I’ve spent many weeks doing fieldwork in Tibet, sitting above these enormous, deeply incised Himalayan river systems and seeing firsthand just how geologically active this landscape is.
So spare me the climate-change grift every time a natural disaster strikes.
Catastrophic glacial outburst floods are not new. The 1981 Zhangzangbo GLOF released ~20 million m³ of water and debris into Nepal, with estimated peak discharge approaching 16,000 m³/s. The Himalayas experienced enormous GLOFs long before today's atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.
If it happened naturally in the past, we should expect it to happen naturally again in the future—regardless of atmospheric CO₂.
Turning a horrific loss of life into an immediate climate-change narrative without demonstrating that CO₂ caused this particular event isn't attribution. It's opportunism.
And the people exploiting tragedy to do it are grifters.