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 The Weekly Report

  WEEK 25 June 10th to 16th 2002

  http://www.midnight-fire.net/theweeklyreport/theweeklyreport.html

  WARMING WORLD ON THIN ICE
  Rapidly melting glaciers threaten death to millions by making huge
areas uninhabitable

  Ian McNaught-Davis has spent a long time in the mountains. Stocky and
affable, the president of mountaineering's international association,
the UIAA, is not easily fazed. But when he hiked into the glaciers
surrounding the world's highest mountains on a UIAA mission funded by
the United Nations Environment Programme, he was profoundly shocked.
For generations of explorers, environmentalists and local people, these
cold Himalayan valleys, with glaciers that stretch for miles, seemed to
symbolise a kind of cold, brutal permanence. After hiking through zero
visibility and atrocious weather for five days, McNaught-Davis emerged
into a sherpa village surrounded by breathtaking scenery. There he was
confronted with a shocking truth: the glaciers on Everest were melting
alarmingly quickly.
  McNaught-Davis listened as kinsmen of Nepalese sherpa Tenzing Norgay,
who conquered Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, reported a rapid
retreat of the Khumbu glacier from which the two pioneers set out.
Sherpas and Buddhist lamas told him the glacier no longer reached to
where Hillary's base camp tents were pitched: it had melted three miles
up the valley. To check their accounts, McNaught-Davis climbed up to a
glacial meltpool at 5,000 meters that 20 years ago was marked on maps as

a series of small ponds.
  He found that the ponds had merged into a vast lake more than a mile
long. 'It was huge. I was completely amazed,' he said. 'Further up the
glacier you can see more ponds forming.'  And it is happening so quickly

that map makers cannot keep up. Locally, the prospect of these glacial
lakes bursting their banks and obliterating whole villages is
frightening. Globally, McNaught-Davis believes what mountaineers are
seeing first is a bellwether for the climate change affecting us all.
  'It is a harbinger, a clue that something terrible is happening. Some
scientists say "It must be other factors", but when you talk to people
who have lived and climbed in these mountains for 60 years they say it
is getting warmer, and the glaciers are shrinking at a sprint.'
  Closer to home in the Alps, mountaineers report that rock pillars held

on to their crags by ice for thousands of years are simply crumbling
away as the ice melts. The climbing and skiing resort of Chamonix is
under threat in the longterm, as the peaks around Mont Blanc begin to
lose their ice and become more prone to avalanches.
  McNaught-Davis said a recent visit to the Eiger in Switzerland was a
shock too. 'The north face used to have three massive ice fields. The
last time I was there, there was one left, and it was almost gone.'
  Glaciers on the African peaks of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya are
receding rapidly, and the same is happening in the South American Andes.

  It is not only the mountain glaciers that are melting. American Nasa
scientists say the rate at which the huge Greenland ice sheet is melting

has increased by a fifth in the last two decades. This is because more
meltwater is trickling down from the surface of the sheet to the bedrock

1,200 metres below. The water 'lubricates' the path of the whole sheet,
causing it to slip faster towards the sea. Team member Jay Zwally said
such a process had never before been detected in large ice sheets.
  Nasa believes global warming could be to blame - and it is the first
time the scientists (at NASA - editor's note) have suggested such a
link. This pattern is repeated in all the world's coldest places.
Antarctica has been the scene of huge collapses of ice shelves. In the
Arctic, seasonal melting around the North Pole has led to a suggestion
that soon shipping will be able to navigate the North West Passage from
the Atlantic to the Pacific.
  All this comes as the world's environment Ministers failed at a
meeting in Bali last week to agree tough action to halt global warming
and wipe out poverty. They now approach the Earth Summit in Johannesburg

in August in disarray and facing accusations of betrayal from
environmental groups.
  Kate Hampton, international climate campaigner for Friends of the
Earth, sees a direct link between disagreement among Western nations
about how to tackle pollution and the reports of vanishing ice sheets.
'Glaciers are the water towers of the world - vital for storage. If they

are melting fast this has grave implications for the people who live
locally but is also a sign of global warming.
  'Water supplies everywhere are under threat from climate change,' she
said.  Water is a vital bargaining chip in any Middle East peace talks.
While politics and religion grab the headlines, shrinking water
resources in this dry region are always a major factor when negotiators
draw lines on maps.
  Hampton warned that without serious strategies to reverse global
warming, the next few decades would see tens of millions of 'climate
refugees' fleeing regions in Africa and Asia, where extreme drought and
floods become the norm.
  'What will happen when millions of Bangladeshis from the flood plains
are literally washed out, and end up spilling into poor parts of India?'

she said.
  In the US scientists are warning that the 'sunshine state' of
California could become the 'desert state'.
  The Intergovernmental Conference on Climate Change has already
established that the average temperature on Earth rose by 0.6 C in the
twentieth century. They predict it will be between 1.4 C and 5.8 C
warmer by 2100 than it was in 1990. The sea could rise by between nine
and 88cms. The higher end of these forecasts spells an environmental
apocalypse. Today it means a few disappointed ice climbers, but by the
end of the century it could mean death for tens of millions.  In Britain

the winters are already becoming warmer, with violent storms and flash
floods more frequent. Hampton said the reports of disappearing Himalayan

glaciers confirmed what many scientists and environmentalists had been
saying for a decade.
  'This is a serious issue in areas where the people who live there are
the least responsible for causing the problem - industrialised nations
are not getting to grips with this in the face of the most overwhelming
evidence,' she said.
  The Kyoto protocol was meant to make the climate targets reached at
the Rio Earth Summit 10 years ago more enforceable. But while the
European Union is preparing to sign up to the protocol this year the US
first watered it down, then walked away from it - holding the world's
climate hostage, said Hampton.
  Campaigners are worried that what should in effect be an emergency
summit to save the planet in Johannesburg will be at best a farce and at

worst a confirmation of the power of corporate America over the
environment - with President George W. Bush presiding as
polluter-in-chief.
  Ian McNaught-Davis believes every car-driving Westerner munching fruit

flown in from halfway around the globe must take a share of
responsibility for pumping climate-warming carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
  'It's about time we slowed this whole thing down and stopped it. If
the US would get off their arses, maybe someone would sit up and take
notice,' he added.

  Editor's comment: Japanese scientists has already predicted that the
temperature will rise at least 10 degrees Celsius within the next thirty

years, stating that the IPCC numbers are far too conservative, that they

fail totally to take the acceleration process inherit in the system into

account, and that between 70 to 80 percent of all ice on Earth will melt

within the mentioned 30 year period.
  This will result in at the very least a 50 meter searise.




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