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New Photos Show 'Devastating' Ice Loss On Everest
Simmeh writes "The BBC reports on new photos of the Himalayas taken from exactly the same position as ones from 1929 and compares the ice coverage. The Asia Society, which did the groundwork, are quoted as saying, 'If the present rate of melting continues, many of these glaciers will be severely diminished by the middle of this century.' I guess the previous claim wasn't too unrealistic."
Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Nepal's power is run from hydro installed by the Russians many years ago. The generators are on the rivers that contain run-off from the Himalayas. I used to live there ('99-'01) and there was enough problems with lack of water then for us to have many brown outs. But lately, friends over there have been telling me that the power has been out for weeks on end, with hospitals, etc, having to constantly run their diesel generators, increasing the already excessive amount of pollution in the air, especially around Kathmandu. They've been saying that it's because the rivers have had hardly any water in them, which is caused by the decreasing amount of ice on the mountains.
"When it comes to size you have to stop thinking about the Earth, 12,752km diameter, and think about the atmosphere, 90% within 50km of surface."
And most (but not all) of the stuff that affects climate happens in the troposphere (bottom 5km).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
To visually compare the images properly, the color image needs to be turned into grayscale, and the two images need to be cut so that they can be properly superimposed. When this is done, the loss is a bit less impressive, but still noticeable in the valley if not on the mountains.
You would like to think that they get omitted, but your questions have been addressed.
1. But the fly in the ointment is that the CO2 levels *lag* the temperature changes by 40 to 50 years.
This has been answered.
2. The major greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn't CO2. It's H2O.
This has been answered too.
3. There seems to be some viking farms being uncovered in Greenland.
They have covered this one as well.
4. And finally, the polar ice on Mars seems to be also shrinking.
Wouldn't you know it, they forgot to omit this question.
Seems to me that the global warming crowd have a bit of a secondary agenda running that has nothing what so ever to do with actual global warming.
That's right, because the big companies behind the denialist movement couldn't have any agenda!
When the above independently verifiable but inconvenient little facts are explained, then I will consider the GW crowd to have done due diligence and be worth listening to.
So will you change your opinion now, or just ignore all this and move on to other pesky facts that the so called "warmers" have allegedly failed to mention.
Since I live very close to himalayas, I can say with confidence, that things have changed quite a bit.
Is it global warming/regional warming or no warming, I dunno.
But over the past 6-7 years these changes have forced farmers to change crop cycles, modified travel plans of seasonal roads, etc., etc.,
Basically, in the Western himalayas, around November, snowfalls would start, seasonal roads would close by december, and jan feb were heavy snowfall months, with some in April and may.
Now from past few years, there is hardly any snow during December and even January, which leads to lousy apple crop.
Then in feb, it snows some, and in April may and june, well heavy snowfall in higher reaches.
This kills the standing crop.
The entire north India reels under heat wave as there is hardly any winter rain. We start getting summer in feb instead of April.
The mountains start getting snow.
So is it warming or cooling. No idea, but its a big change from what has been happening since 1900 or so(when record keeping started).
Winter rain, at the correct time, and winter snow at correct time is very important for healthy crops. all this cycle change has led to big problems.
To add to that, monsoon summer rain has also reduced. Thankfully, this year, though a bit late, monsoon is mostly adequate, but then here also instead of sustained rain over few days, most places get a cloudburst like havoc creating spell, and then its humid and dry. The dams will get filled up, but areas depending only on rain will suffer.
Such rains also lead to big landslides.
Part of the blame is on local deforestation, and micro climate change in the Himalayan region due to rapid commercialization and deforestation. Since protecting the environment is not yet a major election issue, its just a lip service on world environment day, when we switch of lights for an hour(and then get the routine 10 hour power cut due to overload of AC).
So all in all, pics or no pics, the local weather in western himalayas has changed. Hopefully, this weather pattern will stabilize, and farmers will switch there crop sowing times. But since its still too erratic, its a big problem.
As for global warming, when I see the temperature records for the region since 1900, the average temp has been rising steadily in most places, but whether this warming is caused by humans or not, I dunno. I am not a climatologist and like many people here, I will refrain from posting my theories on the changes.
All that matters to many, is that its getting hotter and drier, and rainfall patterns are shifting alarmingly.
Many glaciers in central himalayas are indeed receding, and its a fact. Not that they are warmer now, but because from past few years, there has been little winter snow in these areas.
