The world’s top scientists told us that all Himalayan Glaciers will be gone in 24 years. We could have prevented this had we simply agreed three years ago to go back to the stone ages – while they jet-setted and partied at exotic locations around the world.
WTF is wrong with you deniers?
Lester Brown: Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India
Author: Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute
Published on Mar 21, 2008 – 7:51:14 AMMarch 20, 2008 – The world is now facing a climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies. Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow, and the Yangtze river basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests.
The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia. China and India are the world’s leading producers of both wheat and rice — humanity’s food staples. China’s wheat harvest is nearly double that of the United States, which ranks third after India. With rice, these two countries are far and away the leading producers, together accounting for over half of the world harvest.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that Himalayan glaciers are receding rapidly and that many could melt entirely by 2035. If the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the Ganges flow during the dry season disappears, the Ganges could become a seasonal river, flowing during the rainy season but not during the summer dry season when irrigation water needs are greatest.
Himalayan Glaciers Seem to Be Growing
In the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend.
Perched on the soaring Karakoram mountains in the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend. They’re growing.
Among legendary peaks of Mt. Everest like K2 and Nanga Parbat, glaciers with a penthouse view of the world are growing, and have been for almost three decades.
“These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world,” John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha said. “And all of them are either holding still, or advancing.”
http://news.discovery.com/earth/himalayas-glaciers-shrink.html
Being that there are at least 2000 himalayan glaciers, that 230 are stable or growing is not terribly reassuring. What are the other glaciers in the area doing?
Hopefully we can go back to the days when Vermont was under a mile of ice.
Steve,
I guess my vision is bad, What are the other himalayan glaciers doing? I am having this illusion that you response is a total non sequitor.
Your house was under a mile of ice until evil Neanderthals started pumping their mammoths full of methane.
Steve,
What a shock. TWO irrelevant comments in a row. I might start doubting your credibility.
Uh steve remind me, which climate scientist says all warming comes from CO2 and disputes milankovitch cycles and other natural climate change factors?
OOPs, sooory. i am asking a rational question. Hmmm what will your irrelevant response be this time. One capitol followed by 6 small case z’s?
Less than 10% are even being monitored so no one knows what they are doing. Glaciers shrinking are evidence the water is still flowing. If the glaciers start growing then water is withheld from the farms. The region is better off if the glaciers recede.
COLD IS BAD, WARM IS GOOD!
Cold is bad in Bolivia …
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/storm_watch_stories3&stormfile=cold_snap_kills_35_in_bolivi_040711?ref=ccbox_weather_category2
Hmm, “The summit of Mt. Everest’s K2 is seen through a haze.” I would have a lot more confidence in the article if they could get right such minor details as the relative locations of Mt Everest and K2 !
I was going to mention that Mt. Everest and K2 are separate Mountain peaks. K2 is in Pakistan and Mt. Everest is in Nepal.
The guys that write the articles have no control over the illustrators….
….that was some poor flunky that tagged that picture
Didn’t that 2035 figure base on a dyslexic reading of a study that claimed 2350 instead? I seem to remember that as part of the IPCC report blunders discovered in recent years.
The whole team and all their proofreaders shared the same dyslexia
yes,
and unlike some people they ADMITTED that it was a mistake and not one climate scientist has ever since said anything like this. After all it was a climate scientist who supports ACC who brought up the mistake.
I admit I forced Hansen to predict that Manhattan would drown, and then hacked the Salon web site to put the date off by 3,000 years instead of just 2,985 years.
You are a complete maroon.
Dear Tony Duncan:
Wrong, they still claim it, every day. You see, their signatures are still on the document. Until they have themselves formally removed, they continue to claim that the glaciers will melt by 2035.
Unless you wish to suggest that all those scientists were tricked into signing a document that does not accurately reflect their opinions. In which case you would have to admit that they’re pretty stupid.
Only after Pachuri accused India’s Environment Minister of practicing “voodoo science” for questioning the IPCC claim.
Stark,
no you are wrong. Find me ONE citation of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 after the report was disavowed.. I don’t know if you paid attention to any news regarding the IPCC”s 2007 report, but over a year ago there was quite a big deal about the fact that this should not have been included in the report. it had no foundation in science and NO climate Or glacier scientist believes this to be remotely possible. It was a mistake and a stupid embarrassing one, but it is completely at odds with all the published peer review literature on the subject. All admit it should not have been included.
I don’t have to prove that they were tricked into signing the document. I am rather sure that hardly any read the whole thing. Most who did read the article probably didn’t notice the date because it was so obviously wrong, it didn’t get processed or they didn’t know enough about the issue and didn’t bother thinking about how ridiculous that would be. Once someone DID read it and take note, it was disavowed VERY publicly.
So they are neither stupid nor tricked. Of course I don’t live in conspiratopia, so maybe that perspective is hard for me to fully understand.
ZZZZzzz….
Pachauri was alerted to the problem a year before publication.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Kh7nLplWo]
Kaboom,
that is one theory. It is more likely that the nonscientific statement by a glacier scientist in the 90’s who was making a vague guess was included by WWF in the non peer reviewed part of the IPCC report. There have never ben any scientific papers that have said anything like this.
So Steve’s statement that “The world’s top scientists told us that all Himalayan Glaciers will be gone in 24 years” is a lie. It WAS included in the IPCC report, but no top scientists have ever said anything like this, and even the scientist who made the original statement says it is not true and should not have been included. The mistake was corrected.
The head of the IPCC claimed that questioning the 2035 estimate was based on Voodoo science. According to him the 2035 claim was “Robust” until others started looking at what one of his researchers wrote. The person making the claim worked for TERI!
