Forget the streams
It’s not in the future, it’s not 20 or 10 years from now, it’s now. The Himalayas are losing their ice.
When Padma Thinles was 11 years old, he lived in a city called Leh, in the northern Indian territory of Ladakh, on the Western side of the Himalayas. Then, it was a small village with streams brimming with freshwater. Now, “forget the streams,” said Thinles, who is now 21 and still lives in the region.
“There’s no water left in the sewers, either,” he said.
Despite the location of Leh in the upper Indus River Valley, which is usually flushed with water, global warming has caused an immense water shortage that has led to the shutdown of many agricultural operations critical to the region.
“In Ladakh, we used to get 5 to 6 feet of snow every year, but in 2017, it didn’t snow an inch,” said Akshit Seth, 27, who runs a school for underprivileged children in Himachal Pradesh.
And that’s not “just” a local problem – it’s a problem for everything downhill. What’s downhill is India.
As many as 2 billion people from South Asia to China are highly dependent for survival on the mountain range’s glaciers, which make up one of the world’s largest supplies of freshwater. And the world is set to lose about a third of that supply by 2100 because of global warming, a critical 2019 study found — even with the strictest possible climate crisis measures in place.
Are those measures in place? Hardly.
Glacial meltwater is an essential part of the region’s hydrology. The Himalayas are the source for a number of the world’s biggest rivers, which provide water for agriculture, drinking, and personal use: the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Indus and the Mekong. But the glaciers have lost about a third of their freshwater supply since 1975, a June 2019 study published in Science Advances found. And, more worryingly, in the 21stcentury, the rate of loss has been twice what it was in the last quarter of the 20th, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature.
What does that mean? It means literally billions of people affected by crop failures as well as lack of water. It’s as grim as it could get short of the planet sprouting thousands of live volcanoes all at the same time.
Also, there is a high interdependence between the glaciers located in the Himalayas and the energy security of India. Almost 33 percent of the country’s thermal electricity and 52 percent of its hydropower is dependent on the water from rivers originating in the Himalayas.
So add that. Water shortage, food shortage, power shortage.
Water shortage, food shortage, power shortage. Wars.
Greenwashing, your TERF!
But seriously, yes, very frightening.
I was just saying to a friend that we should send emails to each other, timed by Gmail to arrive in 70 or 100 years, in which we ask: “Is there still a world?” And the answer will either be: “We did something about climate change, against all odds, and found some method to reverse it”, or there won’t be an answer, because we’ll both be dead.
(I’m assuming that life-extension technology will be developed enough by then that if we haven’t died from climate-related causes, we won’t have died of senescence in a mere 70 to 100 years.)
And still most people go about their life as if things are (relatively) normal. They don’t wear masks, they drive gas guzzlers, they crank up heating and air-conditioning, they act as if the world is infinite. I suspect the average American doesn’t see why they should care about India, anyway. An enormous population, most of them poor, they will not have the means to adapt.
Yes, and yet — I think that we need to keep having hope. It’s the only way forward.
Yup, when a good chunk of the Indian subcontinent and China becomes that badly stressed from drought and feminine that wars (civil or otherwise) start up, the people affected by drought/famine/war will not sit quietly in their homes and die. They’ll move on mass somewhere they think might be better. If ‘somewhere better’ doesn’t help them, they’ll take what they need/can, rather than die and watch their children die.
The Arab Spring was caused in part by years of drought, especially in Syria. Sure, not the only cause, but the stress and internal displacement contributed. The resulting wave of refugees and internal conflicts has already affected all our lives and cost western lives both directly and indirectly.
I think of my nieces and nephews and my friends children whose I cherish as if they were my own and I feel very sad for them.
If the water cannot be delivered to where the people are, the people will go to where the water is. Simple as that, and ’twas ever thus.
