Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China
AS an expedition from Chinese state television worked its way across the remote Tibetan plateau earlier this year, the explorers were amazed by what they found.
The plateau has been called the world’s third largest ice store after the North and South Poles. Yet according to Chinese scientists, the “third pole” is warming up faster than anywhere else on earth.
The TV team found bare rock where glaciers had retreated. Lakes had dried up. Lush grassland had turned to desert. The livestock was dead, the farmers impoverished.
They brought back a visual lesson in global warming so stark that censors allowed the programme makers to broadcast a frank exposé. Their film attracted the attention of the Communist party’s leaders and has put climate change at the centre of a remarkably open debate in China ahead of a summit on the issue in Copenhagen next month.
More...
The speed and scale of change on the Tibetan plateau have made Chinese leaders react to something they understand — a potential threat to the future of China itself.
...
The plateau’s 36,000 glaciers, which once extended for 18,000 square miles, could vanish before mid-century if present rates of warming persist. More than 80% of them are in retreat. The overall area has shrunk by 4.5% in the past 20 years.
Most ominous of all, in the area that Chinese know as Sanjiangyuan, where three mighty rivers rise — the Yangtze, the Yellow and the Mekong — the headwaters run shallow and weak, threatening the water supplies for hundreds of millions of people.
In the past 30 years the thawing of permafrost, a layer of soil that is usually frozen all the year round, has changed the landscape profoundly.
“There were 4,077 lakes and now 3,000 of them have disappeared,” said Xin Hongyuan, a geologist in Qinghai...
...
“The snow is thawing and the snowline has risen from 4,600 metres to 5,300 metres. The Jianggendiru glacier, which is the main water supply of the Yangtze, has been degenerating fast since 1970, and when the glaciers shrink there will be a water crisis in the Yellow and Yangtze rivers.”
The Yellow river, for example, supplies water to a fifth of China’s 1.3 billion population and serves 50 big cities along its 3,395 miles.
In recent years it has sometimes slowed to a trickle. Once it virtually stopped flowing for 226 days, causing urban waterpipes to run dry and confronting downstream provinces with huge financial losses...
Originally posted by HotSauce
Well lets all go back to the 16th century because some f'ing ice melted.
There may well be global warming, but can you prove it is going to be any better or worse for humans than the temp 50 years ago.
...nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply...
Originally posted by HotSauce
...your ALLEGED global warming....
Originally posted by HotSauce
Not for me it doesn't. I don't live in Asia. We have plenty of water where I live.
You're not a long-range thinker, I see...
Out of curiosity, when the very livelihood of a billion people comes into jeopardy, and you have a lot of what they need, what do you think is likely to happen????
Hope you have big guns.
What I am pointing out is a seemingly objective and profound change in our environment-- however it occurs.
Originally posted by HotSauce
Look the way I see it is the day I wake up gasping for oxygen and the earth is so hot that just walking to my car makes me spontaneously combust... then maybe, just maybe, I would be willing to pay extra money for global warming. But I would still have to sit down and think about it.
