The Nepal Disaster: How Climate Change is Reshaping the World

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. It's really the era of climate disasters. At least 1 ,200 people now have died in Nepal.

0:36More than 4 ,200 are missing as a result of the glacier disaster there. On top of that, the UN Environment Programme finally admitted that we will overshoot 1.5 degrees of warming. It's also officially been the hottest summer in the UK since records began. And the El Nino event that's only really just getting started is already off the charts and predicted to be the biggest we've had for at least 1 ,000 years. Yeah, and, you know, I think we're getting to understand now, aren't we, that these things aren't one-offs anymore. We're going to be seeing more and more records broken, definitely more glaciers melting and collapsing.

1:11In Europe, we're on track to see the most ice loss from glaciers since records began. And, you know, the climate crisis, the heat waves, the ice loss, they're reshaping the world very palpably in real time. That's what we're getting into on this episode of The World, the Universe and Us from New Scientist. I'm Dr Rowan Hooper. And I'm Dr Penny Sarche. Today we're joined by reporter Alec Loon, who is just back from the Swiss Alps, and Professor of Glaciology Bethan Davis from the University of Newcastle. Welcome to you both. Bethan, can we start with what we know now about the disaster in Nepal?

1:45What happened there? Yeah, so what happened in Nepal, which is an extremely tragic event, is that a large mass of rock fell down the mountain. It fell from the top of the Lorang Lengtang Mountain all the way down to the valley floor. That massive rock had a glacier on top of it. So it's a big mass of ice and rock that's come all the way down the valley, all the way from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Now if it had just been rock maybe the disaster would have perhaps not been quite so severe but the volume of ice within this landslide caused a massive issue because that provided the water for a huge debris flow that then took out the whole of the valley and progressed down the valley and wiped everything in its path so that that massive rock when it hit the valley floor actually landed on some dead ice which used to be a glacier is no longer connected to anything and is was quite buried by rock and rubble that contributed water and then it progressed down the valley floor and wiped out anything standing in its way and what's shaping up to be the worst disaster I can think of right now.

2:58Yeah, like the scale of it. I saw a sort of graphical representation of the amount. So it was 142 million cubic metres of material and they superimposed that on Manhattan and it made this gigantic block, you know, a significant size of Manhattan Island. So that's what shifted down. Absolutely horrendous. um bethan we can say this is open and shut case of a climate disaster can't we it's always a little tricky because this this was a landslide and landslides have been happening in that part of the world for a long time there was an earthquake in 2015 and we saw lots and lots of landslides happening after that 2015 earthquake um but i would argue that there is evidence that the climate crisis has contributed to preconditioning of this event and it has made it much more likely.

3:52We've long predicted an increase in these kinds of events and I think we're going to see ever more. We know that the area is warming really, really rapidly. A load of weather stations in the Langtang Valley at about 5 ,000 metres above sea level show that they're warming at 0.3 degrees per decade and that area at that altitude is now 1.6 degrees warmer than it was compared with the 1960 to 1990 mean so it's significantly warmer and obviously temperature really matters for ice because ice melts when it gets above zero degrees there are other factors as well as the warming we can see that the glacier has significantly retreated in this area there's dead ice in the bottom of the valley that used to be connected now it's just buried but the ice has been removed that used to go from the top of the mountain down to the bottom and that means that the the area that collapsed was very precarious and exposed and much more susceptible to failure we also know that permafrost is degrading these mountains are they're kind of shaly they're not strong mountains and there's a lot of permafrost that's gluing everything together.

5:06When the temperatures become warm, that permafrost melts and then you get water in the joints and that water, when it's under high pressure, a high effective pressure in these joints, that can facilitate this failure of the rock which then falls down the mountain. On top of all of that, there's a glacier on the top of that mountain that's melting and contributing water itself. So there is a number of factors that mean that I would argue there's a strong case that climate change has significantly contributed to this event and preconditioned the whole mountain to become increasingly unstable. And it's likely that we'll see more of these as we continue to warm the environment, degrade the permafrost and melt the glaciers.

