Usually when you analyze an event of this sort you start with an analysis of any correlation between the event and global warming; e.g., Atlantic hurricane frequency and intensity, but your essay apperas to beg the question of whether glacial events in the Himalayas like the most recen disaster have increased as Himalayan temperatures have risen. I assume that tem[eratures have risen because one of the legacy media commentators reporting on the disaster claimed that the Himalayas have been a particular "hot spot" for global warming. Is that correct? Does such an analysis exist? Otherwise, everything I've read about the disaster suggests that there could have been as long as 20 minutes between the glacial collapse and the flooding in the river gorge, which, with the existence of a fundtioning warning system, could have saved many lives.
Roger: The NYT had a story today with fairly compelling evidence that the flood was cause by an enormous landslide or "bedrock failure" with a glacier sitting on top. The video is worth watching. Superficially, IMO, if climate change had any impact on the likelihood of this flood, it reduced the weight of the ice pressing down on the bedrock and made the landslide LESS LIKELY. The likelihood of bedrock failure can be increased by an increase in the number of freeze thaw cycles, which is a climate related phenomena.
I was left a little conflicted w this post. The “exactly what happened” … and what we could do to prevent seemed to get lost in a semi-political conversation. Still not sure if the loss of 18 fewer months of USAID funding was a culprit or this event just emblematic of real problems that such funding could address )outside myriad of NGOs that were funded USAID for “climate justice” initiatives). Granted, it sadly may represent the baby out w the bath water as far as funding objectives. That can and should be fixed. But I was looking for a little science … what series of events actually caused the flood. What is a glacier collapse?
It concerns what was known in terms of flood risk, how much money actually flowed in and how it was spent:
"In other words, USAID climate money flowed to trees, gabion walls, workshops and lake-draining projects on a decade-long timeline, while threshold sensors, sirens, sensor mounts off the bridges and a ban on rebuilding in the same gorge went unfunded and unforced."
Yep, I was just about to post this. The money may have been intended for monitoring and warning systems, but as too often happens, it gets spread in other directions. That's the problem with too much money. Everyone wants some and the highest priority becomes getting more.
I am not against some evidence based international effort to prevent disasters in vulnerable areas, if they prioritize those things that give the best bang for the buck and save lives. But that apparently is not what happens when the money starts flowing, sadly, and then we lose trust.
Michael Schellenberger has a new piece showing why USAID needed to be killed. The money for Nepal that should have gone for censors was actually mostly wasted.
"The reason for these inappropriate priorities is that the international climate bureaucracy, staffed by the professional managerial class, exists to reproduce itself, and reproducing itself does not require sensors and sirens."
"The reason for these inappropriate priorities is that the international climate bureaucracy, staffed by the professional managerial class, exists to reproduce itself, and reproducing itself does not require sensors and sirens."
"Unfortunately, the bureaucracy that misdirected the money remains in place, and it is already asking for more."
Dr. Pielke ==> "Some might say it is not the responsibility of the United States to support disaster risk reduction in places on the other side of the planet. "
It is certainly not the responsibility of the people or the government of the United States to be to sole financial supporter of every good and worthwhile effort to reduce risk in far off places. Nepal is a poor country, but China is a rich, powerful country, and the disaster occurred on China's border with Nepal. Further, China has its own space program.
We have this same argument within the United States, where we find lot of demand that the Federal government pay for everything despite the fact that it is not the responsibility of the Federal government to do so.
The United States should not be the "Police of the World" nor the "Financier of All Good Ideas".
That responsibility falls, if anywhere, to the United Nations. However, the causes behind the failure of the United Nations to be effective are far to complex to be discussed here.
Let’s assume a counterfactual Harris administration, where USAID continued to be funded.
What are the odds that this funding would have somehow led to better warning systems - which would have required the cooperation of many different countries and entities - to be put in place ahead of this flood event such that many lives which were lost, instead were saved? Zero.
Kamalala is actually worse than Biden. She is the quintessential diversity hire with a double digit IQ and a very bad tendency to word salads. What are her core beliefs? No one knows. She was another useful figurehead for the Obama mafia to actually run the country. We would have seen a continuation of the worst Presidency in American history since James Buchanan. Blown out deficits, illegal and immoral DEI everywhere, a flaccid military, a feckless foreign policy and massive corruption in all our entitlement programs, a continued invasion driving down real wages and sparking a crime wave. In short, a continuation of deliberate American decline.
It may be true that funding is needed for this region but that's true world wide. Prioritization is always necessary especially when the US has such a massive debt. I was personally grateful that DOGE and Trump and Rubio were able to shutter USAID which according to Mike Benz and Glenn Greenwald was little more than a CIA front for political operations and color revolutions overseas. What Rubio and Trump are now doing is giving foreign aid money directly to governments instead of laundering it through NGO's with their additional overhead and often leftist goals.
