Nepal: world highest Cabinet meeting at Everest - Himalayan glaciers retreating fast, will they disappear?

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Faster than predicted: Himalayan glacier decapitated, endangers water resources

Energy companies remove the tops of entire mountains. Now it turns out humanity’s use of that coal is removing the tops of entire glaciers. Climate models have repeatedly underestimated the speed and scale of major climate change impacts. That is why climate scientists - and indeed everyone but the blinkered deniers - are increasingly desperate that the we cut emissions sharply and quickly.

A major new study by leading international cryosphere scientists, including American’s own rock ice star, Lonnie Thompson,”Mass loss on Himalayan glacier endangers water resources”, finds yet another key impact occurring faster than predicted - the melting of the Naimona’nyi Glacier in the Himalaya (Tibet). The study concludes ominously: "If Naimona’nyi is characteristic of other glaciers in the region, alpine glacier meltwater surpluses are likely to shrink much faster than currently predicted with substantial consequences for approximately half a billion people."

The study notes that Naimona’nyi is the highest glacier (6 kilometers above sea level) "documented to be losing mass annually." MSNBC reports: "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…. But when the team analyzed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them."

Himalayan glaciers are retreating fast & could disappear

“Himalayan glaciers are retreating fast and could disappear within the next 50 years, experts warned at a conference in Nepal’s capital looking at the regional effects of global warming. The melting ice fields have also caused a dramatic increase in the number and size of glacial lakes now risk bursting and devastating mountain communities, delegates at the conference said. ‘If temperatures continue to rise as it is, then there will be no snow and ice in the Himalayas in 50 years time,’ said Surendra Shrestha, the regional director for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Glaciers in the Himalayas, a 2,400-kilometre (1,500-mile) range that sweeps through Pakistan, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan, provide headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers, a lifeline for the 1.3 billion people who live downstream. But temperatures in the region have been increasing by between 0.15 and 0.6 degrees Celsius (0.27 and 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade for the last 30 years.”

Himalayan glaciers 'could disappear within 30 years' due to global warming

The rise in global temperatures could result in the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035. Experts have warned that the glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world - and fear that there could be serious repercussions.

The glaciers form a constant reservoir that feeds the major rivers of South Asia, such as the Ganges, the Indus and the Brahmaputra. Without the glaciers the flow of these rivers would become seasonal, leaving the livelihoods and lives of tens of millions of people swinging between flood and drought.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest glaciers in the Himalayas - Kolhai in Kashmir - receded by nearly 22 metres last year, said Muneer Ahman of India's National Geophysical Research Institute. The disappearing snow is being blamed on the warming temperatures, and the finger has been pointed at Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABC), three of which are suspended across Asia. These are clouds of pollutants up to 1.8 miles thick which have a complex effect on the atmosphere, alternately masking and magnifying climate change.

Cabinet meeting at Mt. Everest - Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks Friday and held a Cabinet meeting amid the thin air of Mount Everest to highlight the danger global warming poses to glaciers.

Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks Friday and held a Cabinet meeting amid Mount Everest's frigid, thin air to highlight the danger global warming poses to glaciers, ahead of next week's international climate change talks.

The ministers, wearing yellow oxygen masks and purple sashes reading “Save the Himalayas,” sat at folding tables set up on a plateau with the snow-capped peak of Everest behind them. “The Everest declaration was a message to the world to minimize the negative impact of climate change on Mount Everest and other Himalayan mountains,” Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal said.

The event came ahead of the international climate change conference next week in Copenhagen. The talks are aimed at agreement on measures to check the rise in global temperatures that scientists warn could lead to devastating results in rising sea levels, shrinking access to drinking water, shifting agriculture and spreading diseases.

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Photos courtesy of Gemunu Amarasinghe / AP, bring-the-change.blogspot.com, Reuters, Barcroft Media, Getty Images / Paula Bronstein, Scanpix / AFP, and Climate Crisis Coalition / climateofourfuture.org

Original Source: Climate Progress, Climate of Our Future, Daily Mail, and UN Copenhagen Summit