In ancient Sanskrit, Himalaya meant roughly “cold home”. It’s a good fit for the world’s largest store of ice – over 5700 cubic kilometres – outside the poles. Brought together, its thousands of glaciers would cover Tasmania.
The Himalaya will always be colder than elsewhere because it’s so high up, but just like the air above Tasmania and pretty well everywhere, it’s getting less cold. And ice melts when nearby air gets warm enough. Of course you already know that.
Like high mountains everywhere, Himalayan high country is losing its ice, but the process is not completely visible. Glaciers are rotting away inside. Sooner or later they reach a point where they can’t support their mass, at which point the decay becomes very visible – instantaneously.
It’s hard to get a measure of last week’s mind-numbing flood disaster across the China-Nepal border. Such ice-and-rock falls like this are now happening often in different river systems, and no two events are ever the same.
What set this one apart was the immediate, shocking sense of scale that people all over the world got from a surveillance video as an avalanche dwarfed a multi-storey border building at Gyirong, north of Kathmandu on the Nepal-China border.
The Chinese government had rebuilt the border infrastructure, including a concrete road bridge over the Trishuli river, after a similar though smaller flood of ice, rock and melted glacier water destroyed its predecessor in July 2025.
Now, the whole lot is gone – along with hundreds of human victims seen in the video trying vainly to flee the onslaught before it swallowed everything and everyone in its path. Australian foreign minister Penny Wong found it horrifying. So did I.
Like Olympus, home of Greek gods, the breathtaking landforms of the Himalayas have inspired a profound, complex human mythology which draws many thousands each year. “Conquering” the world’s highest mountains is for rich Westerners with nothing better to do, but Himalayan people are drawn to lower slopes to pay homage to power beyond human imagining.
Many of these pilgrims, including some Australian citizens, were victims of last week’s disaster.
This most recent flood is among the worst of many similar catastrophic Himalayan events, featuring sudden releases of glacial meltwater, huge landslides, hydro dams breached, towns washed away and many lives lost. They’ve always been a feature of life in these mountains, but never so often as now. The rate of ice loss has doubled since this century began.
No-one who saw those awful images last week should be in any doubt. This calamity was the deadly work of climate change, of a warming world. And it will happen again and again, and get worse.
Those images, that connection should guide the thinking of every Australian. It should wipe away any doubt as to whether ending the fossil fuel era is worth bothering about. Those net-zero targets aren’t much, but they’re better than nothing.
It’s a shame that message wasn’t being put to the farmers, industrialists and politicians at the Bush Summit in Dubbo last week. Instead they were told that any such measures are a blot on the national canvas, a complete waste of everyone’s time and the nation’s resources.
They would have learned a lot about why Australia needs a climate policy from former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, now chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation.
Ending the fossil fuel era is a marathon, not a sprint, Henry said last week, involving many policy levers including renewable energy targets and compulsory emissions cuts for big emitters. And carbon credits too, for all their negative connotations, because they redirect polluters’ money into protecting native forests, essential to drawing carbon dioxide out of the air.
For One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce, who see the cause of lowering carbon emissions as passé, irrelevant, or downright wrong, all the above may be tedious, too prescriptive and regulatory. But it’s unforgivable that Liberals and Nationals – “parties of government” – are also on that bandwagon.
Donald Trump rose to the US presidency on the back of ill-defined grievances and resentments, which are what brought One Nation electoral success in Farrer and in WA’s weekend by-election for Secret Harbour. The party seems to think that what worked for Trump ought to work here.
Trump has set a tone for politics everywhere. Bullying, hectoring and browbeating have always lurked on the fringes of public policy discourse, in Australia and everywhere, but for those opposing open, rational debate they are now regular tools of trade.
For all these people there will be no clear message from the Himalayan disaster, just as they’ve learned nothing from the fierce heat and fires of this past northern summer, or the succession of other weather disasters of recent years. There are none so blind as those who will not see.