I personally think it is more appropriate for China to put up the money for this region.
We are now spending more on debt service than on the US military. All it would take for us to have a fiscal crisis is for interest rates to rise a couple of percentage points. At that point major sacrifices such as big entitlement cuts would be needed. For US citizens, controlling spending should be a higher priority than almost all foreign aid in my opinion.
Generally, Trump's team is remaking the country and Federal government in a way that hasn't happened since Teddy Roosevelt's administration. Real wages are rising, unemployment is low, inflation is still too high but coming down, the market is booming and retirees like me are seeing a lot of growth in our nest eggs. The border is closed, violent crime is lower than at any time since 1900, the Federal government has fewer employees than at any time since 1969, the deportation campaign and visa denial campaign has stopped the University anti-semitic protests and will put further upward pressure on wages, and lower crime further. The insanity of DEI and woke nonsense are receding under pressure from Harmeet Dilhon and the DOJ. As Vector Davis Hanson describes it in his new book, Trump is a counter-revolutionary who is attacking the root causes of the leftist project of the last 50 years and starting to roll it back. The latest step is the indentification of a terrorist support network funded by people like Soros that is now under official sanction. Anyone sending them money is subject to prosecution.
I cannot agree that "the right thing to do" is to extract money involuntarily from US citizens and for the government to direct that money to projects outside the country. No, the right thing to do is for people with genuine concern to contribute to charitable support for early warning systems and other protective measures.
Roger everyone is pushing their agenda buttons on this event and you are pushing plenty of yours. in our geosci household from what we deduce there is no way people could have been alerted soon enough. (We think a seismic even may well have been in the mix - USGS and others will eventually sort that out.) The real problem is that human settlements everywhere have encroached in locations where extreme hazard risks are prevalent. Extreme events don't happen often enough - low probability, high consequence - to scare people off and time softens the blows even more. But with more people and property exposed the high consequences are worse when they do happen. In places like Nepal where populations have concentrated in steep glacial river valleys it makes for ridiculous math. These places also bear strong cultural (sacred) meanings making for a really tough situation. For all we in the US and other nations have done Nepalese development patterns did not change to reflect what everyone was learning. Indeed, we may have made it worse. Almost certainly the efforts we made to improve understanding along with investments in public health and welfare contributed to complacency. That is the moral hazard in a hazardous business - that we end up exacerbating risks by creating a level of comfort that we can mitigate them in locations where people should not be in the first place. Here in the US and other developed economies the casualty insurance industry is finally catching up, and it would be smart for regulators to avoid sheltering the public against the cost of living with risks when we have alternatives. The hardest thing in the modern world today is telling people they need to leave places they feel strongly about.
This is the untold story that is more important. Increasing human settlement in areas with high hazards is the root cause of the problem. Building on US beaches for example in the Southeast creates a high exposure for human lives as well a property. But the US has a flood insurance program that subsidizes this kind of building. An easy first step is to stop this program. If people want to live on the beach they can pay for their own loses.
A remarkable story for sure. But Himalayan glaciology has been known for well over a century. Understandable that people tend to rely on these amazing rivers and valleys for water, ag, power. But like so many other situations, going forward, at least some money would be better spent moving people out of harms way, encouraging different patterns of development. It's akin to public funding for water, ag, power in the American west and then arguing for early warnings on wildfires. Somehow people need to be more realistic.
Lots of excellent comments in this post, which is why I enjoy THB so much, even if I don’t share Roger’s enthusiasm for managing Nepal’s disaster warning systems. Thanks to all for a good discussion.
Dear Professor:
Usually when you analyze an event of this sort you start with an analysis of any correlation between the event and global warming; e.g., Atlantic hurricane frequency and intensity, but your essay apperas to beg the question of whether glacial events in the Himalayas like the most recen disaster have increased as Himalayan temperatures have risen. I assume that tem[eratures have risen because one of the legacy media commentators reporting on the disaster claimed that the Himalayas have been a particular "hot spot" for global warming. Is that correct? Does such an analysis exist? Otherwise, everything I've read about the disaster suggests that there could have been as long as 20 minutes between the glacial collapse and the flooding in the river gorge, which, with the existence of a fundtioning warning system, could have saved many lives.
Roger: The NYT had a story today with fairly compelling evidence that the flood was cause by an enormous landslide or "bedrock failure" with a glacier sitting on top. The video is worth watching. Superficially, IMO, if climate change had any impact on the likelihood of this flood, it reduced the weight of the ice pressing down on the bedrock and made the landslide LESS LIKELY. The likelihood of bedrock failure can be increased by an increase in the number of freeze thaw cycles, which is a climate related phenomena.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/01/world/asia/nepal-flash-floods-landslide.html
The bedrock had moved about a foot in the month before the failure, supporting your case for spending money on monitoring, rather than mitigation.
