The climate alarmist habit of leaping with a cry of triumph on any natural disaster was on ugly display when a flash flood struck in Nepal and Tibet on August 26, killing at least hundreds and probably thousands. NBC admitted that “it’s not exactly clear what happened yet” yet confidently attributed whatever it was to “rising global temperatures and climate change”. Bloomberg was especially shameful, touting “The new era of glacier catastrophes” in an email newsletter the next day as if there had been more than one of them. And the day after that Climate Home News chanted “This week’s deadly landslides in Tibet and Nepal – where the planet’s warming climate means glaciers are breaking off at a faster rate and causing flash floods – are the latest horror showing why emissions must be reduced as fast as possible.” Such coverage is an affront to decency and science alike. For one thing, initial analyses were based on satellite images in which clouds blocked the view, but once the skies cleared scientists determined it was the bedrock that collapsed taking the glacier with it, not vice versa. Worse, the ghouls tell us afterward it was all very predictable, yet they did not predict it, nor did they take even a fraction of the money given by the west to Nepal for what Michael Shellenberger called “woke green nonsense” and use it to install inexpensive sensors and sirens that could have given the unfortunate people downstream critical time to escape.

The story to which the Bloomberg newsletter linked asked “What Role Did Climate Change Play in the Deadly Nepal Flood” rather than, say, “Did Climate Change Play a Role?” and (all together now) assured readers that “The Himalayan region is warming faster than the global average, leading to rapid glacial melting”. Meanwhile the piece in The Week explaining the results of examining the clear-sky satellite imagery quoted one geologist who conjectured that melting permafrost may have contributed, and two others who cautioned against such a conclusion since “slopes fail, and landslides do occur.”

But who needs facts? As always with Bloomberg the climate polemics come first:

“Nepal is particularly vulnerable to flash floods because of its mountainous terrain and rapidly melting glaciers. Such events are becoming more frequent as global warming accelerates the ongoing thaw in the Himalayas, an area that holds more snow and ice than any place on Earth besides the Arctic and Antarctica.”

But where’s the evidence that they are becoming more frequent? Verdict first, trial afterwards. As in Reuters “Sustainable Switch” promising:

“We’ll unpack the role that climate change played and the glacier that broke off and ‌crashed onto the valley floor, according to scientists from Earth Sciences New Zealand and satellite imagery from Planet Labs.”

The New York Times also knew why if not what:

“Climate change is heating up the Himalayas and supercharging the risk of disasters like the deadly flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet, though scientists are still determining the exact cause of this week’s catastrophe.”

And “Climate Forward” columnist Claire Brown uninformed us that:

“A deadly flood has swept away entire villages and killed hundreds in Nepal and Tibet. More than 1,400 are still missing. The exact cause hasn’t been confirmed, but scientists say climate change is sharply raising the risk of deadly flash floods in the Himalayas.”

The scientists who say strike again.

By Friday another of them, Jason Gulley, was contributing a guest piece to “Climate Forward” that remembered to express “horror and sadness” before claiming vindication on the grounds that he didn’t know what had happened but he did know why.

“In many catastrophic floods in the Himalaya, glacier lakes are to blame. When Nepal’s glaciers were healthy, they bulldozed down mountains and pushed up piles of rocky debris hundreds of feet high to form features glaciologists call moraines. Low buildings with green roofs and white walls sit near fields divided by stone walls. As the planet has warmed and temperatures across the Himalaya have soared, glaciers have shriveled, and those moraines have trapped meltwater. That has created lakes that can grow until they replace the glacier feeding them — or until a disturbance causes them to drain catastrophically.”

Again, he may boast that “I have an intimate knowledge of this part of the world” because he has done research there. But does he not know that the glaciers have been retreating since the depths of the Little Ice Age and, in the process, doing the moraine-lake thing repeatedly, followed by the disturbance-catastrophe thing?

Oh wait. He does:

“Data shows that glacial failures – the scientific term for a category of events that includes ice avalanches, glacier detachments and rock-ice avalanches – have happened dozens of times since 1900 in the China-Nepal border region that was the site of this week’s devastation.”

