The stunning collapse of Langtang Lirung, at 7,234 m (23,734 ft) the highest peak of the Langtang Himal, a subrange of the Nepalese Himalayas, and the 99th highest mountain in the world, and the subsequent hell that it unleashed in Nepal and Tibet, has surely sounded the death knell in the struggle to contain anthropological climate change.

Even as rescue efforts to find some thousands still missing continued, a widely discussed report of the UN's Environment Programme or UNEP, based out of Nairobi - probably the first report from within the UN system to do so - admitted the battle is lost. Just in case seeing 5-storey border infrastructure getting swallowed whole by muddy water couldn't convince you, this report has the numbers and data, that tell you the margin of defeat. Global heating will reach at least 1.8C above pre-industrial levels under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C. That's a huge difference from where we are and where we need to be, since every fraction of temperature rise intensifies extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. Continuing down the path we're on leaves Earth on course to hit 2.3C above pre-industrial levels.

Coming back to the Himalayas, certainly a Rubicon must've been crossed somewhere, for such an unprecedented disaster to have unfolded before our eyes. A true one-off event for which no-one could've prepared in advance, which was so outside the event horizon that it got registered as a more familiar natural disaster instead - the famed USGS initially recorded it as an earthquake, thanks to the intense shaking its sensors picked up at ground level during the course of the avalanche. As for the consequences downstream - let's just say to call them merely "flash floods", feels almost blase, and wholly inadequate.

The UNEP report acknowledges that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst effects of global warming's harms. So now the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and "back to safety".

Yet safety is increasingly a luxury in some of the countries most vulnerable to the changes we are seeing unfold before our eyes now. For the longest time, climate change deniers clung to the fact that many of the adverse effects were playing out over epochs. Take sea level rise for instance - you just don't see it with the naked eye. The science was strong, but a majority of ordinary people would never engage with that, and you couldn't really expect it of them. Now though, the evidence is right before eyes, it is undeniable and it is catastrophic.

Nepal is on the same boat as Bangladesh - paying a steep price for something it had almost no role in creating. And that is why we must stand in solidarity with them not only in this hour, but in the future as well, as they demand climate compensation from the largest emitters in the world, namely the US, China and India. Nepal doesn't need aid. It needs 'climate justice'. As more and more such catastrophes occur, expect that concept to gain prominence in our global discourse.