Hot Times on the Roof

From the Independent:
Global warming is rapidly melting the ice-bound roof of the world, and turning it into desert, leading scientists have revealed.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences - the country's top scientific body - has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade. Each year enough water permanently melts from them to fill the entire Yellow River.

They added that the vast environmental changes brought about by the process will increase droughts and sandstorms over the rest of the country, and devastate many of the world's greatest rivers, in what experts warn will be an "ecological catastrophe".
More sandstorms, drought, and spreading desertification are only part of the problem. The big worry is loss of water supply:
Perhaps worst of all, the melting threatens to disrupt water supplies over much of Asia. Many of the continent's greatest rivers - including the Yangtze, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yellow River - rise on the plateau.

In China alone, 300 million people depend on water from the glaciers for their survival. Yet the plateau is drying up, threatening to escalate an already dire situation across the country. Already 400 cities are short of water; in 100 of them - including Beijing - the shortages are becoming critical.

Even hopes that the melting glaciers might provide a temporary respite, by increasing the amount of water flowing off the plateau - have been dashed. For most of the water is evaporating before it reaches the people that need it - again because of the rising temperatures brought by global warning.

It would be comforting to believe Bill Gray's story of a soon to occur global cooling cycle to cut in, triggered by his THC fluctuations - but I don't.

Comments

  1. Anonymous4:11 PM

    50% percent per decade means essentially gone by 2050. This information has been out there for a couple of years in fairly definite form, but each new piece of research makes things more definite. What does seem to be new is that a large proportion of the water is disappearing before it gets down into the flats. This is good news flooding-wise, but as the article points out it means the desertification and such will be more front-loaded than previously expected.

    The irony is that even the prospect of such a catastrophe in the relative short term isn't enough to galvanize people into action. One wonders what the talk on the street is in Beijing when one of these monster dust storms is underway.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CapitalistImperialistPig6:26 PM

    A student of Chinese pollution once told me that the average lifespan of a Chinese city dweller is 15 or so years shorter than for a Chinese living in the countryside. It's definitely good news that the Chinese government is allowing or promoting dissemination of this information.

    ReplyDelete

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