Melting Himalayan glaciers will affect more than one billion people
The title of this post comes from my Nature Briefing news feed, but the title of the article itself within the feed is "Fast-melting glaciers in the Himalayas" which in turn leads to a Yale360 article entitled As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, a Water Crisis Looms in South Asia.
Recently on line I came across an anti-nuke of Trumpian scale dishonesty in describing himself as "not an antinuke" while dragging out every dullard (if popular) bit of rhetoric in this case, an evocation of so called "nuclear waste," which he, she, or they described as being "dangerous."
My new tack with this sort is to ask them, if used nuclear fuel is so "dangerous," perhaps the person can refer me to a case where the accumulation and storage of commercial used nuclear fuel over a period of almost 70 years has led to the number of deaths observed every day from dangerous fossil fuel waste, a death toll of 18,000 people per day world wide, or even a death toll over 70 years comparable to the death toll from air pollution in the next hour, which would be roughly 800 people.
The functional idiot then morphed into a childish Pee-Wee Herman routine asking if I would "take a bath in used nuclear fuel" and insisting he, she or they would not answer the question until I answered his, hers or theirs.
"You first."
This is the level of these sort of people, ever willing to demonstrate that they are morons, intellectually beneath contempt, refusing to state any supporting information for a specious claim, since there is no such information, pure Trumpian type rhetoric.
Nevertheless the "bath" meme is illustrative, since we are all continuously bathed in dangerous fossil fuel waste and have no means of avoiding being so, the chief form of this waste, but certainly not the only component of it, is carbon dioxide.
This carbon dioxide waste, dumped into the atmosphere bathes even the highest reaches of our planet, including the Himalayas, where the glaciers that support the water supplies of more than 1 billion people are disappearing.
While I don't expect any "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nuke to give a shit about 1 billion people, anymore than they gave a shit about the roughly 80 million people who died from air pollution while they carried on about Fukushima, the matter is very real.
As the glacial melt accelerates, events like the recent flooding of 1/3 of Pakistan's land area will become more common, and be followed by dead rivers and a lack of access to water.
The Yale article should be open sourced, but some excerpts will follow. Here is the subtitle of the article:
An excerpt:
Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, tweeted videos of the destruction and highlighted the vulnerability of a region with the largest number of glaciers outside the Earth’s poles. Why were these glaciers losing mass so quickly? Rehman put it succinctly. “High global temperatures,” she said.
Just over a decade ago, relatively little was known about glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, the vast ice mountains that run across Central and South Asia, from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east. But a step-up in research in the past 10 years — spurred in part by an embarrassing error in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, which predicted that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 — has led to enormous strides in understanding.
That future is daunting. New research suggests that the area of Himalayan glaciers has shrunk by 40 percent since the Little Ice Age maximum between 400-700 years ago, and that in the past few decades ice melt has accelerated faster than in other mountainous parts of the world. Retreat seems to have also recently initiated in Pakistan’s Karakoram range, one of the few areas where glaciers had been stable. Depending on the level of global warming, studies project that at least another third, and as much as two-thirds, of the region’s glaciers could vanish by the end of the century. Correspondingly, meltwater is expected to increase until around the 2050s and then begin to decline.
These changes could have far-reaching consequences for hazard risk and food and water security in a heavily populated region. More than a billion people depend on the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river systems, which are fed by snow and glacial melt from the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, known as the world’s “Third Pole” because it contains so much ice. Peaking in summer, meltwater can be a lifesaver at a time when other water sources are much diminished.
But increased melt may also trigger landslides or glacial lake outburst floods, known as GLOFs, scientists warn. Or it could aggravate the impact of extreme rainfall, like the deluge that caused recent massive flooding in Pakistan. Changes in melt could also affect the safety and productivity of the region’s expanding hydropower industry.
Scientists now have data on almost every glacier in high mountain Asia. They know “how these glaciers have changed not only in area but in mass during the last 20 years,” says Tobias Bolch, a glaciologist with the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He adds, “We also know much more about the processes which govern glacial melt. This information will give policymakers some instruments to really plan for the future...”
Have a pleasant Sunday evening.