Anthropogenic global warming is melting the world's glaciers at increasing rates. This poses some grave dangers to the vast populations around the world who are dependent on glacial melt water feeding into the river systems as a supply of water for drinking and agriculture in the dry summer months. The glaciers of the Himalayas are mostly shrinking rapidly and these glaciers are the source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India and China. Some mountaineer photographers recently took current photos of many glaciers from the same spots that photos were taken many decades ago, showing the changes in the ice very clearly. Take a look. Rivers of ice: Vanishing glaciers Stunning images from high in the Himalayas - showing the extent by which many glaciers have shrunk in the past 80 years or so - have gone on display at the Royal Geographical Society in central London. 10 October 2011
Here's some info on some studies done a few years ago that highlight the drastic changes occurring with glaciers in the high mountainous regions of the world. Himalaya glaciers melting much faster Warming appears to be having bigger impact on ice at higher elevations By Michael Reilly MSNBC.com 11/24/2008 (excerpts) Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply. Throughout India, China, and Nepal, some 15,000 glaciers speckle the Tibetan Plateau, some of the highest land in the world. There, perched in thin, frigid air up to 7,200 meters (23,622 feet) above sea level, the ice might seem secluded from the effects of global warming. But just the opposite is proving true, according to new research published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of researchers traveled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the Naimona'nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting. Mountain glaciers have been receding all over the world since the 1990s and there was no reason this one, which provides water to the mighty Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra Rivers, should be any different. But when the team analyzed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them. Glaciers around the planet are usually dated by looking for two pulses of radioactivity buried in the ice. These are the leftovers from American and Russian atomic bomb testing in the 1950's and 1960's. In the Naimona'nyi samples, there was no sign of the tests. In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944. He suspects the reason for this is that high-altitude glaciers, despite residing in colder temperatures, are more sensitive to climate change. As more heat is trapped in the atmosphere, he said, it holds more water vapor. And when the water vapor rises to high altitudes it condenses, releasing the heat into the upper atmosphere, where high mountain landscapes feel the brunt of warming. "At the highest elevations, we're seeing something like an average of 0.3 degrees Centigrade warming per decade," Thompson said. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects 3 degrees of warming by 2100. But that's at the surface; up at the elevations where these glaciers are there could be almost twice as much, almost 6 degrees." The finding has ominous implications for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters of the Naimona'nyi and other glaciers for their livelihoods. Across the region, no one know just how much water the Himalayas have left, but Thompson said it's dwindling fast. "You can think of glaciers kind of like water towers, " he said. "They collect water from the monsoon in the wet season, and release it in the dry season. But how effective they are depends on how much water is in the towers." © 2011 Discovery Channel (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Here's some recent news from scientists in China about the melting of the glaciers in Tibet. Glaciers in Tibet melting due to global warming: Researchers CORPORATE PRESS RELEASES (INDIA) news desk October 24, 2011 (excerpts) Glaciers in southwest Chinas Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, a key source of major rivers in this country and those in the Indian subcontinent, are melting faster than ever under the influence of global warming, Chinese researchers have warned. Results from the study show that a large area of the glaciers has melted in the 2,400-square-kilometre region. Glaciers are the largest source of fresh water on the planet. They are also a reliable indicator of climate change, and easy for scientists to observe. An expert with Qinghais Three-River Headwaters Office said the cluster of some 80 glaciers around the Aemye Ma-chhen Range, the source of the Yellow River headwaters, is shrinking especially fast. Cheng Haining, a senior engineer with the provincial surveying and mapping bureau, said about 5.3 per cent, or 70 square kilometres, of the glaciers in Yangtze headwaters had melted away over the past three decades. Cheng said that the melting of glaciers is closely connected with climate change. He said the data collected by three meteorological stations over the past 50 years show a continued rise in the average temperature of the three-river headwaters area. The winter of 2009, for example, was the warmest in 15 years, according to the provincial climate centre. Last year the average temperature there hit a five-decade record high. Local residents in Yushu Tibet Autonomous Prefecture said Lancang River froze in November in the 1970s, but it did not freeze at all in 1999. It is estimated that 70 per cent of the glaciers in Lancang River headwaters have disappeared due to the warm weather, researchers said. Xin Yuanhong, a senior engineer with the Qinghai Hydrography and Geology Study Centre, said the melting of the glaciers could lead to a water shortage and even a dry-up of rivers in the long run, and consequent ecological disasters like wetland retreat and desertification. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is among the regions worst hit by global warming. Consequently, this will have a deleterious effect on the global climate as well as the livelihood of Asian people, Qin Dahe, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said. Copyright © 2011. Corporate Press Releases (India). All Rights Reserved. (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
One big advantage is that it'll be easier to climb Mt Everest in the future. They might even build a road to the top like Pikes Peak in Colorado.
