What we can and cannot say about climate change and the Nepal disaster

The useful part

The falling mass of ice and rock released energy equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake according to the USGS, and set off a debris flow that traveled ~100 km down into the Trishuli and Bhote Koshi rivers. This buried and washed away large parts of towns, severed the only highway between Nepal and China, and damaged at least six hydropower facilities. Currently (the morning of August 28th), reports put the death toll at around 500, with roughly 2,000 people still missing across Nepal and Tibet, and we expect these numbers to continue to rise.

How it works

• In this piece I'll try and lay out what the data and the scientific literature actually supports.
• There is an important difference between the two events: in 2015 an earthquake triggered the collapse.
• The mountain simply failed, and the collapse itself produced a seismic event that was initially mistaken for an earthquake.
• Within hours, some people on social media were confidently asserting that climate change caused the disaster, while others were just as confidently asserting it had nothing to do with it.
• The short version is this: any formal attribution of this specific collapse to climate change is pre...

What to take from it

The tragedy is unfortunately familiar for the Langtang valley.