I was left a little conflicted w this post. The “exactly what happened” … and what we could do to prevent seemed to get lost in a semi-political conversation. Still not sure if the loss of 18 fewer months of USAID funding was a culprit or this event just emblematic of real problems that such funding could address )outside myriad of NGOs that were funded USAID for “climate justice” initiatives). Granted, it sadly may represent the baby out w the bath water as far as funding objectives. That can and should be fixed. But I was looking for a little science … what series of events actually caused the flood. What is a glacier collapse?
The US is $40 Trillion in debt and doubling every 10 years. We just can't afford to do everything we would like to do.
Michael Shellenberger has an interesting take:
https://www.public.news/p/usaid-and-un-poured-billions-into?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=19ybf1&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It concerns what was known in terms of flood risk, how much money actually flowed in and how it was spent:
"In other words, USAID climate money flowed to trees, gabion walls, workshops and lake-draining projects on a decade-long timeline, while threshold sensors, sirens, sensor mounts off the bridges and a ban on rebuilding in the same gorge went unfunded and unforced."
Yep, I was just about to post this. The money may have been intended for monitoring and warning systems, but as too often happens, it gets spread in other directions. That's the problem with too much money. Everyone wants some and the highest priority becomes getting more.
Beat me to it.
Yes Trump cut off USAID but they did so same reason as everywhere else, so much of the money is misdirected or spent on garbage.
Why exactly does the USA need to fund Gender nonsense in Nepal?
I think the approach is there is so much crap in there its not fixable so cut off all the money. And i agree with it.
These networks of NGO's are parasites that mostly do nothing useful except provide income for otherwise unemployable people.
I am not against some evidence based international effort to prevent disasters in vulnerable areas, if they prioritize those things that give the best bang for the buck and save lives. But that apparently is not what happens when the money starts flowing, sadly, and then we lose trust.
It’s why we can’t have nice things
The grifters come thru and steal the furniture
I'm willing to believe it was not a glacial collapse, it was bedrock failure . . . watch this explanation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILngACgq4w8
Michael Schellenberger has a new piece showing why USAID needed to be killed. The money for Nepal that should have gone for censors was actually mostly wasted.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/213571439
"The reason for these inappropriate priorities is that the international climate bureaucracy, staffed by the professional managerial class, exists to reproduce itself, and reproducing itself does not require sensors and sirens."
Why some of us are hesitant - headline just came out from Michael Shellenberger via "Public."
USAID And UN Poured Billions Into Nepal For “Nature-Based Solutions” And “Gender Inclusion” — Not The Sensors And Sirens It Needed
Until that stops happening... I think there'll be plenty of opposition to more spending.
Two of the best lines from the piece:
"The reason for these inappropriate priorities is that the international climate bureaucracy, staffed by the professional managerial class, exists to reproduce itself, and reproducing itself does not require sensors and sirens."
"Unfortunately, the bureaucracy that misdirected the money remains in place, and it is already asking for more."
Perhaps this report from Shellenberger can spread some light on what USAID funding actually did in Nepal: https://www.public.news/p/usaid-and-un-poured-billions-into?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=279400&post_id=213571439&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1n5xfw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Great minds think alike?
My Stolen 2 Cents-
"the wisest safeguards usually get built right after the moment they were needed most."
Dr. Pielke ==> "Some might say it is not the responsibility of the United States to support disaster risk reduction in places on the other side of the planet. "
It is certainly not the responsibility of the people or the government of the United States to be to sole financial supporter of every good and worthwhile effort to reduce risk in far off places. Nepal is a poor country, but China is a rich, powerful country, and the disaster occurred on China's border with Nepal. Further, China has its own space program.
We have this same argument within the United States, where we find lot of demand that the Federal government pay for everything despite the fact that it is not the responsibility of the Federal government to do so.
The United States should not be the "Police of the World" nor the "Financier of All Good Ideas".
That responsibility falls, if anywhere, to the United Nations. However, the causes behind the failure of the United Nations to be effective are far to complex to be discussed here.
Let’s assume a counterfactual Harris administration, where USAID continued to be funded.
What are the odds that this funding would have somehow led to better warning systems - which would have required the cooperation of many different countries and entities - to be put in place ahead of this flood event such that many lives which were lost, instead were saved? Zero.