It's even worse than you think. The thick glaciers covering most of the U.S. have already disappeared. In their place we have crops and homes and cities. It's terrible. My god, what are we going to do?
Glaciers provide much of the water supporting the continued existence of farms and cities. Sporadic precipitation is stored, and released evenly, providing reliable suppies without them, drought, flood, failed crops and destabilisation is inevitable.
Yes, Patty, we all know the Earth has been in an ice age for the last million years and that we only transitioned from the last period of heavy glaciation into the current inter-glacial period about 12 thousand years ago. The transition from glacial to interglacial took a few thousand years and then the Earth's general climate patterns largely stabilized, resulting in a generally stable climate for the last nearly ten thousand years which allowed us humans to develope agriculture, cities, civilization and a world population of humans numbering seven billion. Most of the glaciers that are now disappearing due to anthropogenic global warming were in place and relatively stable for many thousands of years until mankind began turbo-heating the atmosphere with our fossil carbon emissions. Now, with the disappearance of these glaciers, the water supplies that literally billions of people depend on for drinking water and for agriculture are drying up. During the last interglacial warm period, about 125,000 years ago, when it was just slightly warmer than it has been so far in this interglacial period, the sea levels were about 18 feet higher than they are today. The Earth's glaciers are mostly melting away at this time and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are starting to melt at increasing rates. Almost half of the world's population lives within 200 miles of a coastline, 14 of the world's 17 largest cities are located along coasts and two-fifths of cities with populations of 1 million to 10 million people are located near coastlines. Those people and all those trillions of dollars of infrastructure are severely threatened over the next half century or so by the rising sea levels due to the melting ice. Perhaps if you actually learned something about this, you wouldn't make such clueless, foolish comments that just reflect a deep ignorance about what is happening.
Man made, nature made, doesn't much matter. There isn't the political will, nor the technology to do anything else. The only option is adaptation. Man has done it time after time. Europe, before the new world was discovered, had stabilized at "sustainable". China shrunk back to "sustainable" after their golden age. Oh! But, this time there will be billions starving, animals will go extinct, etc. etc., etc. You are right, your alternative? Europe doesn't have the answer..... http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/59486-biofuels-as-carbon-intensive-as-gasoline
Environmental degradation might proceed nonlinearly. If potable water with low salinity is not available, more energy-intensive procedures are necessary (i.e. distillation). Energy-intensive means that the very act of getting the water will exacerbate the problem exponentially unless that magic bean form of energy is created.
