the greatest opportunities Americans will have to affect climate policy is the upcoming midterm election. You can make support for urgent and dramatic climate action a litmus test issue as you go to the voting booth.”
A Summer of warnings
Because about 70% of the earth’s land surface and the vast majority of the people in the world live in the northern hemisphere, it is perhaps no wonder that the effects of global heating are most noticed during our Summer. However, this has still been an exceptional Summer for recognising the effects of global heating. As well as the flood in Nepal and Tibet, caused by a melting glacier, there have been record high temperatures set across Europe, with thousands dying as a result, while a record drought has also gripped the European continent.
Yet there have been no major statements from any of the world’s leading political figures. In this country it has been noted that new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has had very little to say about the growing crisis, and while he has said that he would attend COP 31 in the autumn, he has a ‘pragmatic’ approach to allow drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea in both Rosebank and Jackdaw fields. He seems to believe that there has to be a choice between the climate and creating jobs. This is a false choice. With a robust Green New Deal, and a just transition from the carbon rich to a carbon neutral economy many good, well-paid jobs can be created, including those with the kind of skills presently used in fossil fuel industries.
National security cannot be just about making us secure from threats posed by states such as Russia. Surely the climate crisis, worsening all the time, is at least as big a threat if not more so. As the desperate search for more survivors in Nepal and Tibet continues, more people need to be asking: when will Burnham and other world leaders learn that Climate Security is important and start to take the Climate Crisis seriously?
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