Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA conducts regular “Office Hours” YouTube sessions where he discusses current climate issues and answers questions. Last night I followed his discussion of this week’s Nepal Glacier disaster, and recorded some of the more striking and informative passages. First one, above, contains some of the most triggering footage you may have already seen, with Swain’s admonition that, while difficult to watch, it is worthwhile as a reminder of the scale of forces the natural world can bring.
Second clip, Swain puts this week’s events into a more historical perspective, comparing similar disasters in other locations and times.
Below, Swain discusses astounding footage of a gigantic boulder being pushed along in the torrent. The forces involved are immense and irresistible.
On Monday Donald Trump issued an executive order that, if implemented, would substantially reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and, in practice, how many of them are vaccinated at all. While it’s not clear whether Trump’s order has any legal force, it will reinforce public skepticism of and hostility to vaccines, which has led to declining vaccination rates. This decline has in turn led to a surge in infectious diseases that had previously been virtually eradicated, notably measles. As the chart below shows, cumulative cases in the first 30 weeks of this year already exceeded the total for last year, which itself was the worst measles year since 1991:
Brad Panovich is the Chief Meteorologist for WCNC, the NBC affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina, and adjunct Professor at University of North Carolina Charlotte.
1500 ft high flood surge? If true, that’s gargantuan. It’s as tall as the Empire State Building. I would not be surprised. In 1958 in Lituya Bay, Alaska a massive landslide caused a huge #Tsunami wave and massive 1700 ft splash-up in the narrow Bay. So narrow channels can really… https://t.co/lUNeokxTaE
One of podcasting’s Uber Bros, Scott Galloway, whose work I actually like a lot, seems to find it surprising that renewable energy economics are compelling.
Description: Hannah Ritchie and Scott Galloway on the economics that flipped clean energy from luxury to no-brainer — solar and battery prices down 90%, red states adopting wind on pure economics, the Iran energy shock accelerating the transition, and why the US is stuck at 10% EV adoption while China and Europe race past 50%.
In Indiana, a utility is ready to drop rates for customers – and Data Centers are the reason. It’s not hard to understand. When you get a big customer on the grid that is willing to pay to help amortize all those power plants, towers and wires, you spread the costs out more, and rates can go down.
If state regulators approve Indiana Michigan Power’s latest base rate reduction request, the Fort Wayne-based utility’s residential customers could see $100 in annual savings.
The estimated savings is for the average residential customer using 1,000 kilowatts a month. Total customer savings in 2027 is estimated at $59 million, officials said.
I&M expects the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to announce a decision on the proposed plan in June of next year, according to the news release. In that scenario, customers would begin to realize savings next summer, the release said.
The utility also proposes freezing rates at the lower amount for three consecutive years.
A local economic development official and a social services executive applauded the move on Wednesday.
The full extent of the deaths and damage caused by the enormous flash flood that swept down a river valley in Nepal and Tibet today won’t be clear for weeks. But initial analyses of satellite images and seismic data suggest that the collapse of a high glacier caused the disaster.
“There’s a glacier that rolls over a cliff at about 5200 metres,” says Dan Shugar at the University of Calgary in Canada. “It’s just like a perfect straight line where it snapped off and dropped over a kilometre vertically to the valley bottom.”
This collapse could be a result of global heating. “It’s not that much of a stretch to think, yes, we’re seeing one terrible ramification of human-caused climate change,” he says.
As the glacier flowed over the cliff and moved down the steep slope, deep crevasses would have formed in the ice. Warm weather in the past day or so may have melted a lot of snow and some glacier ice, with this liquid water weakening the glacier and causing the entire section flowing down the steep slope to collapse.
“Comparing satellite imagery from yesterday and today, the glaciers in the vicinity do seem to have lost a fair bit of snow in the last 24 hours,” says Shugar. “My guess is that snow melt, and glacier ice melt as well, injected a lot of liquid water into the glacier, which percolated down to the bed and lubricated it. That was enough for it to collapse.”
The potential energy released as heat when millions of tonnes of ice fell a kilometre may have melted large quantities of it, producing enough liquid water to generate the huge flash flood.
Permafrost, the icy glue that holds the mountains together, is thawing along with the glaciers. This is what increased rockfalls onto the Birch glacier near the Swiss village of Blatten. In May 2025, the glacier fractured, burying the village under 20 million tonnes of rock and ice, and killing a shepherd. Experts monitoring the glacier evacuated 300 inhabitants nine days before the collapse.
Last month, researchers showed that laying a fibre-optic cable across a glacier can detect crevasses hidden 25 metres down, a far cheaper way to monitor fracturing than seismometers. They were surprised to discover that 8 per cent of the volume of a glacier in Valais was empty crevasses. Scientists may be underestimating the damage to glaciers’ stability, says Thomas Hudson at ETH Zurich, one of the study’s authors.
In the past, monitoring was really all about protecting the glaciers, he says. “We now need to put more of our focus on monitoring for prevention of disasters.” — Below, a disaster similar to the Nepalese collapse destroyed a Swiss village in 2025.
Stunning stat: The amount of U.S. capacity somewhere in the development pipeline doubled in the first half of 2026, per Global Energy Monitor’s analysis.
A whopping 189 gigawatts is planned for on-site data centers through the first half of 2026, roughly doubling (!) the pipeline at year-end 2025.
Driving the news: Overall, the U.S.pipeline has soared to 378 gigawatts, per the nonprofit that closely tracks projects internationally.
More concretely, projects under construction climbed 76% in the first half of 2026 to 52 GW, around twice what China is currently building.
A gigawatt can power roughly 750,000 U.S. homes.
Reality check: If all the 378 GW on the drawing board become reality, the U.S. fleet would grow by two-thirds.
But the report tracks everything from construction to projects in much earlier stages that may or may not ultimately happen.
“Pre-construction” and “announced” projects together account for about 86% of the U.S. pipeline.
State of play: The report highlights big questions. For instance, two-thirds of the capacity in development globally hasn’t yet named a turbine or engine manufacturer.