How silly can you get? Of course it matters. If the problem was all naturally caused then there would probably be very little we could do about it but the reality is that humans are collectively currently pumping about 30 billion tons (and still rising) of fossil carbon into the atmosphere every year. The scientists all around the world who have studied this matter affirm that these carbon emissions are the primary cause of the current abrupt warming of the planet and the associated climate changes. We have the ability to stop doing that. We can switch from fossil fuels to clean, non polluting, non carbon emitting, renewable energy sources, like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and ocean wave, current and tidal energy. It is quite feasible and doable. This transition in energy sources will not cause an immediate end to global warming but it would avoid making the problem worse and then much, much worse in future decades and centuries. The best strategy right now is to stop doing what we've been doing that is causing the problem. The worst long term strategy would be to continue with this 'business-as-usual' continuation of massive and ever increasing fossil carbon emissions. Actually there is a great deal of "political will" among the intelligent and educated people of the world who understand the problem but effective actions to deal with the crisis have been undermined by the massive propaganda campaign that was undertaken by the fossil fuel industry several decades ago in an attempt to confuse the public and the legislators about the reality and dangers of anthropogenic global warming/climate changes and by the enormous political and economic power that the fossil fuel industry can wields on the governments of the world. Fossil fuel energy is very heavily subsidized with taxpayer dollars in many ways so if those subsidies are removed and a tax is put on carbon emissions, fossil fuel energy will no longer be economically competitive and their trillion dollar a year profit stream will wither away. The fossil fuel industry is endangering future generations and the whole biosphere for the sake of their short term profits in much the same corporate way that the tobacco companies tried to protect their profits by confusing the public for some years about the degree of scientific certainty that tobacco smoking was causing elevated levels of cancer and a host of other diseases and problems. As far as your denier cult myth that "there isn't the technology to do anything else", that is just beyond silly and seems almost deliberately ignorant. We do have the technology and it is getting better all the time. As an example, hydrogen, which in liquid form would make a great transportation fuel for cars, trucks and planes, has been up until now, expensive to make, requiring such large amounts of electricity to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen that it seemed too expensive to compete. Too much already usable electric energy going into the process relative to the amount of hydrogen fuel energy you get in return. Just recently though, scientists announced that they have developed a way to just mix some inexpensive stuff in the water and then expose it to sunlight and get hydrogen and oxygen separation. Cheap hydrogen fuel from sunlight is just one of the emerging alternatives to ever-more-expensive fossil fuels like gasoline. Solar-electric conversion is getting better (more efficient) and cheaper every year. Wind energy systems are also quickly improving. There are vast amounts of energy available from ocean currents, waves and tides and ways to extract that energy are starting to be developed. I can't make heads or tails out of this gibberish. You seem to have no idea what is actually meant by the word "sustainable". On our current course, there may well be "billions starving" within a few decades. If we continue with "business as usual" and increasing CO2 emisssions, we will certainly cause even worse damage than that. The "alternative" is to make a massive planet wide effort to switch from fossil fuel energy sources to clean, non carbon emitting sources like solar, wind, ocean, geothermal, hydro, etc.. It is possible to do. Such a switch is being resisted by those with a vested financial interest in the sales of fossil fuels. That's why your head has gotten so twisted around and bamboozled by those folks' propaganda campaign. They stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year if the world breaks its fossil fuel addiction and switches to cleaner, cheaper renewable energy sources.
Here's some info on some studies done a few years ago that highlight the drastic changes occurring with glaciers in the high mountainous regions of the world. Himalaya glaciers melting much faster Warming appears to be having bigger impact on ice at higher elevations By Michael Reilly MSNBC.com 11/24/2008 (excerpts) Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply. Throughout India, China, and Nepal, some 15,000 glaciers speckle the Tibetan Plateau, some of the highest land in the world. There, perched in thin, frigid air up to 7,200 meters (23,622 feet) above sea level, the ice might seem secluded from the effects of global warming. But just the opposite is proving true, according to new research published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of researchers traveled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the Naimona'nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting. Mountain glaciers have been receding all over the world since the 1990s and there was no reason this one, which provides water to the mighty Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra Rivers, should be any different. But when the team analyzed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them. Glaciers around the planet are usually dated by looking for two pulses of radioactivity buried in the ice. These are the leftovers from American and Russian atomic bomb testing in the 1950's and 1960's. In the Naimona'nyi samples, there was no sign of the tests. In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944. He suspects the reason for this is that high-altitude glaciers, despite residing in colder temperatures, are more sensitive to climate change. As more heat is trapped in the atmosphere, he said, it holds more water vapor. And when the water vapor rises to high altitudes it condenses, releasing the heat into the upper atmosphere, where high mountain landscapes feel the brunt of warming. "At the highest elevations, we're seeing something like an average of 0.3 degrees Centigrade warming per decade," Thompson said. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects 3 degrees of warming by 2100. But that's at the surface; up at the elevations where these glaciers are there could be almost twice as much, almost 6 degrees." The finding has ominous implications for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters of the Naimona'nyi and other glaciers for their livelihoods. Across the region, no one know just how much water the Himalayas have left, but Thompson said it's dwindling fast. "You can think of glaciers kind of like water towers, " he said. "They collect water from the monsoon in the wet season, and release it in the dry season. But how effective they are depends on how much water is in the towers." © 2011 Discovery Channel (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
How Glaciers Around the World are Melting... Then and Now: How Glaciers Around the World are Melting April 04, 2017 - Over the past decade, scientists and photographers keep returning to the world's glaciers, watching them shrink with each visit. Now they want others to see how a warming planet is melting masses of ice in a series of before-and-after photos.
