Nepal’s request should be rejected unless the U.N. would likewise fund U.S. recovery from a San Andreas earthquake or Cascadia tsunami.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
The death toll from the Himalayan landslide and subsequent flash flood in Nepal and an adjacent region in China continues to rise, and thousands are still missing.
The death toll following the massive flash flooding along the Nepal-Tibet border climbed on Wednesday to 1,114 in Nepal, officials said, as the country’s leader said his government would begin to shift its focus toward “rehabilitation.”
The Nepali government’s estimate for the missing remained at 3,916, the National Disaster Management Authority said in an update posted on social media at 9 a.m. local time.
The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was tracking around 75 Americans who were unaccounted for across the Nepal-Tibet cross-border region. Fourteen Americans had made their way to safety, the department said.
Earlier this week, I noted that it is premature and politically opportunistic to attribute this disaster to climate change since the immediate trigger remains under investigation and no formal attribution study has been completed. I reviewed the Himalaya’s long-running tectonic activity, steep terrain, monsoon dynamics, avalanches, and glacier-bed processes that offer more plausible explanations, while acknowledging a regional scientific body says it is too early to determine climate change’s role in this specific event.
Back in 2025, I reported that President Donald Trump rescinded $4 billion in outstanding U.S. pledges to a United Nations Green Climate Fund (an initiative supposedly designed to help struggling nations adapt to the rapidly changing world). With that move, Trump halted the transfer of wealth from American taxpayers to politically-connected bureaucrats and the climate cultist minions.
It’s a good thing he did. A Nepali politician is already knocking on the United Nations’ door asking for a climate-handout.
Putting the cost of recovery at $5 billion, a senior Nepali official said his country had requested urgent financial help from the United Nations’ special fund for climate-disaster recovery.
The official, Maheshwar Dhakal, the climate change chief in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forest and Environment, explicitly asserted that human-caused climate had been a factor in last week’s horrific glacial collapse and flooding. In an interview on Monday he framed the event as an inequity in which decades of greenhouse-gas emissions from richer nations are harming vulnerable countries like his that can’t cope.
“Those who have contributed the least are suffering the most,” said Mr. Dhakal, who shared a letter his government sent to the fund’s board and that echoed that language.
It was a version of this argument, used for years at international climate conferences, that persuaded negotiators to agree to the special U.N. climate fund in 2023, after years of talks.
As it turns out, I was right to focus heavily on the geology of the Himalayas in my earlier piece. The root cause of that landslide was weak bedrock that took the overlaying glacier with it.
Geomorphologists Kristen Cook and Dan Shugar said initial images from Nepal were obscured by clouds and dust from the debris, so they could only see that part of a glacier had broken off from Langtang Lirung peak, near the border with Tibet. In clearer images from Thursday, they said they could see that the bedrock underneath the glacier had collapsed, taking the massive chunk of ice down with it and sending boulders and ice into the valley.
“It shows the whole area without anything hidden, and we could see that, yes, it looked like there was not only this glacier that had failed, but a much larger chunk of the bedrock of the mountainside itself that had given way,” said Shugar, associate professor at the University of Calgary. “You have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it.”
Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki, Director of the US Global Change Research Program, says this information changes the story.
That distinction matters. This was fundamentally a geologic mass-failure event involving bedrock, which then mobilized ice, rock, sediment, and water downstream… not simply a glacier spontaneously collapsing because of warming.
Tectonic forces along colliding plate boundaries can substantially weaken rock, creating dense networks of fractures that leave slopes far more vulnerable to failure. This fact helps explain why landslides can be so frequent and destructive in active plate collision zones….like the Himalayas.
The Nepal landslide was an Earth-caused disaster.
Nepal’s request should be rejected unless the United Nations is prepared to apply the same standard consistently, such as providing the United States with climate-recovery money after a catastrophic San Andreas Fault earthquake or a Cascadia Subduction Zone rupture and tsunami.
The Earth does not need climate change to produce earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis, and turning every natural disaster into a climate-money shakedown is neither science nor justice.
