Chinese Glaciers Melting At 'Shocking' Pace, Scientists Say (cnn.com) 73
An anonymous reader writes: Glaciers in China's bleak Qilian mountains are disappearing at a shocking rate as global warming brings unpredictable change and raises the prospect of crippling, long-term water shortages, scientists say. The largest glacier in the 800-kilometer (500-mile) mountain chain on the arid northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau has retreated about 450 meters since the 1950s, when researchers set up China's first monitoring station to study it. The 20-square kilometer glacier, known as Laohugou No. 12, is criss-crossed by rivulets of water down its craggy, grit-blown surface. It has shrunk by about 7% since measurements began, with melting accelerating in recent years, scientists say. Equally alarming is the loss of thickness, with about 13 meters (42 feet) of ice disappearing as temperatures have risen, said Qin Xiang, the director at the monitoring station. "The speed that this glacier has been shrinking is really shocking," Qin told Reuters on a recent visit to the spartan station in a frozen, treeless world, where he and a small team of researchers track the changes. The Tibetan plateau is known as the world's Third Pole for the amount of ice long locked in the high-altitude wilderness. But since the 1950s, average temperatures in the area have risen about 1.5 Celsius, Qin said, and with no sign of an end to warming, the outlook is grim for the 2,684 glaciers in the Qilian range. Across the mountains, glacier retreat was 50% faster in 1990-2010 than it was from 1956 to 1990, data from the China Academy of Sciences shows.
Glacier National Park replaces signs... (Score:1)
For more than 10 years, Glacier National Park in Montana had signs that said all of its namesake glaciers would be gone by 2020. Now it's replacing the signs because the glaciers are still in place...
Re:Glacier National Park replaces signs... (Score:5, Insightful)
One spot prediction is wrong, therefore ALL of GW is wrong? I suspect it's the polar vortex pattern that's been growing of late. It brings down artic air. GW does not predict every spot will get warmer. Some are expected to get colder as weather patterns shift.
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Apparently the original study those signs were based on was actually estimating something like 2030, so the signs weren't even in line with that prediction. They also knew definitively that they would still be there by 2020 years ago, but they didn't have the budget to replace the signs. In any case, the models from the original study were wrong and the glaciers will probably be around past 2030. They're just shrinking, like pretty much every glacier in the world (it's not perfectly steady as some shrink fo
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Yup, totally [yaleclimat...ctions.org] all still there! If fact, I think it might have even got a little bigger!
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Whoever does base manufacturing is going to pollute a lot. Either the world population lives with less manufactured stuff, or some factory somewhere is going to pollute, whether it's in China or Timbuktu. It can be filtered to a degree, but there's probably a practical limit.
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I suspect there is a point of diminishing returns such that the cost of further reduction jacks up the price significantly such that people won't or can't pay. It would be interesting to see studies on such.
I do wish products were more repairable or lasted longer. I had to throw out a printer simply because I couldn't find drivers for it matching the newer OS. Shame.
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If a product's price needs to build in the real-world cost of its manufacture and people won't or can't pay for it, that sounds like a win.
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Going back to the stone age will certainly "solve" global warming.
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It sure would, but there's lots of ground between the stone age and our current consumerism. There's a sweet spot in there somewhere. Let's aim for that.
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The area of middle ground is pretty wide. Conservatives will more or less say live for today and let the future worry about it. (Many think the Rapture is due soon.)
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A Chinese spokesman claimed that China never had glaciers, and that anyone who posts photographs of the glaciers will be sent straight to jail.
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Well, technically those glaciers are in Tibet.
Technically Tibet is its own country. But well,
it got conquered by China and annexed shortly
after WWII.
So probably they are good in double-thinking.
It is China when it is good to be China, not
otherwise.
And the 75 percenters do nothing (Score:1)
If 75 % of the world does nothing on pollution other than agreeing on paper only with no action to climate accords, I'm done.
Yes China, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Africa, South America that's the do nothing 75 %.
I've done my part for the last 40 years and not going to worry about doing anything more until air quality in the top 50 cities in each of those 75 % has average air quality equal to San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, Boston and Miami.