Don't see too many climate deniers on this one. If you look at this map, these are really the only glaciers in Central Asia. https://nsidc.org/glims/glaciermelt/
Have each and every one of you climate preachers: 1. Forsworn all future vacations? 2. Pledged never again to drive to any entertainment venue, or park? 3. Promised to work only at jobs which provide essential services, such as food, housing, and medical care? 4. Sold your cars which use those nasty "fossil fuels"? 5. Thought about all the billions of the world's struggling poor, most of whom don't even have electricity and refrigeration, and couldn't care less about your climate proselytizing? They just want to achieve some better measure of prosperity, a shadow of that which all Americans take for granted? Meanwhile Al Gore rides in a huge private limousine to his private jet, like so many of the Hollywood Ignorati, as they preach down to the rest of us.
Who knew perpetual motion machines could be so simple! Just "mix some inexpensive stuff"! Hell, Al Gore kin do that! Physics, chemistry, thermodynamics? WHO NEEDS 'EM! Not the eco-warriors.
No, but I built a "zero-energy" home. I find that the home is where we can all make a difference. So from your post, you seem to be focused on bitter hypocracy and finger-pointing, instead of the issue of truth or denial, in regard to climate change. Something got your goat?
Leftists don't stay at home, and "make a difference." Leftists drive to Earth Day gatherings, and "environmental" protests, and Hate Trump riots, and "eco-tours" (sic), and everywhere else they darn well please, while preaching to everyone ELSE to stay put and don't ever buy any more of that nasty fossil fuel. Keep it all in the ground, EVERYBODY ELSE! The Leftists are out partying hard, like hypocrites. Learn how to spell, please. You look so unsophisticated when you pick out a word you can't even spell.
That is not REMOTELY true. The worst long term strategy would be to continue funding "research" on the climate change cabal, blackballing all dissent, transferring trillions of dollars to third world crapholes, while some Americans restrict their lives dramatically, and others continue PREACHING climate change action while: 1. Taking "eco-tours" (sic) 2. "KEEP ON TRAVELING" like Rick Steves tells them to do, while... preaching climate change 3. Flying and driving to conferences all around the world, burning millions of gallons of gasoline, instead of videoconferencing,\ 4. Accomplishing absolutely nothing except bankrupting the United States with this nonsense. THAT would be the worst long term strategy, by far. Look at Al Gore's mansion, down by the ocean and how he travels by limousine and private jet all around the world, like all the Hollywood Glitterati, who preach one thing and practice something very different. {quote] Actually there is a great deal of "political will" among the intelligent and educated people of the world who understand the problem but .[/QUOTE] "Understand the problem".... Good one. Because you're all so "intelligent and educated" and anyone who deigns to disagree with you is a Neanderthal. Typical liberal nonsense. John Kenneth Galbraith was about as bad a snow skier as he was an economist. A far-left liberal who Milton Friedman made fun of on the ski slopes when he kept falling. Friedman asked him how long he had been skiing. When Galbraith said a few years, Friedman said "About as long as you've been an economist." This joke is lost on all Leftists, of course, who fall down every time they type a sentence. If Leftists think capitalism is so bad and so "selfish" they should all move to Cuba or North Korea. BUH BYE!
Sometimes people put you on ignore because they think they are punishing you in some way. When someone claims to be a chemical engineer and puts you on ignore they are doing you a favor. You don't have to respond to his nonsense.
"Media Truth" - Dan Rather, resigning in disgrace after he and Mary Mapes published forged documents attempting to throw the presidential election. "Media Truth" - New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, lying through his yellow teeth that Russia was prospering as millions starved, for which he was given the Pulitzer Prize, never revoked even after his lies were exposed "Media Truth" - The lying press covering up for Barack Obama and Hillary Crooked Clinton "Media Truth" - Clinton has a 98% chance of winning "Media Truth" - CNN Executive Vice President lied through his yellow teeth that US Armed Forces were "targeting the media" in Iraq for which he was exposed and fired And on and on the list of media lies goe, without end. Pravda was more honest than you and your leftist media even at the height of the Cold War.
