The Himalayas have always inspired a peculiar mixture of awe and arrogance. We look at those enormous peaks and imagine that they are permanent, immovable, eternal. They are not. They are living geological systems, changing constantly, and increasingly under pressure from a warming planet.
The catastrophe along the Nepal-Tibet border should therefore be understood as more than another terrible natural disaster. A glacier collapse unleashed torrents of water, mud, rock and debris through Himalayan valleys, destroying villages and infrastructure and leaving thousands dead or missing. Hundreds of foreign travellers and pilgrims were among those caught in the disaster. Rescue teams now face the grim task of searching landscapes that, in places, have effectively been rearranged by the flood.
And still, somewhere, someone is explaining that climate change is a hoax. It would be almost funny if the consequences were not so devastating. There is an extraordinary psychological trick involved in climate denial. A person can watch glaciers retreat, temperatures rise, forests burn, oceans warm and floods become increasingly destructive, and still insist that nothing fundamental is happening. Reality can arrive carrying a mountain of evidence and the denier will ask for identification.
Nepal, of all countries, has little reason to be lectured about responsibility. Its contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions is tiny compared with that of major industrial economies. Yet its people live beneath a climate system increasingly influenced by decisions made thousands of kilometres away. The Himalayas are warming, glaciers are becoming increasingly unstable, and communities downstream are exposed to hazards they did little to create.
That is the injustice at the heart of the climate crisis. The foreign travellers missing in this disaster make the point particularly uncomfortable for wealthy countries. Climate change is not somebody else's problem happening somewhere conveniently distant. Tourists from dozens of countries were caught in the Himalayan catastrophe. Families across continents are now waiting beside telephones, checking messages, searching lists of survivors and wondering whether a loved one has somehow escaped.
Suddenly the Himalayas are not a postcard. They are personal. But even that should not be the principal lesson. The Nepali villagers who lost homes, relatives and livelihoods matter just as much as the foreign visitors. Indeed, they matter precisely because they were there when the world changed around them. They did not arrive for an adventure. They lived there.
Climate change is often discussed through statistics because statistics are emotionally convenient. Two degrees. Three degrees. Melting glaciers. Rising seas. Extreme rainfall. Carbon emissions. Parts per million.
Then comes the flood. Statistics become houses floating away. They become roads disappearing. They become names pinned to hospital walls. They become families waiting for news. And yet climate denial survives because admitting the scale of the problem would require something more uncomfortable than changing one's opinion. It would require changing behaviour, investment, politics and priorities. It would require governments to spend money before disasters happen rather than after them. It would require better early-warning systems, resilient infrastructure, scientific monitoring and serious international cooperation.
Most importantly, it would require accepting that nature does not negotiate with ideology. A glacier does not care whether somebody voted Republican, Democrat, Labour, Conservative, left or right. Water does not check someone's political affiliation before entering their home. Mud does not distinguish between a climate scientist and a climate denier.
The Himalayas are giving humanity another warning. We can continue arguing about whether the warning exists. Or we can finally listen.
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