Nepal Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal’s request for a foreign response to his country’s disastrous Himalayan flood would be better made as an appeal to the charitable instincts of people than as a demand for compensation from climate sinners.
Khanal connects the Aug. 26 flood to the popular narrative that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide cause dangerous atmospheric warming and the melting of mountain glaciers, which, so the logic goes, produces floods like the one that killed his countrymen. “Climate justice” reasoning is that industrialized countries such as neighboring India and China bear more responsibility for the disaster than Nepal, whose per capita income ranking is less than five on a global scale of 1-100.
Khanal’s framing begins with a vacuous political claim that someone else must pay and ignores realities of the physical world, adopting the false premise that CO2 emissions have made the weather worse. He apparently embraces the notion that computer models can assign a dollar value to damages inflicted by increases in the destructiveness of natural disasters. For the foreign minister, an apocalyptic narrative used for a decade to advance net-zero policy is an observed fact rather than an implausibly extreme scenario treated as destiny.
A century of observations shows no CO2-driven march toward more heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires. Many of those hazards peaked in earlier decades or have declined. Record U.S. heat still belongs to the 1930s. Hurricane activity has not followed the alarmist script. Wildfire intensity is inseparable from fuel loads and land management.
A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that “quantifies climate damages” merely assumes worsening weather with rising CO2 without even attempting to establish a link. The National Academies uses computer-generated models of a world with no industrial CO2 emissions to divine how much milder the weather would be. That is a fabrication for use in a liability case, not a finding of fact.
Studies that purportedly attribute worsening weather to emissions have multiplied because “climate scientists” have been rewarded with research grants, not because physics demonstrates evidence of a connection. Saying the Nepal flood would have been milder on a planet without industrial CO2 is not evidence that floods have grown more common or more destructive.
Once those exercises are treated as proof of causation, Nepal’s Khanal would say, energy producers “whose historical contribution to greenhouse gases is much bigger than ours” are to be made defendants in civil courts facing billions of dollars in liabilities. This demagoguery makes villains of businesses whose products — coal, oil, and natural gas — have powered electric grids, transportation systems, and factories that have lifted living standards worldwide. The fertilizers and medicines derived from these hydrocarbon feedstocks nourish and enhance the health of billions.
Nepal’s own development depends on fossil fuels. Transport runs on imported diesel and gasoline. Cooking and industry use liquefied petroleum gas and coal. Coal is necessary for cement production, which is integral to the infrastructure of the country’s hydroelectric system and highways.
Asian neighbors and Western countries demonized for “climate failings” have supported Nepal’s building of high-voltage lines, tunnels, bridges, vehicles, and other blessings of modernity. Foreign Minister Khanal is biting the hands engaged in feeding his country.
None of this diminishes the tragedy of the thousands of dead and missing in August’s awful flood. Nonetheless, compassion does not require surrendering facts to accommodate what amounts to a scam. There is no evidence of carbon dioxide emissions precipitating the Nepal flood or any other disaster. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has declared its most extreme predictions of global warming implausible. The most likely cause of the flood has been identified as the failure of bedrock underlying a glacier.
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More than climate apostates to blame, Nepal needs modern technology and better land-use practices to protect people as much as possible from the risk of nature’s brutality.
In the meantime, the country has reportedly received $820 million in aid, which suggests that at least some in the developed world are more charitable than villainous.
Angela Wheeler is executive director of the CO2 Coalition in Fairfax, Virginia. She is a cum laude graduate of Emporia State University, Kansas, where she studied communication, with additional biology and pre-medicine coursework.