5:53So can you tell us a bit then about the extent of ice loss in the Himalayas more generally? It's an area that's all of the glaciers are shrinking really really fast. One of the latest assessments showed that glaciers in the Himalaya have shrunk by five percent just over the last 25 years. So the glaciers are significantly smaller than they were just 20 years ago. The rate of change is accelerating so glaciers are thinning faster now than they were in the 2010 to 2015 period glaciers are now shrinking even faster and in the Langtown catchment itself which is in that particular part where the where the mountain glacier collapsed the glaciers there are shrinking really really fast and are significantly smaller than they were just 10 years ago there's a really consistent story of ice shrinkage across all of the Himalaya in much the same way as we see ice shrinking in the Andes and in the European Alps and in other glacierised mountain ranges across the world.

7:01And you must have seen this in over the course of just your career right? Have you noticed it almost in real time? Yeah so we have been doing repeat surveys on some particular glaciers for example some of the glaciers in Austria and you can go and see you can walk up to the glacier terminus and when you repeat that visit year on year and every year you have to walk an extra hundred meters because the glacier has shrunk it's really really telling you're like well I had lunch here right on the snout of the glacier last year and now the glacier is all the way over there and you're seeing this happen year on year the other thing that we're seeing in the European Alps is the glaciers are melting so quickly that the terminuses are becoming very chaotic very riddled with holes collapsing all over the place melting from below as well as on top we did some seismic surveys on one of these glaciers and it's like swiss cheese it's it's so the ice is so rotted and degraded it's certainly something that we see very visually and the glacier recession is probably one of the most visual aspects of climate change another glacier that's particularly a glacier that I've visited many times is Merglas in Chamonix I visited it for the first time with my parents when I was three years old Merglas, that's the sea of ice that's the famous sea of ice and it has a tourist grotto where you can go in and it's got coloured lights and it's very pretty but when you go there as you walk down from the restaurant where the glacier used to be as you walk down there are years signposts with years on about when the ice was out that year and you kind of you say okay well i was here at this in 1986 when i was three and the glacier is is you know it's miles below me now and then we visited it several times over the last few years each time you have to go down an extra staircase because the glacier has shrunk so well didn't your parents say don't be a glaciologist there's no there's no life in this right they're going to run out.

9:05It is a concern, but fortunately there's lots of ice in Antarctica, so I hope I should be all right in my career.

9:34That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Alec, you're just back from the Swiss Alps, seeing glaciers there with glaciologists. What was the mood like? What did they have to say? Yeah, it's not a happy mood. As you mentioned, we're on track possibly for a record ice loss year in the European Alps. And just to put that in perspective, they're talking about 6 % of all the ice that's left in glaciers in the Alps being lost just this summer alone. So, I mean, it's just a massive amount. And I went to the Rhone Glacier with some scientists from ETH Zurich, and that glacier has lost 30 million tons of ice just this summer alone, which is enough to fill 12 ,000 Olympic swimming pools.

10:30So, I mean, just the amount of melt this summer is staggering. And you can really see it. You know, just as we approached this glacier, we went by the Belvedere Hotel, which was built as a place where people could could sit and drink a cocktail and look over the glacier in this valley. Well, the glaciers retreated two kilometers. It's no longer visible from that hotel. It actually makes an appearance in the James Bond film Goldfinger. James Bond drives by and there's this huge cascade of ice behind him. Well, that's no longer there. It's retreated all the way into the valley, and the hotel has been abandoned because there's no reason for it to exist anymore.

11:13We got a little bit closer. Bethan mentioned the ice grotto at Mer de Gloss. There's a similar ice grotto at the Rhone Glacier. They have taken to covering up the ice grotto in geotextiles, these reflective, white, plasticky coverings to reflect more sunlight and try to save the ice. so that those geotextiles over that ice cave that that now there's a giant lake of meltwater between that and the glacier the ice cave has been left behind by the glacier which has continued to retreat back and the ice cave is you know there's about a a meter of of ice left on the ceiling of it pretty soon it's just going to be an ice hole and and then we made it to the glacier itself we put on our crampons started climbing up the glacier the first thing we saw was this gigantic hole in the middle of the glacier.