Per-capita comparisons mean nothing, we can measure av
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CO2 lasts 300-1000 years in the atmosphere. I doubt that AMerica has been emitting 1000 years. [nasa.gov]OTOH, China and EUrope HAVE been emitting large quantities for several millenniums. In fact, both Europe AND China have burned through most of what was considered MUCH LARGE COAL RESERVES than what America ever had.
CHina's emissions CONTINUE to grow, with even their CO2 / capita as being above Europe, and heading towards what AMerica is at. OTOH, A
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CO2 lasts 300-1000 years in the atmosphere. I doubt that AMerica has been emitting 1000 years. [nasa.gov]OTOH, China and EUrope HAVE been emitting large quantities for several millenniums. In fact, both Europe AND China have burned through most of what was considered MUCH LARGE COAL RESERVES than what America ever had.
Even just 100 years ago [ourworldindata.org] the level of CO2 emissions was a tiny fraction (less than 10%) of what it is today. 300 years ago it was practically zero. Less than 10 million t, compared with todays over 35 billion t. [ourworldindata.org]
Why do you always lie and just constantly make shit up WindBourne?
Nobody could be stupid enough to think anywhere in the world back then could mine as much coal and oil etc as we do now with our massive fossil fuel industries.
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But haven't the majority of the other 25% outsourced their pollution to that 75%?
Can't be true (Score:1)
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Biden's gonna do everything his rich donors tell him to do to stop climate change, don't you worry. His team will play fair, like the Washington Generals. They won't cheat you like those Harlem Globetrotters.
What?
Both teams are owned by the same guy?
Well shit.
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A parting gift for our fellow bios (Score:4, Insightful)
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Grab your tinfoil hat man, I think it's blown a bit sideways.
I'm pretty sure that we haven't yet rendered the planet uninhabitable and are not anywhere near having done so. Yea, we've messed some stuff up and left an indelible mark on this planet, but I seriously doubt that we could, beyond a total thermonuclear war involving every nuclear power on earth, kill off every human being here.
We may be facing having to reduce our population and dealing with the mess we've made may be hugely expensive, but we w
Re:A parting gift for our fellow bios (Score:4, Informative)
Glaciers are the source of many river systems, the source of their headwaters. Those rivers are literally the lifeblood of civilization. Sure the planet won't be uninhabitable, but you see rivers disappear and you're going to see the bread baskets relied upon by hundreds of millions of people disappear. You do understand, I trust, that you can't grow grains or raise livestock without water.
This isn't about the planet becoming uninhabitable, it's about the areas of this planet that have fostered civilization for thousands of years suddenly finding those rivers at risk. We're fucking up the conditions that made civilization possible to begin with. Couple that with shifting rain belts, and then the American Midwest may have its own day of reckoning.
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They still can't make rivers magically keep going when the headwaters dry up. The Three Gorges Dam was a pretty significant, and massively flawed, engineering project.
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Glaciers are the source of many river systems, the source of their headwaters. Those rivers are literally the lifeblood of civilization.
But the rivers won't go away. When the glaciers are neither contracting nor expanding, the rivers are fed by rainfall. The rainfall doesn't care whether there's a glacier there or not. All the glacier does is delay the rain from reaching the rivers during the winter.
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https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/himalayas-melting-climate-change/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-himalayas-idUSKCN1PT157
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"But the rivers won't go away. When the glaciers are neither contracting nor expanding, the rivers are fed by rainfall. The rainfall doesn't care whether there's a glacier there or not"
Exactly, instead of waiting 10.000 years in a slow river it floods cities all at once, each time it rains.
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There *are* answers to that. Dams. They aren't cheap, or without side effects, and they depend upon terrain features that aren't everywhere available, but they *do* work...as long as you keep them well maintained. And you need to build them sized for the eventual need rather than for the current need.
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But the rivers won't go away. When the glaciers are neither contracting nor expanding, the rivers are fed by rainfall. The rainfall doesn't care whether there's a glacier there or not. All the glacier does is delay the rain from reaching the rivers during the winter.
It actually sounds like you're saying that the river _will_ go away, but only seasonally.
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And plenty of regions have due to global warming less rainfall.
From the point of view of the people living there, the river is going away. As it has no water/not enough water, when they need the water. For example, the last 1000km of the Mekong river.
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But the original statement was about glaciers vanishing.
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The Mekong river is not fed by rainfall, but by glaciers in Himalaya. Like basically every river in Asia.