Kamalala is actually worse than Biden. She is the quintessential diversity hire with a double digit IQ and a very bad tendency to word salads. What are her core beliefs? No one knows. She was another useful figurehead for the Obama mafia to actually run the country. We would have seen a continuation of the worst Presidency in American history since James Buchanan. Blown out deficits, illegal and immoral DEI everywhere, a flaccid military, a feckless foreign policy and massive corruption in all our entitlement programs, a continued invasion driving down real wages and sparking a crime wave. In short, a continuation of deliberate American decline.
It may be true that funding is needed for this region but that's true world wide. Prioritization is always necessary especially when the US has such a massive debt. I was personally grateful that DOGE and Trump and Rubio were able to shutter USAID which according to Mike Benz and Glenn Greenwald was little more than a CIA front for political operations and color revolutions overseas. What Rubio and Trump are now doing is giving foreign aid money directly to governments instead of laundering it through NGO's with their additional overhead and often leftist goals.
I personally think it is more appropriate for China to put up the money for this region.
We are now spending more on debt service than on the US military. All it would take for us to have a fiscal crisis is for interest rates to rise a couple of percentage points. At that point major sacrifices such as big entitlement cuts would be needed. For US citizens, controlling spending should be a higher priority than almost all foreign aid in my opinion.
Generally, Trump's team is remaking the country and Federal government in a way that hasn't happened since Teddy Roosevelt's administration. Real wages are rising, unemployment is low, inflation is still too high but coming down, the market is booming and retirees like me are seeing a lot of growth in our nest eggs. The border is closed, violent crime is lower than at any time since 1900, the Federal government has fewer employees than at any time since 1969, the deportation campaign and visa denial campaign has stopped the University anti-semitic protests and will put further upward pressure on wages, and lower crime further. The insanity of DEI and woke nonsense are receding under pressure from Harmeet Dilhon and the DOJ. As Vector Davis Hanson describes it in his new book, Trump is a counter-revolutionary who is attacking the root causes of the leftist project of the last 50 years and starting to roll it back. The latest step is the indentification of a terrorist support network funded by people like Soros that is now under official sanction. Anyone sending them money is subject to prosecution.
I cannot agree that "the right thing to do" is to extract money involuntarily from US citizens and for the government to direct that money to projects outside the country. No, the right thing to do is for people with genuine concern to contribute to charitable support for early warning systems and other protective measures.
Roger everyone is pushing their agenda buttons on this event and you are pushing plenty of yours. in our geosci household from what we deduce there is no way people could have been alerted soon enough. (We think a seismic even may well have been in the mix - USGS and others will eventually sort that out.) The real problem is that human settlements everywhere have encroached in locations where extreme hazard risks are prevalent. Extreme events don't happen often enough - low probability, high consequence - to scare people off and time softens the blows even more. But with more people and property exposed the high consequences are worse when they do happen. In places like Nepal where populations have concentrated in steep glacial river valleys it makes for ridiculous math. These places also bear strong cultural (sacred) meanings making for a really tough situation. For all we in the US and other nations have done Nepalese development patterns did not change to reflect what everyone was learning. Indeed, we may have made it worse. Almost certainly the efforts we made to improve understanding along with investments in public health and welfare contributed to complacency. That is the moral hazard in a hazardous business - that we end up exacerbating risks by creating a level of comfort that we can mitigate them in locations where people should not be in the first place. Here in the US and other developed economies the casualty insurance industry is finally catching up, and it would be smart for regulators to avoid sheltering the public against the cost of living with risks when we have alternatives. The hardest thing in the modern world today is telling people they need to leave places they feel strongly about.
This is the untold story that is more important. Increasing human settlement in areas with high hazards is the root cause of the problem. Building on US beaches for example in the Southeast creates a high exposure for human lives as well a property. But the US has a flood insurance program that subsidizes this kind of building. An easy first step is to stop this program. If people want to live on the beach they can pay for their own loses.
Here is how a teacher in a school was alerted with a phone call that the flood was coming and he moved 1,643 students out of harms way
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/nepal-teacher-received-flood-warning-what-he-did-next-saved-1-643-children-11978266/amp/1
The entire school was washed away
I’ve seen published accounts that the border crossing was 7 minutes downstream from the event and others were hours downstream
A remarkable story for sure. But Himalayan glaciology has been known for well over a century. Understandable that people tend to rely on these amazing rivers and valleys for water, ag, power. But like so many other situations, going forward, at least some money would be better spent moving people out of harms way, encouraging different patterns of development. It's akin to public funding for water, ag, power in the American west and then arguing for early warnings on wildfires. Somehow people need to be more realistic.
Agreed
Lots of excellent comments in this post, which is why I enjoy THB so much, even if I don’t share Roger’s enthusiasm for managing Nepal’s disaster warning systems. Thanks to all for a good discussion.