The Nepal flood disaster is the latest skirmish in the War against the Climate - or rather the climate's war against humanity.
The numbers are horrific. With over 500 dead and more than 3,000 missing, buildings flattened, whole villages destroyed. if this level of destruction had been caused by a foreign power, we would be sending in tanks, aiming missiles and bracing for war.
Some people might call this a natural disaster, but it is not. The flooding was caused by a glacier melting because of rising global temperatures, caused in turn by global warming fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution.
This disaster is likely to not be a one-off event. We have seen smaller scale collapses in the Alps. As the global temperature continues to rise, glaciers will continue to melt, mountains will become even ore unstable. The climate will continue to kill humans and destroy our civilization in ways that we have have not yet imagined. If a foreign power posed such a threat would we stand by and allow it? Or would we do something like the following?
- Re-arm - build up our stockpiles of armaments
- Develop new weapons and new technological advances to defeat the enemy
- Switch industry to a war footing - factories to produce tanks instead of cars
- Conscript able bodied people into the army
- Government control of media to ensure consistent positive messaging about the war and keep up morale
- Arrest spies from the foreign power, even, possibly intern people from the enemy country
- Issue war bonds to cover the huge cost of fighting the war
- Create a government of national unity
- Rationing
Some of these are pretty extreme measures but they were all used in the Second World War because the threat of Nazi Germany was seen as being so serious. It threatened our very existence.
How about if this was caused by an Alien species attacking us? Would we stand by and watch? Or would we pull together as a species against the external threat?
It's easy to say, "Oh, we're not Tibet, we're not Nepal, we don't have glaciers" but we are vulnerable on other fronts, wildfires, drought, flooding, rising sea levels, the Atlantic current which keeps our climate temperate could shut off causing a new ice age, crop failures, pests and diseases migrating north as the temperature rises, train tracks buckling... Are there other future problems that we haven't thought of yet? Statistics out this week show around 1000 excess deaths per year in the UK alone caused by climate change - a number which is steadily rising.
Declaring this to be a war could bring the human race together against the common enemy - the actions of humans in the past, which turned out, decades later to have unforeseen consequences.
The Telegraph writer Allister Heath said in July 2026 that "We've lost the war against climate change", but as Trump has discovered, it takes both sides to end a war. We can surrender to the Climate, but it will not join us in a ceasefire. While we continue to burn fossil fuels, the temperature will continue to rise and the consequences will keep on getting worse.
Big Tech is currently having its ' big tobacco moment' where the world wakes up to its damaging effects. Big Oil too. Both industries can be transformed to work for the common good instead of against it. Big Oil are the best placed companies to switch to green energy production and distribution. Big Tech could transform our society if they pivoted from profit as a motive to working for the wellbeing of their users and the health of our society.
Ultimately, we have no real option. We either fight this war or die.