The irony is that the Earth has 71% of its surfacxe covered by water; saline sea water. However, modern cheap and reliable plastic pipe systems could deliver this valuable liquid to most of the world’s population, which mostly lives close to the sea or ocean. Cheap and easily constructed rooftop solar desalinators could turn that saline water into potable fresh water, providing as a spin-off cooling in summer (as the desalinators shade the roof) and warming in winter, as desalinators easily double as rooftop insulation.
Nitrates are highly soluble in water. Consequently, they are only found as mineral deposits in very dry locations, such as Las Salinas in Chile. Solar stills provided miners in the Chilean niitrate mines with all their fresh water around the beginning of the 20th C.
https://solaqua.stores.yahoo.net/solstilbas.html
AND they sit around in their parked cars WITH THE ENGINE RUNNING. It’s the one that drives me craziest because it is so fucking stupid and pointless yet it’s all over the place.
Weird. Why would anyone do that?
Why would anyone do that? To keep the A/C running, to keep power going for charging phones or using built-in electronic capabilities (radio, on-board navigation). I don’t love doing it, but it’s convenient, and it beats driving around aimlessly for the purpose of charging a phone and staying cool, especially when you’ve already managed to get where you need to go and are just waiting for someone or something.
You don’t need to have the engine running to charge a phone…
Only if that hope is laced with reality, and a dose of fear. I’ve tried the hope thing for decades; it never changed anyone’s behavior. I have seen behavioral changes when people are afraid of the future, and realize the need to act. Not so scared they are paralyzed, but scared. Pundits say you can’t succeed on fear, yet the GOP has been using that as their prime motivator to get people to vote Republican throughout my entire life. If no one is afraid, there is no reason to change their behavior.
As for desalination, the return of the brine to the ocean creates serious problems with increased salinity. In some places, the WHO is drilling hand pump wells, which has a lot of problems, and you have to have a sufficient supply of groundwater. Some places are having it shipped in, but that takes a lot of money (like they have in Saudi Arabia) and it simply moves the problem, because it takes three gallons of water to make one gallon of bottled water.
In short, I despair of a solution. We are definitely between that rock and hard place my mother always talked about. I’m sure there are solutions, but we won’t find them until people realize the urgency. Any solution we find is going to take changes in the rich countries, and for some asinine reason (greed, I would guess), these changes are always directed at the working poor, who don’t have the money to make the needed changes.
In the Atacama desert there are places where no rain has ever been detected in 400 years, but even there there is enough moisture in the wind off the ocean to make it worthwhile setting up nets to condense it and collect it. I don’t know if this is yet being done on an industrial scale but it’s certainly being done experimentally. I don’t know where cities like Antofagasta and Iquique get their water, but they must get it from somewhere. Rain in those places does occur, but extremely infrequently: when I went to Chile in 1980 there was a report in the newspaper that it had rained in Antofagasta for the first time since 1946. (Probably they weren’t counting a little light drizzle every couple of years.)
Sorry, Sackbut, I don’t think it does beat driving around aimlessly for the purpose of charging a phone and staying cool. I think people should do those things in other ways.
My wife has been to Antofagasta, but I haven’t. The furthest north I’ve been is the Elqui Valley; it’s pretty darn dry there, but it’s far from being the driest.
Blowing my own trumpet for a moment, there are two things I particularly remember about the visit to the European Southern Observatory (La Silla). We had to wait for about 45 minutes for permission to go up the mountain, and there was another group of about six people waiting as well. They were from the USA (our group was mixed Chilean-foreign), and they included a young woman with the longest hair I’ve ever seen. When we told each other who we were and our names, there was someone in the American group who had heard of me!
I don’t disagree with you. Yes, fear, but also hope; because if there’s no hope, there’s no point.
Re “You don’t need the engine running to charge a phone”, yes, you do. Some cars, including all the ones I have had in recent years, do not provide power to the ports with the engine off. One car provides power to one of the ports, but quickly warns you that you risk depleting the battery if you leave the engine off.
