Back in the day, mainstream efforts to publicise climate change — think of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or films like The Day After Tomorrow — inevitably featured scenes in which walls of water swept away entire communities.
They looked rather like what we’ve just seen in Nepal, where, at the time of writing, floods have killed at least 1,000 people, with around 4,500 still missing, 38 of them Australian.
Scientists can’t yet identify the specific cause of the recent glacial collapse, but as climate researcher Zeke Hausfather says, the massive fall happened “on a mountain that has warmed rapidly for decades, immediately after four consecutive summers that all rank among the five warmest in at least 86 years, and in a valley that has been losing ice at an accelerating rate”.