EXCELLENT — Adam Jones: Climate Change Is Not the Future. Nepal Is Happening Now.

Excellent! 100% spot on! Heartbreakingly, tragically true. And so important to know, absorb, and speak the truth about. Again and again and again! Those whose utter greed and stupidity compels them to continue to deny the human causes behind these profound and heart wrenching climate disasters are absolutely complicit with the horror and death and destruction increasingly brought on in the wake of our warming world. The debate, doubt, denial, distraction, and dangerous disinformation related to the human causes behind these climate catastrophes must end! I am so over climate deniers! We humans must wake up and act to do everything humanly possible to save ourselves and all life on Earth. Climate Justice NOW!! — Molly  

By Adam Jones

August 27, 2026

A mountain just failed.

That is the part of the disaster unfolding in Nepal and Tibet that I think people need to understand.

Not simply “there was a flood”.

Not simply “a glacier melted”.

A vast mass of ice and rock high in the Himalayas broke loose, fell more than a kilometre vertically and set off a chain reaction powerful enough to send water, mud, boulders and debris tearing through valleys more than 100 kilometres downstream.

At least 165 people are already dead.

Nearly 1,500 are missing.

At least 34 Australians are among them.

And before anybody turns this into another stupid argument about whether one individual disaster can be “proved” to have been caused by climate change, understand what the scientists are actually saying.

They are not saying climate change single-handedly pushed some giant red button and caused this exact glacier to collapse at this exact moment.

They are saying something considerably more important.

We are changing the conditions under which mountains remain stable.

Warm a high mountain system and you don't merely make the air a little warmer.

You melt glaciers.

You thaw frozen ground.

You remove ice that can help support steep slopes.

You change freeze-thaw cycles.

You put more meltwater through cracks and fractured rock.

You change snow cover, lakes and rivers.

And eventually something that had been sitting above a valley for centuries or millennia may no longer behave the way it used to.

That is climate change.

It is not just temperature.

It is destabilisation.

And the Himalayas are already changing frighteningly quickly. The latest major assessment of the Hindu Kush Himalaya found that the rate of glacier loss has roughly doubled since 2000.

This matters far beyond Nepal.

The ice and snow of this region form part of an enormous planetary water system supporting ecosystems, agriculture, economies and the lives of more than two billion people downstream.

Lose enough of that ice and the problem is not simply that the mountains look different.

First you can get more meltwater, expanding glacial lakes, avalanches, landslides and catastrophic floods.

Eventually you lose part of the natural water storage system itself.

Too much water.

Then too little.

And in between, increasing instability.

There is another part of this that should make people angry.

Nepal has contributed a microscopic share of the greenhouse gases humanity has dumped into the atmosphere.

Yet countries like Nepal are being forced to spend scarce money adapting to a planetary experiment largely created elsewhere.

That is what climate injustice actually looks like.

And yes, 34 Australians being missing makes this disaster suddenly feel closer to Australians.

But we should interrogate that instinct too.

A Nepali child swept away by a flood is not less dead because their passport is different from ours.

A Tibetan family losing its home matters exactly as much as an Australian family losing theirs.

The atmosphere does not recognise borders.

Glaciers do not recognise borders.

Rivers do not recognise borders.

The climate system certainly does not recognise borders.

We invented those.

Nature didn't.

So when you look at the images coming out of Nepal and Tibet, don't just see another terrible disaster somewhere far away.

See a warning about the century we are entering.

Human civilisation developed during an unusually stable period of Earth's history. Our farms, reservoirs, roads, cities, borders, power stations and assumptions about where it is safe to live were built around that stability.

We are now altering it extraordinarily quickly.

And when people say we need to act on climate change, this is what they are talking about.

Not saving some abstract planet in the year 2100.

The planet will survive us.

The question is what kind of biosphere, hydrological system, coastline, climate and civilisation will survive the experiment we are conducting on it.

Nepal is not the future.

Nepal is happening now.