Re #15, the car uses more gasoline driving around than it does sitting still, so I do think, even from an impact standpoint, it is better to have the car sitting still and running than driving around pointlessly. I understand you would prefer the car be turned off, but that wasn’t one of the options I was comparing.
I do not approve of someone sitting in a car for several hours with the engine running. I do not, however, have an issue with sitting in a running car, occasionally, for up to maybe 30 minutes, usually far less, and I do so myself. I don’t routinely monitor how long other people are sitting in running cars, so I don’t know what’s typical. I don’t like doing it, but sometimes it’s the expedient thing to do.
GW asked why someone would do that, and I answered. It’s not a mystery.
I think things will get desperate and ugly everywhere. It might take a little longer in more affluent places, but if things break down in the human food supply chain, wealthy urban people will start to find it harder to locate anyone to sell them food soon enough. People closer to their food sources might do better for a bit longer, but will end up fighting off huge numbers hungry urbanites. Governments will find it hard to resist calls from hungry urbanites to commandeer food and take it away from farmers by force.
And how many of those fears have been completely imaginary.
We’ve painted ourselves into the corner of a burning building built on quicksand, that is collapsing around us during an earthquake, in the face of the storm surge of an oncoming hurricane. Our exploding numbers have resulted in a sudden and unprecedented confluence of planet-wide, inter-related resource, climate, and environmental crises in just a few generations. None of this was unforeseen, or unexpected, yet the warnings went unheeded, apart from half-hearted lip-service. Things will get much worse before they get better. I do not believe they will get better in our lifetime.
We are poorly equipped to handle disasters that are played out slowly and gradually. Events that are instantaneous geologically or astronomically speaking, are still centuries-long affairs for humans on the ground. By the time we notice the effects, it’s too late. Even if we could magically halt all CO2 emissions this instant, the amount in the system already has committed us to further degrees of warming we can ill afford. Even realistic courses of action that might be helpful are decades too late. There will still be great damage, great hardship, widespread extinction, and massive loss of human life. There is no way out, only through. None of the possible paths before us will be painless. Our slow reaction has seen to that. Some paths may be a bit less bad than others, though. The trick is finding these less bad ones.
I’m afraid of solutions that stand to make some people richer being implemented over better solutions that aren’t driven by profteering. I’m afraid of solutions that prioritize trying to keep the status quo alive as long as possible over more important goals. I’m afraid of “sexy”, expensive, grandiose, hasty, high-stakes, Big Science geo-engineering projects that promise fast, no-sacrifice, no-change-required results, that have disastrous, unintended consequences, that push their way to the top of the list because of the loudness and power of its advocates rather than the soundness of the proposed course of action.
OK, I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never driven a car that doesn’t provide power with the engine off but it doesn’t surprise me that such things exist. You’re not going to drain your battery charging the phone with the engine off, though. Heat and air conditioning, sure.
And meanwhile I keep reading articles about the falling birth rate by doomsayers who are sure we cannot survive if our numbers don’t continue exploding. We built an economic system based on continuous growth, and that isn’t feasible ecologically. You cannot have infinite growth in a finite world, and the piper was sure to stick out his hand for payment sometime.
I suspect we have passed the tipping point, but I do continue to try to have hope. It gets harder every day.
latsot, neither my car nor my husband’s will provide power when the engine is off. I was surprised when I heard there was such a thing…my husband’s late, lamented Oldsmobile would do that. None of the cars he had before or since would, and I never had a car that would. I learned at 40 about cars that do that.
I’m admittedly not the most informed person on this matter. I haven’t had a car for the last two or three years, but my last one was a 1990 model and the one before that was from 1976. I don’t have much expertise on new-fangled automobiles. The newest one I’ve ever owned was from 1994.
But all my wife’s cars have delivered power (via the cigarette lighter and, more recently, USB ports) with the engine off and her current one is only 3 years old. Maybe we’ve just been lucky. Or maybe it’s a US/UK thing.