Ah. Dozens of times since 1900. So nothing new here, right? And all this hooting and hollering about how now we get landslides whereas before everything just sat there fat and sassy is rubbish?

It really has ceased to resemble science. Consider:

“Unless the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating the planet are curbed, scientists project warming across High Mountain Asia, a broad region encompassing the Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir, Hindu Kush and Tien Shan, will erase as much as 75 percent of the remaining glaciers by 2100.”

Yeah, we’ve heard that kind of thing before. Even The Guardian snorted.

And another thing. When precisely were Nepal’s glaciers “healthy” as opposed, say, to “big”? What can such prose mean? Does he regard the climate of the Last Glacial Maximum as good, because glaciers in North America were so “healthy” they were obliterating pretty much everything else?

Anyway, we’re all going to die:

“As a geologist focused on the science of glaciers, I don’t know what can be done to address floods like these in the future. But one thing I do know is that they are coming.”

Yeah. And one thing you should also know is they came. Long ago, and frequently. Also that glaciers across the globe have been shrinking for more than three centuries. (Need we yet again print that map from a 2005 Alaskan Glacier National Park brochure showing them out into the Pacific in the 17^th century and waaaay up the fjords by the 20^th?)

The Bloomberg piece also admitted that this disaster was the biggest of which we’re aware, meaning it’s an outlier not a typical event. At least not in the news of today, though certainly in the news of the future as invented by their staff. And the misrepresentation of the past ditto because, you see, landslides didn’t happen before Henry Ford invented climate:

“From the Apostle Paul to Ira Gershwin, mountains have for millennia been a symbol of immovable stability. A warming planet is undermining that, leaving landslides, floods, and avalanches in its wake. The apocalyptic scenes after Wednesday’s flash floods on the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet region are the latest example of the devastation that can result.”

Riiight. So never mind, say, the “Tsergo Ri landslide” during the Last Glacial Period, timing highly uncertain somewhere between around 64 and 38 thousand years ago, in which an estimated 10 to 15 cubic kilometers of rock came thundering down at around 120 metres per second. Mountains didn’t do that then so um uh…

Likewise there cannot be a “Siddhababa-Dovan rockfall” along “the Siddhartha Highway in Palpa District, western Nepal” that “has repeatedly experienced rockfall and landslide events due to its steep slopes and complex geology.” Because if steep slopes and complex geology generated a tendency to rockfall and landslide events, there’d be a lot of them instead of mountains doing nothing for millennia until we turned them into deathtraps using CO2.

And don’t mention the 1995 landslide that wiped out most of Bagarchap. Unless the man-made climate crisis hit 31 years ago or more. Let alone the 1988 Darbang landslide, unless the crisis hit 38 years ago. No, wait, there was another one there “about 62 years earlier”, the uncertainty indicating just how few records we have to enable us to state with certainty that such things are becoming more common, that mountains never crumbled until 1988 or whatever it was. (Again, all we had to do was Google. Why don’t they? No internet?)

Oh, and don’t mention the monsoons, lest they dump large amounts of water on Nepal every dang year and have for millennia, water that doesn’t come from evil humans melting glaciers that have been retreating for 350 years or more naturally but are now retreating unnaturally, the effect being constant but the cause having changed magically. And don’t mention that this monsoon water causes landslides, lest the admission cause talk.

Instead just go climate climate climate. So on Bloomberg rants, with the kitchen sink coming down-river at you:

“Extreme weather events this year are starting to hurt food production in serious ways, which is likely to push up everyone’s food prices. That’s before the weather-wrecking super El Niño has really kicked in.”

To object in this chaos that El Niño isn’t “weather-wrecking” but “weather” seems almost beside the point. Except that, to the climate cult, bad weather never happened in the past.

P.S. Global Affairs Canada, quick to side with the bad guys including recognizing the non-state of “Palestine” with insincere conditions, while relentlessly criticizing Israel, here reflexively referred to “Severe flash flooding and mudslides along the Nepal-China border” lest the mention of something called “Tibet” stir memories of China’s forcible annexation of that region and suppression of its culture and religion. What people blurt out on the spur of the moment is very revealing.