12:03And the scientists were saying, yeah, this hole has collapsed just this year, where there's all these crevasses around in this giant hole. And at the bottom of it is just a channel, kind of a river of meltwater. And that's meltwater that's coming down through the glacier, through these mulans, and then coming under the glacier and just pouring out of it. Then we go up a little bit further. And the scientists were checking the melt stakes, which are these just big kind of aluminum pipes, tubes that they drill into the glacier to measure, you know, how far down the ice is melting. The melt stakes were sticking out at weird angles because they're falling out of the glacier because the glacier has melted so fast this year that the scientists, you know, despite having decades of experience drilling these melt stakes, they didn't drill them in deep enough.

12:53They said, yeah, we were, this caught us by surprise, the extreme melt this summer. You know, we didn't expect this much melt. We didn't drill in the melt stakes deep enough. So it's just, you know, really shocking when you see it with your own eyes. And then meanwhile, we were hearing these thumps from deep within the glacier, probably crevasses opening within the ice. As the ice melts, it gets more unstable. It fractures more, which tends to, which can lead to these glacier collapses. I mean, we're talking about the one the Himalayas, but one happened last year in the Alps where an entire village was destroyed by a glacier collapse, which was similarly kind of a...

13:32Many factors played a role. Permafrost thaw led to a rock avalanche, rock fall, which then led to the fracturing of the glacier, which led to the ice avalanche, which led to flooding, which destroyed the town. But tragically, one person died in that incident, but not 1 ,200. And that really goes to show the importance of early warning systems, because the difference was in the Swiss Alps, they got an early warning and they evacuated the village before the collapse happened, which unfortunately didn't happen in the Himalayas. And anyway, the last thing I'll say is that, yeah, I mean, just as we're standing on the glacier, throughout the day, you know, in the morning, there wasn't that much water on top of the glacier, but by the afternoon, there were just dozens and dozens of these streams of water pouring down the glacier, all this meltwater coming off it as the day heated up.

14:23And all sorts of rock falls coming down the valley sides. You know, every couple of minutes, there'd be a couple of cracks like gunfire. And you'd turn and these rocks would be falling down the sides of the valley as the permafrost. And more likely with that, it's probably ice remnants. There are these little bits of ice that have been, you know, cut off from the glacier. And as those melt, they drop rocks on the sides of the glacier. So it was super dynamic, super scary, and just shocking to see it up close. let's talk about the knock-on effects then of all of this glacier melt because what happens on the mountain doesn't stay on the mountain there's there's literally downstream effects bethen yeah so a surprisingly large number of people about 1.9 billion people live downstream of glacier ice mountains and a large number of those people particularly in places like high mountain asia are really reliant on the melt water from these glaciers to irrigate their crops for hydropower, for domestic consumption, for industry.

15:23And that water also provides ecosystem services. So it supports biodiversity in these mountain zones. As the glaciers are shrinking, that meltwater can temporarily become more available. So you might get a little bit more water. But as our glaciers are shrinking so fast now, we're actually now getting less water from these glaciers. And so particularly in droughts, particularly in dry seasons, some of these rivers are becoming very dry indeed. And in places like High Mountain Asia, where these rivers cross national boundaries, we're liable to have transboundary issues with one country taking water and another country having insufficient water.

16:04That gap is often closed in High Mountain Asia through groundwater extraction. But that's unsustainable. We're taking out groundwater faster than we're putting it back in. so a loss of water from these glaciers is likely to be a very it's an increasingly significant issue and over the coming decades i think we're going to see increased migration away from places where water is becoming increasingly a problem what this makes me think of is you know we've we talk in other climate situations that the people who suffer most from the climate problems are not the people who've caused the problems who've contributed and that's what we're seeing in Nepal as well.

