The mechanics of the Nepali flash flood(www.economist.com)
55 pointsby vinni27 hours ago7 comments
  • pm22223 hours ago
    https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-nepal-tibet-glacie...

    CCTV footage is there. Horrific scene. When you see it coming at you it’s already too late.

    • kulahanan hour ago
      It's awful to see dozens of people running and knowing they're all gone. It wasn't even close. They were so small compared to that absolute FORCE.
      • 1attice42 minutes ago
        This is true, and, relatedly, is the feeling I have about all of climate change. By the numbers, it won't be close.

        Of course, this little preview is itself anthropogenic. This horrific disaster is the thinnest tendril of the monster we have unleashed.

        • kulahan38 minutes ago
          Both figuratively and literally, this experience was the tip of the iceberg. Terrifying. People might think I'm crazy, but I'm choosing my retirement location 100% based on resistance to climate change. Local water, too much humidity for massive fires, too cold for insane heatwaves... you get it.
          • ferguess_k9 minutes ago
            Which places have you found? I'm in Canada and figured most of the places are going to suffer more rain falling in the next decades.
  • glimshean hour ago
    I haven't yet been able to properly internalize the horror of this scene. Maybe because we're exposed to so many images from disaster and action movies/videogames, I got somewhat desensitized to the "graphics", so to speak. It's like my brain is denial.

    At the same time, I know this is real and a tragedy in an unimaginable scale. Every "little walking figure" is a full human being with dreams, fears and a rich life story.

    I'm afraid that at one point it will just hit me super hard.

    • bamboozled2 minutes ago
      What scares me about climate change is how frequent these “little figures” are getting wrecked.

      In Japan we have had these sudden flood events this year, people just die as their cars are washed away.

      We have really fucked the climate and this is just the beginning.

    • debo_36 minutes ago
      About 18 years ago, some guy at work was laughing at a video of someone being blown to pieces by an explosive device. People kept walking by his desk and laughing, I suppose because it looked so cartoonish that it felt more like looney tunes than real life.

      As an experiment, I showed the same video to my 85-year old grandmother, and she cried out in horror and prayed for the people in the video for a solid hour afterwards.

    • verdverman hour ago
      Tragedy happens every day, this is likely one of those freak events we cannot do anything about. Millions of people die from hunger and malnutrician every year. Perhaps we could focus our energies on that were it not for the media (us by proxy) that prefers the edgier stuff, since we've desensitized ourselves and seek that fix with something new
  • tintor14 minutes ago
    Is Switzerland exposed to similar risk, given the amount of glaciers?
    • bamboozled5 minutes ago
      Yes, but apparently they monitor the glaciers stability / Temperature closely and evacuate required
  • decasia2 hours ago
    The CCTV footage was one of the most heartbreaking things I have seen on the internet lately.

    It makes me think a bit of the Johnstown flood from 1889:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood#/media/File:Th...

  • croisillon2 hours ago
    another good article, without paywall: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/nepal-tibet-fl...
  • yeah8798462 hours ago
    [dead]
  • shreya1999an hour ago
    Need of the hour is AI for climate change.