The New Climate. New(s)letter #28
Lessons from Nepal; a new planet of extremes; and community success stories
We have a new benchmark. The images from the Nepal-Tibet glacier collapse and debris surge shocked even seasoned UN-disaster responders. The region is well known for glacial lake bursts, flashflooding, landslides and earthquakes — but no-one has seen anything on this scale. The media seems to have settled on calling it the ‘Nepal flood’, but this was no flood. It was an 80 metre-high wall of pulverised rock and ice travelling at up to 100mph. Nothing in its path stood a chance. And in its path stood a municipal border crossing, towns, villages, bridges, roads and several hydropower plants, plus the early warning system sensors. All are gone. At the time of writing, 1,287 people are confirmed dead and more than 5000 are still missing.
Nepal and the wider Himalayan region are warming twice as fast as the global average. This summer was its warmest ever. The analysis so far suggests that a combination of rapid snow melt, glacier retreat, and a thaw of the permafrost holding the mountain-side together, caused a one-kilometre-wide section of the Langtang Lirung mountain (which peaks at 7246 metres) to shear off, falling 1200 metres and causing a magnitude 5.2 earthquake as it hit the ground — the debris flow then careened off down the Trishuli and Bhote Koshi river valleys. I wrote about what we know, what we don’t know, and what the UN needs to do, in The Nepal-Tibet Glacier Disaster Changes Everything.
When we published Chinmay Jambhale’s Permafrost is Thawing. Scientists Can’t Agree on How Scared To Be back in July, I was a little unsure of the headline. Was it possibly too OTT? Little did I know just how prescient it would be just a month later:
A team led by researchers studying the Tibetan Plateau ran a multi-level warming experiment at an alpine meadow site 4,790 meters above sea level in central Tibet… What they found was a qualitative shift, not a gradual slide.
Timely too was The Conversation U.S. piece How Do Scientists Know if Climate Change Made a Heatwave, Storm or Wildfire Worse? In short:
Scientists conducting extreme event attribution studies aren’t asking whether climate change caused a hurricane, heat wave or flood. Instead, they’re asking how climate change influenced that event: How would this event have differed in a world without increased greenhouse gases, and how have the chances of it occurring been altered by warming?
The worsening conditions in Nepal and the wider Himalayan region prior to 26 August were unquestionable. Whether climate change ‘caused’ this is the wrong question; rather, just how much did climate change speed up the process and make it worse?
Martina H’s The New Planet of Extremes reminds us that climate change is not linear — it can get so much worse, so much more quickly, than expected, then followed by a brief plateau that gives a false sense of easing off:
We were told to expect a slope. A gradual warming, a degree here or there across decades, a line tilting up gently enough that you could plan around it, build for it, insure it, retire into it. What we are actually living through is a staircase. Long flat stretches where the old rules seem to hold, and then a sudden step up, a lurch into conditions the body and the building and the crops and the power grid were never calibrated for. Today’s climate can seem like an unexpected step change from the climate of just a few years ago.
The rapid warming of this summer was painfully apparent the world over. As Europe burned, even Argentina, in what should have been mid-winter, recorded a night that never fell below 26°C, a whole 20 degrees above normal. Patrick Galey dubbed it A Summer of Violence in his movingly poignant and personal essay:
The debt is now here for us all. We knew it would come. Most of us (myself included) assumed we would have a little more time, that we would at least make it to 2030 or 2040 before the worst excesses and privations of climate breakdown would make themselves unignorable.
Ricky Lanusse told a similarly personal story through the lens of his in-laws baking in a non air-conditioned home.
Roberto Suarez’s The Climate Distraction is Over reminds us that even in the George W. Bush era, climate change was ackowledged as a threat. A 2007 report by a panel of generals, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, headed by Sherri Goodman, a former deputy under secretary of defense, found that climate change was a ‘threat multiplier’. By 2014, Chuck Hagel, then defense secretary, signed a Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap that carried the phrase into the machinery of installations and procurement. Then 2016, and a single mindset trumped all others.
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Deniz’s Dutton’s The Urban-Rural Divide asks:
Why do people who live close to nature — on the farms and in the rural communities in North America — seem to favour a conservative politics that, transposed at the national level, consistently undervalues, commodifies and actively harms nature?
It remains a million-dollar question.
This was on George Dillard’s mind too in Real Men Want to Save the Planet:
Most Americans don’t consider themselves to be environmentalists. This seems crazy to me because, well, the environment keeps all of us alive. You’d think that we’d all want to protect it. Unfortunately, environmentalism has fallen victim to the culture wars.
While Niladri Giri | 10+ Years Agriculture Field Work shows us what happens to rural farmers when pollinating insect populations collapse completely: farmers are forced to pollinate by hand, with paint brushes. They no doubt become an environmentalist after that.
I try to end each New(s)letter on a positive note, though, so I’ll finish with some more positive success stories. Precious Awonge has been on a roll this month, with a series of articles in dialogue with her readers on Clean Energy’s Dirty Problem — do check them out and join the conversation.
Kamyar Razavi’s excellent The Citizens Vs. The Plastics Industry informs us of a Boston-based startup USEFULL that works with colleges and universities to address single-use plastic waste:
…USEFULL provides food establishments, and students, with fully washable, reusable stainless steel containers. They get scanned and checked out, used, and returned for cleaning, just like a library book would. Through partnerships with just under 30 colleges and universities they’ve avoided 90 metric tonnes of plastic waste.
While one of my favourite stories in August, The Bird Counters by Quentin Septer, tells of a nonprofit helping to turnaround the fate of some of North America’s most at-risk birds:
… the Audubon Conservation Ranching program… rewards ranchers who manage their lands for grassland birds. MRBO does the bird surveys that help verify these ranches are living up to the label. Nationally, the program now spans nearly 4.5 million acres across more than 150 farms and ranches in 15 states. The idea is that cattle, grazed the way bison once roamed, can keep a prairie — and its birds — alive.
And hot off the press, published today, David Steinman’s extraordinary tale — The CCS Battle Bubbling up in Louisiana, tells of the struggle against federal tax dollars directly funding the destruction of pristine Louisiana wetlands. But also of the people, including David himself, fighting back against corporate bullying and political incompetence.
Finally Matilde Meireles’s Building for Stillness helps us, and the people of Belfast, to pause for peaceful reflection and a deeper connection with water and nature. A multi-disciplinary floating art space on the River Lagan aimed for nothing less than:
…a renewed attention that reconnects people and river, fostering forms of care and kinship that acknowledge the waterway not merely as infrastructure, but as a living presence within the city.
Matilde’s personal invovement focussed on the soundscape that visitors could listen to on headphones within the floating platform.
‘Movements of water between atmosphere, land and sea’ was a 17-minute immersive headphone-based installation I composed. Available to visitors during DRIFT’s public activation programme, the installation took listeners on a sonic drift exploring the multitudes of water and our deep entanglement with these cycles.
It went on to inform her album, Four Tales, rooted in listening as an act of care. Maybe that’s something we all need. It’s available on Bandcamp. I don’t know why but listening to it brought tears to my eyes.
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Until next time.
Tim Smedley, the Editor, The New Climate.
