Solar panels, not sirens: how perverse climate zealots killed thousands in Nepal

Next week, the annual United Nations climate summit will once again misuse a catastrophe to get attention.Starting Monday, the COP31 gathering in Antalya, Turkey, will highlight the devastating ice-and-rock avalanche that tore through northern Nepal’s Trishuli Valley in late August.The disaster left more than 1,400 dead, 5,000 missing and a recovery bill of nearly $5 billion, about an eighth of the country’s economy.And yes, it carries a lesson for the world — just not the one climate activists are selling: ever more spending on climate.Within days of the calamity, UN climate chief Simon Stiell declared that climate change is making such tragedies “much more likely, frequent and severe.”Environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote that Nepalis “are not causing the crisis that is killing them: we are.”Climate change may have played a part: The World Weather Attribution group, which rarely understates the case, estimated that human-caused warming raised Himalayan summer temperatures by about 2.7°F over the “preindustrial” average.Yet even WWA calls climate change “a destabilizing factor acting on a pre-existing geological predisposition, rather than the fundamental cause” of the avalanche.The largest study of snow avalanches across high-mountain Asia, published this year, mapped 60 million of them since 1990 — and found no long-term trend across 85% of the region.Either way, carbon cuts are not the answer.If every country attending the summit pledged deeper emissions restriction — and, for once, kept its word — the glaciers of Langtang would not refreeze.Trillions of dollars spent cutting carbon buy a barely measurable drop in temperature by the end of the century.What the Trishuli Valley needed is no mystery: A flood becomes a mass-casualty disaster when the people in its path are not alerted in time.Thousands were swept away — including in areas that had 40 minutes or more to evacuate, but received no warning.Downstream in Bidur, school princi...