The catastrophic glacier failure due to ice melt on the Nepal-Tibet border is a metaphor for the proliferation of unthinkables piling up ever faster across our planet.
The disaster was inevitable. It fits all the scientific warnings for the havoc being inflicted by global warming on our natural systems.
The reason is simple. Warming melts the permafrost glue that holds together the ice and rocks. It shreds the assumed stability created by ice.
In an identical vein, the glue that has bound together multilateral systems of politics, economics, finance, trade, law and international security that we have trusted to improve things globally, is either melting, imploding or disintegrating.
President Trump’s self possessed MAGA obsession has made even worse so much of what Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has labelled this global “rupture”.
And other “nasty people” are refining similar autocratic tendencies. As Slovenia’s highly regarded president Natasa Pirc Musar, an eminent human rights lawyer, told the Bled Strategic Forum a few days ago: “international law is going down the toilet”. Leaders “violate it because they can”.
So the Nepal catastrophe is just the latest example of an inexorable, tragic and unstoppable direction of travel, on an ever sharper time line.
The trend is grim. Super smart Switzerland was shocked when the mountain village of Blatten was buried due to a similar glacial collapse in May last year. Up to 130 houses were smothered, and a community wrecked. Similar collapses or conflagrations due to heat or flood threaten almost everywhere globally, as many of us experienced in the multiple heatwaves across Europe this summer.
But our orthodox mindsets and systems seem unable to dramatically redefine themselves in the ways they need to. New mind muscle must be developed to create far bolder thinking.
In Lytton, western Canada, a heat dome with temperatures up to 49 degrees, had left the town frying in 2021 and 90% of it burned to the ground. The 2025 failure in Los Angeles to recognise the enormous fire vulnerability from un-cut brush led to the massive destruction of 18,000 structures and homes.
Temperatures in Dubai soared recently to 52 degrees, with an unimaginable three metres of intense rain fall threatening infrastructure not designed for destructive flooding.
The scary list of similar unthinkables continues to build fast. At this moment 30 million people in south west USA are wilting under another dome of “dangerous record breaking heat”.
This is why glacial collapse due to global warming is a stark metaphor for the sinister and profound new realities that confront us. We all have no option but to embrace the implications. And learn fast.
This applies not just to climate but also nature, biodiversity, geopolitics and conflicts like Iran and Ukraine. And like a massive, hostile umbrella hovering over us the breathtaking changes being imposed by AI are compounding the intensity of all of this rupturing.
Overall the relative stability we take for granted in our lives is imploding. All the threats are coming together at ever greater colliding speeds. We are living through a deepening cascade of systemic risks. This is led by a converging of institutional fragility, climate breakdown, geopolitical instability and growing economic inequality.
This is happening in multiple directions that cannot be controlled. All of us are struggling to navigate an ever more unpredictable and destabilised landscape. Yet responses are siloed, incremental and constrained.
In our work at Thinking the Unthinkable we liken this ruptured and unpredictable reality to a pinball machine at a fairground. Like the ball zigzagging back and forth in ever more erratic directions, new extremes are being reached. Watch Pinball explainer video.
As a result multiple pressures are colliding at ever higher speeds, control is vaporising, and the uncertainty of focus is intensifying.
This is why the Nepal-Tibet catastrophe due to melting ice is just the latest wake up metaphor that we ignore at our peril. We all have to realise there is much worse to come in all our societies. Hoping it wont happen is not a sane option. Facing up to reality is.
As our 12 years of work at TTU has long signalled, the trend must be recognised as profound and inevitable. It is defying the ability of our leaders – whether political or corporate – to grip the implications at the pace and scale needed. As a result they need to make huge readjustments to their orthodox ways of thinking.
For a host of reasons most people don’t want to accept the new realities. They are in denial, firstly about the enormity of threats, then secondly the implications that unthinkables are also unpalatables..
The largely orthodox approach to leadership means the current political and corporate class are ill suited and too narrow minded to embrace what must be done. This is because of the threatening scale and nature of the new realities.
This is not a moment for self delusion, wherever we are in the world. Whether we are rich or poor, whether privileged or in the struggling classes and regions of our fragile world.
In the UK, the National Preparedness Commission has struggled for years to get its warnings heard. A government culture of denial and not alarming the public has pervaded. This was despite the growing evidence and even an extraordinary series of alerts published in January this year by the UK intelligence agencies.
Read UK Nature Security Assessment
This strategic assessment explores how global biodiversity loss and the collapse of critical ecosystems could affect the UK’s resilience, security and prosperity.
As in the Nordics and Baltics, the ever louder recent Russian threats to British national security have finally started to change that.
“Most of the public are blissfully unaware of the scale and nature and intensity of some of the threats we face as a nation” said Lord Toby Harris, chair of the NPC. “We need a national conversation to try to remind people of the threats we face”.
That can be said everywhere in every nation on our planet. The sinister reality is global. It requires urgent action to prevent the inevitability of many more catastrophes of all kinds.
Unthinkables will keep piling up: an ever greater number, with an ever greater intensity. The deepening pinball realities mean such disasters won’t not happen, however much we wish they will not.
They will happen. But how prepared and willing are we to accept the new inevitability?
