Nepal Floods: Scientists Link Disaster To Climate Change, Point To Record Warming

Human-caused warming has pushed the freezing threshold in the mountains by about 100 meters each decade, causing glaciers to melt faster.

A global team of glaciologists and scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) have concluded that climate change was one of the triggers for the devastating rock and ice avalanche in Nepal on August 26 that killed nearly 1,400 people with over 5,179 still missing.

The rapid-attribution analysis just completed by the team points to record warming in July-August in the region, which is likely to have caused the glacier instability and its eventual collapse. The analysis is not peer-reviewed yet, but the team says it was carried out using peer-reviewed methods to investigate the role of climate change in one of Nepal’s worst disasters in recent years.