16:45Is there any way of getting reparation for it? In other words, getting the rich to pay for the problem they've caused in these cases? Yeah, so we've already seen the Nepali Prime Minister making a case for loss and damage reparations. And we have COP coming up in November. I saw on the news that Andy Burnham is planning to go to COP, which is good. There will be, I am sure, much discussion of this event at COP. And this is somewhere where the loss and damage negotiations will be really intense. We will be talking about this disaster at the Chrysler Pavilion extensively at COP, for example. Yeah, I mean, loss and damage is always, even before this, it's always been a sticking point, hasn't it?

17:31There's never been enough given to what has been promised or has been asked for. Yeah, I think it's never been enough. And I also think the withdrawal of USAID has been a significant issue in Nepal there actually was an early warning system and that early warning system required funding to maintain and that funding was withdrawn and so that early warning system was not able to be maintained and so not only is there a growing humanitarian disaster in Nepal that's going to require financial support for recovery. But in order to prevent such a tragedy happening again we need funding allocated to these regions to install such early warning systems.

18:19Some of them can be satellite based to look for sudden changes in previously stable glaciers but also you need on the ground seismometers, on the ground weather cameras, on the ground even audio recordings that can provide early warning systems, but all of that requires a staff and equipment, and you're working at high altitudes, so it's complex to maintain. Just to note, I mean, that loss and damage fund, it's been funded about 400 million. It's received about$400 million, I believe. It's been pledged about$800 million. But when people estimate how much loss and damage actually will require in terms of money, they talk about hundreds of billions of dollars.

19:03So the scale of the funding available is just vastly smaller than the need, even if that money were to be mobilized to Nepal or other places that are hit by the damages. It's just not enough to go around. You know, I always used to wonder back in the day that if it would take, sadly, like a major disaster that would prompt the world into action. And now it's looking like actually there'll be major disasters and we'll just carry on and start to sort of accommodate them into this is just what happens. I don't know. Is that too pessimistic? I think it's realistic. I think we're seeing the idea of net zero, the idea of reducing climate change becoming increasingly polarised and increasingly politicised.

19:50So we're seeing, for example, within the UK politics, we're seeing political parties that were previously strongly in favor of net zero now backing away from it. So the conservative Theresa May government, for example, increased our commitment towards net zero and now they're backing away from it. So an increasing rejection of this idea of curbing of carbon emissions, despite the very, very clear evidence of the impact of climate change. And we felt it within the UK, but also in Europe and in tragically in Nepal. And there's this kind of also this discourse around, you know, and again, conservative parties around the world saying we need to focus on adaptation, we need to stop striving for net zero and put more money towards adaptation, which sounds like a kind of an interesting argument or maybe sounds enticing when you're talking about, yeah, these huge, these climate disasters that keep happening.

20:53but you can't have the the adaptation will never keep up if the mitigation doesn't come along with it because the climate disasters will just get worse and worse and more and more expensive and no matter how much money you redirect towards adaptation it will never be enough so so i think that yeah the the politics shifting away from net zero and towards these arguments about well let's just spend that money on on adapting instead really miss the mark because you'll never catch up unless you do both. You have to get to net zero and also spend more money on adapting to, because even in a net zero world, we'll have climate disasters.

21:30They just won't be as bad as in a, you know, a world of runaway global warming. It's one of these false dichotomies, isn't it? The cutting emissions versus adaptation. But it's been shown that the money saved by cutting emissions is going to be far superior to So if we adapt now, the costs are just going to keep racking up and up and up and up. Yeah, it's cheaper for sure. Adaptation is going to be extremely expensive. And when people add up the costs of net zero, they typically fail to add up the costs of not getting to net zero. And adaptation is, I mean, I would dispute that you can adapt to a massive wall of rock and water coming towards you.

22:15the adaptation to that is migration away from these these regions which are the heartlands of whole communities okay on that point i think we'll leave it there look thanks so much to our guests beth and davis alec loon and thanks to you for listening do subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts goodbye for now bye-bye

22:58We'll see you next time. the perfect sequel. That's all. Get runway ready for The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Disney Plus and Hulu. Rated PG-13.