India, Sept. 14 -- As I write this, over 1,300 lives are confirmed lost and many thousands are still missing in the floods in Nepal, as the mighty Himalayas came down as rubble. This is an enor-mous and painful human tragedy, but it is also about willful actions and inactions of humans. This tragedy is really about our mindset, the be-lief that we, as humans, can re-engineer everything; that we are in control of the universe and all things in it. We are the supreme beings who can weather climate change, because, after all, it is only about a small and insignificant matter of weather. This is on us.

Let me break this down. First, the question of what happened in Nepal on August 26. The images that all of us would have seen are of the moun...