So you’re saying that no scientist signed the IPCC report that contained the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035?
Grumpy,
It is an interesting series of events, and certainly Pachauri put his foot in his mouth, but if you listen to the actual interview, NOWHERE does he say or is he asked if all the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. I can’t find a link where he acknowledges that date. It appears that he lied about it at some point before Copenhagen, for a couple of months after having been told by several glaciologists that the assertion was not credible.
Here is a good explanation of the time line and factors involved that does not refrain from lambasting Pachauri. http://www.tni.org/article/himalayan-blunder.
My calculations show they will be gone by 3250, possibly 5230 with sufficient taxes, depending on the weather.
However, there is a possibility of another apocalypse. If these glaciers STOP melting, then there will be that much less water in these drainages. They’ll just have to go pack to the melting snowpacks and rain which now account for… just guessing… 95% of their current flow.
And, by the way, who knew that we now depend on China and India to feed the world? Does Ehrlich and his band of Merry Malthusians know about this?
OOPs again,
soory Steve i got the irrelevant comment prediction in the wrong place. You wouldn’t be pedestrian enough to use it twice in one post would you.
BTW i believe Pachauri lied about this, and that has nothing to do with the actual issue. That kind of means the same as irrelevant.
“If the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the Ganges flow during the dry season disappears, the Ganges could become a seasonal river, flowing during the rainy season but not during the summer dry season when irrigation water needs are greatest.”
Was that Glacier supplying the Ganges water in the dry season without melting ?
How’d it do that ?
I’ll bet that one is really big too.
I find that statistic very hard to believe. 70%? Based on their track record, how about 7%? Close enough for these experts.
Journal of Glaciology, Vol. 57, No. 203, 2011 567
What do glaciers tell us about climate variability and
climate change?
Gerard H. ROE
“The important principle in this study is that stochastic
interannual climate variability can cause large and persistent
glacier fluctuations that should not be misinterpreted as
being driven by a climate change. This principle is
fundamental and does not depend in any way upon the
details of the models used. These models are sufficient to
gauge the magnitude of the effects, and sensitivity to different
conditions has been reported here. Glaciers are complicated,
and no model can capture all their facets.”
http://www.igsoc.org/journal/current/203/t10J107.pdf
If in fact these glaciers supply all of these rivers it sounds like they must have been melting for a while now like prior to the existence of human civilization such as it is.
This whole glacier thing is overrated. India should just call Sparkletts and have them deliver.
If what you want is for your glacier to not shrink then all the water you need when you need it must come from rainfall. The immediate consequence of this then is that the presence or absence of the glacier is of no importance. It is not a source of water, it is a competitor for water. And so oddly enough if the glacier were to grow there would be less water available for human consumption. The glacier would be hording it. The water problem in the Himalaya drainage area is not shrinking glaciers – it is inadequate rainfall.
Now we can say to hell with the glacier, we don’t need it, what we need is rain. That is quite a different thing than a glacier, because with or without the glacier you still need rain. Hopefully that is obvious.
So now let us look at what else glaciers do. They are a kind of reservoir, I think we can agree. And we would prefer a situation where that frozen reservoir replenishes each season. We are powerless to manage that, but it is desirable. Here it gets tricky. For it to both satisfy your water needs and replenish, it requires reliable annual rainfall with greater capacity than your need, not ignoring your varying need in agriculture and manufacturing. That is a bit of a stretch to expect rain and climate to adapt to your varying need, so you take the rainfall as it comes seasonally, gratefully, and deal with the highs and lows.
Initially this creates waste in that fresh water flows out to sea, possibly as a result of there being no winter agriculture, and in summer months the glacier will melt, adding to the rainfall. The water available exceeds the need and what is not used is ash. It goes to the ocean, unused.
This is not lost on people so more of them migrate to this bounty of year round fresh flowing water and their numbers grow until you now have an edge condition or worse. During peak flow there is enough water to go around – during slack flow, while the glacier is replenishing, there may be shortages. In fact we see this all the time. In this hypothetical, climate has remained constant. This is an exercise, after all.
So what is wrong here? Clearly, glaciers are poor reservoirs, and we have all that wasted water. People are smart and adapt by building dams to capture the excess. Now the glacier no longer matters again (glaciers are not sources of water, remember), and the reservoir holds what was once wasted water that flowed out to sea. And people see this bounty and move into the area where water runs fresh and cool from the dam and where now there are generators to light homes and drive industry and life is good. Until the population grows such that during peak times there is water to go around but during slack times there is not because some of that water has to keep the generators running.
What is wrong here? We can’t keep blaming glaciers and dams – how about we start blaming people? Because in this scenario the climate didn’t change, but the need did. What else is wrong here? Write this down: It is impossible that the climate will not have changed! Either warmer or cooler, it will have changed. It is what climates do. So what didn’t change? People. Stupid as oxes to think a river is a guarantee for all time of clean fresh running water.
So here we are back at the top. What is not needed is glaciers and dams – what is needed is enough rain. But there will never always be enough rain. So what is really needed then if not more rain?
For a case study and the answer, research Los Angeles and their history of water grabbing and unmanaged population growth.
DP,
I am a little baffled. That made total sense. It might take me awhile to recover.
Feel free to manage your own population, Tony. Nobody is stopping you.
That last paragraph is an example of the usual rubbish tendered in alarmist proclamations about Himalayan glaciers. “the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the Ganges flow during the dry season” doesn’t, except in the upper reaches in the foothills. The percentage lower down drops dramatically as the flow increases due to RAIN. It’s just another half-truth. If it WERE true, the glacier would have had to have melted centuries or millennia ago to provide the flow.