Year 3, Month 3, Day 8: First There Is A Mountain, Then There Is No Mountain, Then There Is

The Oshkosh Northwestern (WI) runs an AP story on the likelihood of glacial-melt floods in the Himalayas:

TATOPANI, Nepal (WTW) — Before Apa became a legendary Sherpa mountaineer, he was a humble Himalayan potato farmer who worked his fields in the Everest foothills until, without warning, raging floodwaters swallowed his farm.

The flash flood — unleashed when a mountain lake fed by melting glacier waters burst its banks — destroyed homes, bridges and a hydroelectric plant. Apa scrambled up a hill, but at least five neighbors were swept away.

Twenty-six years later, after scaling the world’s highest mountain a record 21 times, Apa is on a quest to draw attention to the danger of more devastating floods as glacial melt caused by climate change fills mountain lakes to the bursting point.

The 51-year-old Apa, who like most Sherpas uses only one name, is trekking the length of Nepal to warn villagers to prepare themselves for change. A third of the way along his 120-day journey, he has already seen many lakes that look ready to spill.

“If it happens again, many villages would be washed away and lives lost,” he said during a break in his trek in Tatopani, a resort village near the Tibet border.

Chances are, it will happen again.

There are now thousands of such lakes transforming Himalayan foothills and waterways into extreme danger zones for some of the millions of people in seven countries abutting the massive mountain range.

I smell an analogy. Sent March 3:

As Himalayan glacial ice melts, Nepal’s mountain lakes are filling up faster than they can drain, making catastrophic flooding a certainty, and forcing the villagers living below to confront the dangerous reality of climate change every day. The choice they face is a devastating one: stay — and continue an imperiled existence, or go — and abandon their ancestral lands for an uprooted and uncertain future? It only adds to the irony that they have contributed absolutely nothing to the planetary accumulation of greenhouse gases that now threatens their lives and livelihoods.

But the Sherpas, unlike most citizens of the industrialized world, are acutely aware of their precarious position. Ultimately, of course, their plight is humanity’s dilemma in microcosm; all of us are confronting a danger far graver than any our species has faced in all recorded history. Whether it’s floods, storms, fires or droughts, the consequences of the burgeoning greenhouse effect are a Damoclean sword hanging over all our heads.

Warren Senders