As the climate changes, is the deadly flooding in Nepal a sign of things to come?

0:00It's Consider This where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, the devastating flooding in Nepal and its links to climate change. Hundreds are dead and many more are missing after catastrophic flash flooding along the Tibet-Nepal border. Nothing is visible. No houses, no roads, no any greenery in those areas, and no blue water. Now it's muddy water now. Andy Tapa is one of the rescuers trying to get to as many survivors as he can. He's a charter and rescue pilot for a helicopter company in Nepal. And in 20 or so flights over the last two days, he shot some video and shared that video with us.

0:41We saw many people stuck in the middle of the mall. Half of the body were just inside the mall and they were just seeking for help. But there was no place to land, even no place to drop for the rescue. Tapa said he was able to find survivors in some accessible parts of the mountainous region. But many were in bad shape. Personally, for me, I've evacuated more than 120 people. They are muddy, like in their face, in their legs, might be body scratched, hand broken, leg broken, and they're terrified, you know, unable to speak. He told us about one man who was able to talk with him. He had 10 people in the family, out of which he lost nine in front of his eye.

1:20Tapa has been flying the most critically injured people to Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, and the rest to a closer staging area. but there are so many people still stranded. Today, he said he had to leave several hundred people sheltering in a tunnel because the weather just got too bad to fly. But they are very safe and they have enough food to eat. We will just continue with such missions. Consider this. Climate change is accelerating the frequency of deadly natural disasters. What do we know about the role climate change is playing in the Himalayan region?

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3:00It's Consider This from NPR. These deadly flash floods on the border of Nepal and Chinese-administered Tibet are not a surprise to many climate scientists. NPR's Julia Simon joins us now to explain why. Hi, Julia. Hello, Elsa. So the way I understand it, this flooding, it came from a glacier, right, that collapsed. Is that correct? Yeah. So the reports are still preliminary. But many scientists think this was a glacier collapsing, this giant chunk of ice that snapped off, triggering the floods. This mass of ice and rock and mud and water, it started ripping down this Himalayan River Valley, down through these villages, destroying communities.

3:43If you've seen the videos, you can see it's this avalanche of deadly debris. Yeah, and I mean, these glaciers, they've been around for thousands of years, right? So to have a chunk of glacier just snap off now seems like a huge deal. It does, but sadly, many scientists are not so surprised that this could happen, Elsa, and that's because of human-caused climate change. These glaciers that were once stable, they're disappearing. NPR has been reporting on Nepal's glaciers for years. A team from NPR traveled to Nepal in 2022. They were climbing up a moraine. That's a massive pile of boulders created by a glacier.

4:23But when NPR's Rebecca Herscher got to the top, there was no glacier in sight. Oh, wow. That's the sound of water. There was only water, this huge lake, where a glacier should have been, Elsa. The glacier had melted, and glacial lake floods are a growing threat. In recent years, multiple glacial lake floods have displaced and killed people. Scientists warn that an estimated 15 million people around the world are at risk from such floods. Wow. So just how unstable are these melting glaciers? Yeah, so NPR spoke with Alton Byers about this. He's at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

5:11He says he's surprised how fast the permafrost, that's the continuously frozen ice, soil, and rock that's held the mountains together for millennia, it's now changing. The analogy I and my colleagues use is take a stick of butter out of the refrigerator and put it on the counter. It's going to get softer and it's going to lose its structural integrity. Yeah, so these melting glaciers, they pose deadly risks to the communities in their path. I mean, we're seeing it right now. So what are some solutions here to prevent the kind of disaster that we are seeing in Nepal, for example, a disaster that is caused by melting glaciers?

5:51Well, the first thing is better alert systems. It seems right now like Nepal's flood warning system wasn't equipped to handle this, despite quite a bit of investment in those warning systems over the last decade or so. And it's important to mention, this area has seen flash floods before. But we also know the primary driver of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels, like oil, gas, and coal. The solutions to transition away from fossil fuels are out there, Elsa. They are scalable, they're affordable, they're reliable. They include solar energy, wind energy, and batteries. That is NPR climate and energy correspondent, Julia Simon.

6:31Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Elsa. This episode was produced by Henry Larson, Megan Lim, and Kai McNamee, with audio engineering by Tiffany Vera Castro. Our director is Jonas Adams. It was edited by Sadie Babbitts, Sarah Handel, and Timbi Ermias. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dornan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor-free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get NPR Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org. This season on Planet Money Summer School, we have drilled for oil in Norway.

7:17We've smuggled products into North Korea. And now we make it to our seventh continent, Antarctica. That's right. Speak for me. Mr. Penguin, speak for me. That's another sound of Antarctica. That's a reporter trying to interview a penguin. We'll explain on Planet Money Summer School. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.