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‘Long story short, this is BS’ – Meteorologist on blaming ‘climate change’ for Nepal floods: ‘Landslides/avalanches in Nepal have happened for tens of millions of years…Glaciers will always be growing or receding’

 

Long story short, this is BS. Landslides / avalanches in Nepal have happened for tens of millions of years. In fact, floods associated with landslides are how the V-shaped valleys in the region were carved out millions of years ago at pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations. The Himalaya is an exceptionally steep and tectonically active mountain range where earthquakes trigger landslides, avalanches, and glacier collapses fairly regularly. The Google Earth satellite image I pulled up shows this well. Although an earthquake likely did not trigger the devastating landslide the other day, moderate earthquakes occur often due to plate tectonic movement lifting the Himalaya upward driving India into the Asian continent, and it is likely earthquakes in recent years and months helped set the stage for this. Frequent seismic shaking in alpine areas can fracture glaciers by creating crevasses, unstable blocks of ice called “seracs,” and hanging ice.  nhess.copernicus.org/articles/23/25 The north face of the Himalaya in the Langtang Valley is characterized by steep slopes that are conducive for “hanging glaciers” (a type of glacier that starts high on a steep mountain wall and stops abruptly, usually at a cliff edge). These hanging glaciers are far more susceptible to destabilization and often produce avalanches when ice is knocked loose. Jim Steele (

@JimSteeleSkepti) wrote a nice post about the geology behind this; I recommend giving it a read. Although warming and surface melt can affect glacier stability, basal conditions are largely controlled by geothermal heat flux, friction, pressure, and bedrock geography. And while there aren’t any paleoclimate temperature reconstructions in the exact area the recent disaster unfolded, there is evidence that both the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau were warmer throughout much of the early-to-mid Holocene than they are today (e.g., Chen et al, 2020; Feng et al., 2022), which suggests that glaciers in the region may have also been smaller.  link.springer.com/article/10.100  agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/20 Climate change is real, yes. It always has changed and always will, and I don’t deny that at least some modern warming is due to carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. But glaciers are not a permanent fixture of our environment and we need to quit pretending that they are. Glaciers will always be growing or receding; they are not supposed to stay static over time. Pretending so is a fool’s errand.
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