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We've got a short memory. It's only around a century ago that the great plains of the US were called "the dust bowl". We're currently using water at a faster rate than it is accumulating, and drawing down the water table. Any year now we can expect that to bite us. If we don't get salinization of the soil first.
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Ever heard of positive feedback loops?
We're already seeing change, I'm pretty sure that unless there is some absolutely massive measures put in place to reverse what we're seeing already, we have totally fucked op the planet in terms of habitability. We're just sitting back and watching it all unfold now.
Humans as a whole a fucking stupid.
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The events being surprise is the difference between weather and the averages of climate. They are seeing weather events rather than climate events, even though the weather change is driven by climate. So weather driven hot spots generating far more rapid change than predicted by the average of climate models.
Melting glaciers melt into the sea, raising sea level much faster than predicted, the locals to avoid the most as really, really, really, bad investments, the US East Coast, anything that would be impa
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I got it, fill it with an annoying virus that keeps people from going out and having a good time.
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Glacial meltwater from Chinese controlled territory supply drinking water to 1.8 billion people in China and South Asia.
All your water doesn't have to disappear, all you have to have are marginal changes in seasonality of your water supply to destabilize a country. And as regime feel less internally secure, the more externally belligerent you can expect them to get.
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No shit, Sherlock. (Score:3)
In case any dimwits haven't noticed yet: *Everything* is melting at a "shocking" pace. ... >>>OMG, if only we could've known! .... Seriously, who still needs scientific studies for this genius discovery??!?
Glaciers are down to 3 (three) in the Alps and they'll be gone in 5 years or so. I expect land ice to be just about gone in a decade or two. Globally. We're beyond a tipping point and the tipping has just started. Pro tip: Don't buy land in Florida. Or Denmark. Or at similar heights.
I only hope that the new equilibrium we'll reach in 35 years or so will be good enough for some form of modern civilization to survive. But with the methane clathrate gun getting ready to fire that might be questionable as well.
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It's not surprising, but it's important that it be documented. It seems like decision makers don't believe anything unless it's happening locally.
P.S.: This isn't a research report, it's a news report. And it's not the first even in this area. It's one of the reasons for the trouble between India and China...there's this river that both want to claim the water from.
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Climate change is not a political tool (even if some like to use it as one).
Let's not bring politics into science - it doesn't fit well. The converse will fit better.
It's a desert and nobody lives there (Score:1, Troll)
I don't mean to fly in the face of all this alarmist rhetoric, but you do understand that this region is VERY dry and unpopulated to start with. That the glaciers are receding is not some huge indicator of some major climate problem that's going to sneak up and kill billions of people. Yea, the climate is changing and it's no surprise that this area would be affected in this way.
So can we cut the chicken little sky falling act?
Re:It's a desert and nobody lives there (Score:5, Informative)
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it's a desert and nobody lives there and those glaciers regulate temperature, humidity and ground water for the surrounding regions and provide water security for probably a billion people.
Their presence influence temperature, humidity, and ground water, certainly. "Regulate" is overstating it. But water security for probably a billion people, absolutely not.
It only takes a moment's thought to see how that is impossible. Especially in China, with some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the planet, the influence of glaciers on the presence of the river is obviously minimal. The rivers those billion people use for water have been there for thousands of years. Importantly, and c
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So many science trolls on Slashdot who hate the truth. The EPA article I cited pre-dates the Trump administration, nitwit. And includes citations of its own. The truth hurts when you're a religious zealot.
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"That the glaciers are receding is not some huge indicator of some major climate problem that's going to sneak up and kill billions of people."
Yes, if they are thirsty, they can drink Perrier, oops, no, also fed by a glacier.
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"Best troll ever, believe me! I'll be on Mt. Trollmore and you can't do shit about it using your puny little slashdot point system! Invented by losers; probably never touched a woman. You can rig the votes to get me out of office, but you never ever can make me stop trolling and I'll keep trolling until I'm non-orange in the face! #MTGA!"
At what point are we going after the deniers? (Score:2, Interesting)
oh well (Score:2)
At least the Chinese have a solution in the works (Score:1)
China does it faster (Score:2)
China does everything faster, including melting glaciers! Come on, keep up.
It is Official (Score:2)
The Ice Age is over.