The ski slopes of Auli, which used to be snowed out in winters, now are devoid of snow many times. Last year Auli did not get a snow season.
This year in June higher reaches of himachal got a few feet of snow. Not unusual, but definitely unusual in the peak of summer!
So the weather is changing, but who is changing it I dunno. I hope it can be fixed, because it causing a lot of food supply problems. Fruits are out of reach of many, and if this continues, even cereals will become precious.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Before you yell "get it right" to others, and then ramble on about "just two data points", how about reading TFA ?
oh, look:
He has not only followed in the footsteps of Mallory but also those of Italian photographer Vittorio Sella, whose work spanned the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The result is a then-and-now series of photographs from Tibet, Nepal and near K2 in Pakistan - all of which show glaciers in retreat.
It appears that there are lots more than just two data points. It's just the /. summary and maybe limited space or journalistic choice at the BBC that made them pick out only one specific picture set to show.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"It takes quite a bit of arrogance to believe that humanity can change the Earth's climate that much, that fast."
Earth's surface: 510,072,000 Km^2
Earth's population: 6,856,832,000
Mean earth surface per inhabitant: 0,074 Km^2/habitant, or, to give it in "real international standards units", about 13,7 football fields.
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that a single man can alter 13,7 football fields within his lifetime through farming, mining, driving, building, etc.?
As opposed to the sun which has a surface area of 6088000000000 Km^2 ?
That's 887 Km^2/habitant, or 164,377 of your "real international standards units" (football fields).
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that the variations in radiation from a superheated ball of gas at 5505C (9941F) might, just possibly, have some bearing on the situation ?
The sun may very well may have a bearing on the situation but you are not going to convince anybody that digging and pumping up billions of years worth of sequestered carbon over the last 60-70 years and releasing it into the atmosphere with wild abandon had no effect at all. But let's put the climate debate aside for a moment. He was talking pretty generally about the way that humans are affecting their environment. Facts like a drop in the wold tiger population from 100.000 at the beginning of the century to a mere 3000 today can hardly be blamed on the sun, there are huge areas of dead ocean where nothing survives in any numbers you can make a profit from catching and selling, the list goes on... Changes like that are undeniably due to human excesses, mismanagement, corruption, greed and very little else.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Before the climate gate emails were released I had heard of the "hockey stick" but I didn't look into it because I thought it was probably just anti-science oil company propaganda. But after hearing about the trick to "hide the decline", I looked into it more. Climate scientists wanted to get rid of the medieval warm period because if temps were just as warm in the recent past, then there couldn't be much worry about today. So they found some tree rings that showed temps were cool back in the medieval warm period. Problem was that some of these trees were saying that temps were also cool during the last 50 years. Instead of eliminating these lying trees from the data set, they covered up the inconvenient data for the last 50 years from the lying trees with thermometer measurements and left us to think that these lying trees were telling the truth about the temperatures 1000 years ago.
There seems to be two main defenses given by the climate science community for these cover ups. One is that some of the trees don't show this "divergence" from the thermometer temperatures. But if it is true that they have trees that give good data, then why not exclude the trees that lie? They can't claim they're reluctant to cherry pick the trees because this whole temperature from tree rings procedure demands picking out trees that are growth limited only by temperature and not anything else like water or CO2, and therefore cherry picking is inherently part of the process. And besides, even if they ought to leave the lying trees in, that's still no excuse to "hide the decline" in the final results.
The other defense is that other studies by other researchers using other proxies, like sediments, have come to similar conclusions about the medieval warm period. But that's kind of like saying "My methods may have been corrupt, but my good buddies who have defended my corrupt methods, have gotten similar results in their research." This defense doesn't alleviate my concerns. And even getting correct results doesn't justify corrupt methods.
If you think my criticisms of the hockey stick are harsh, imagine what the climate science community would think if someone like an oil company used similar methods in some research. Imagine an oil company found the medieval warm period was much hotter than today, but their results were based in part on rings from trees that showed temperatures from the last 50 years were much hotter than they really were, and the oil companies hid the results from the lying trees by replacing them with thermometer temps. But of course nobody would criticize that method if sediment studies from other oil companies showed the same results, right?
What IS unrealistic to to blame ONLY man to the exclusion of all other contributing factors, which is what the A in AGW and all the real debate is about.
