“Tragedy struck Nepal and China this Wednesday when a maelstrom of water, rock, and mud erupted down a Himalayan river valley, sweeping away countless houses, bridges, roads, and people—and burying many more under a viscous slurry.”
Nepal’s Glaciers Will Flood Again. Can Scientists Predict the Next One?
“The Himalaya is one of many places around the world home to glaciers that are increasingly becoming unstable as the planet warms.”
As our climate catastrophe accelerates, and accelerating it is, that is possibly the single most important detail of our predicament, ongoing faith in this set of living arrangements will progressively erode, until we reach a tipping point when it will collapse, the Seneca effect if you will.
Capitalism is a confidence game, as long as people are confident that tomorrow will be similar to today and that presenting a plastic card at the supermarket continues to fill your fridge, pantry and fuel tank, people shrug off the looming shortages or disasters, until it affects them directly.
Everyone who lived in that valley the day before the collapse were just like you and I, now their lives have either been extinguished, or altered forever. 10’s of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands have been traumatized. My dear friend and neighbor Jude said, “I can’t stop thinking about it”, multiply that thought by the millions across the planet. Every adolescent on the planet is pondering their uncertain future. As I have said previously there is a tsunami of grief building in our youth.
Everyone you see running from the tsunami of water and debris field below is now dead.
At one point the flow was travelling at 150km /hour, try outrunning that. It flowed, cascaded and destroyed everything in its path for 80km’s. This catastrophe is not over, it’s just begun.
According to Red Cross estimates 90,000 people have been affected.
“Climate change accelerates the extensive retreat of glaciers, leading to the widespread development of glacial lakes. A holistic picture of the spatial distribution of glacial lakes worldwide is a critical base for tracking the outburst hazards. By employing a semi-automated mapping approach and rigorous quality control, this study inventories 117,352 glacial lakes”. Source: A spatially constrained remote sensing-based inventory of glacial lakes worldwide
Now everyone who lives ‘downstream’ of those 117,352 glacial lakes are looking up, wondering when it will be their turn.
Nepal is not a wealthy nation (is there such a thing anymore as a wealthy nation, all I see is Himalayan sized mountains of debt globally), fixing the infrastructure that has been destroyed will cost hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, that Nepal doesn’t have.
Repairing infrastructure after natural disasters is spectacularly expensive and it doesn’t ‘add value’, the expenditure just gets you back to where you were before the ‘event’. This is a continuum across the planet.
One benefit of having China as her neighbor is that there is no better nation at infrastructure construction than China, I’m sure they will help out.
Now let’s talk Insurance:
Every insurer will now be pouring over every policy downstream of those 117,352 glacial lakes, expect them to not be renewed.
I’ve covered the issue of insurance in a time of abrupt climate change at: The Insurance Industry, soon to be the first pillar of Capitalism to succumb to Abrupt Climate Change
Professor Kate Booth recently published a book titled: In Collapse__ When Insurance and Climate Collide I’ll write a suitable review after I have finished reading it.
I have previously delved into the issue of losing our glaciers, in conjunction with my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson.
“The retreat of the planet’s glaciers is one of the most visible and dramatic indicators of the far-reaching impact of climate change on world’s ecosystems.”
“Now a new paper published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity has shed further light on how glacial retreat drives unmitigated changes to ice, water, and land – and how their loss threatens the health of our planet.”
New analysis reveals glacier retreat will lead to loss of biodiversity as vital habitats for specialist species disappear
The collapse registered as a 5.2 earthquake, that was the energy involved, the debris field ‘tsunami’ was the earthquake, not the other way around.
“So far, local media have reported 579 deaths. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority of Nepal raised the number of those still unaccounted for to 1,924.” Over 1,900 people now reported missing after devastating Nepal floods
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I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
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