Straw man weasel alert! No-one (NO-ONE) is saying that man is the only factor in climate change. You are pointing at the relatively small (natural) variation in climate that you could expect to occur over a couple of centuries and using it to spread FUD over the much larger anthropogenic variation.
The phenomenon of warming caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to humans burning fossil fuels was predicted by Arrhenius over 100 years ago.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
No. It's because you suffer from cognitive dissonance, and any evidence that clashes with your current world view merely reinforces it. In other words, you are walking case example of neuroscience at work.
Hi I'm the Cognitive Dissonance Troll. I'm here to point out that you are incorrectly using the phrase "Cognitive Dissonance"
Cognitive Dissonance does not mean that people reinforce their current world view because of conflict with a new evidence. What it does mean it that you feel discomfort because there is a clash between your current world view and the evidence the world presents. What a person does with that discomfort is not related to the dissonance, the dissonance is the discomfort.
Thank you for your time
The medieval warm period happened in northern Europe. At a global level there was no "medieval warm period".
Here's the pesky facts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#By_world_region
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/werent-temperatures-warmer-during-the-medieval-warm-period-than-they-are-today/
Sorry for bursting your cozy little bubble.
No sig today...
Ah, I see. "Denialism" is what zealots used to call "heresy":
No, denialism is what we usually call "unwillingness to accept reality". If a truth is inconvenient (it's times like these I hate the name of that movie) then deny, deny, deny. Well, forget Al Bore for a minute and take a look at the science involved. We know what CO2 does. We know we release orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanoes, and we know their CO2 is a driver of weather. Cancer rates double in the industrial revolution and denialists want to claim that it's because people live longer, but a) lifespans did not increase so very much at this time and b) we now know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the industrial revolution caused positively carcinogenic compounds in the atmosphere to be multiplied several times. It's always the same; the people who have everything invested in a process of raping the earth want to claim that she was asking for it. You don't have to be a coal miner or a logger to benefit from modern industrial society, of course; every time you discard a disposable plastic plate or get your iPhone replaced for some failure that never should have been made you're not only making your own contribution but you're deriving a feeling of security from the ongoing destruction of the biosphere upon which we depend. When your sense of well-being is dependent on believing a lie, you apparently cling to that lie whether it appears to fit the facts or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, yes, that's the problem with climate scientists. They don't appreciate the personal impact of seeing scouring marks on mountains, so they forget that there's been an ice age recently!
Uh, NO. No one ever said "the current interglacial period was all our fault". Ice ages and interglacials are caused by Milankovich cycles, small variations in the earth's orbit and axial tilt.
It's just one thing: those orbital anomalies cause only a very, very small change in temperature by themselves. Not nearly enough to move the earth in and out of an ice age. Yet they have been found to be an excellent explanation for them. Why is that?
Because of climate feedbacks. As white ice sheets melt and turns into dark ocean, the sun absorbs more of the energy striking it. As the oceans warm, their capacity to dissolve gases is reduced, causing them to release higher amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Causing further warming, causing further melting. The earth keeps warming, but all things that become warmer emit more heat radiation. Eventually it becomes hot enough that the heat radiation out is in balance with the additional energy absorbed. But by then the tiny change in temperature from an orbital change has turned an ice age into an interglacial.
I recommend you start read Uppsalainitiativet since you presumably speak Swedish.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
You mean the poor farmer in Bangladesh will experience the same hardship from sea level rise than a Miami millionaire? One loses his livelihood and the other has to move his yacht pier up 3 feet - yes, that seems about the same.
Yes, the 2.8mm/year rate of sea level rise is sure to take away the livelihood of that farmer in Bangladesh... he should start running now, or else he may never escape!!!!!
You don't realize the absurdity of your extremist appeals to emotion BECAUSE YOU DONT EVEN KNOW THE FACTS OF THE VERY SHIT YOUR ARE SUPPORTING.
No, you don't know the facts of the "shit" you are supporting. To start with, Bangaldeshi farmers can't start running because they live in one of the most densely populated areas on earth and the national boundaries there have been drawn in the 20th century to stop traditional migrations. And while 2.8mm/y may sound like nothing, try to remember that a) it has been going on for decades, b) that projection is probably too low and c) it is already causing serious problems in low-lying island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives as well as in Bangladesh itself.
So get your head out of your fat Western ass and start paying attention.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates