55,000 glaciers
Deutsche Welle last July on South Asia and the melting glaciers:
Heat waves are melting Himalayan glaciers on which hundreds of million people rely, flooding villages and leaving residents without drinking water. Climate change heats up Asia’s highlands faster than other regions.
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The central Asian mountain region – also known as High-mountain Asia – includes the Himalayan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains. Stretching from China to Afghanistan, it is home to 55,000 glaciers that together store more fresh water than anywhere else on the planet outside the North and South Poles. The meltwater feeds the 10 biggest riverrs in Asia, in whose basins almost 2 billion people live. The Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra rivers alone are sources of water for the livelihoods of 750 million people, according to a 2015 World Bank report. The Yangtze river in China – the biggest on the continent – and the Mekong in South-East Asia also dependend on Himalayan waters.
But hotter temperatures put them at risk. According to the United Nations Development Program, temperatures in the Himalayas are rising twice as fast as the global average, melting ice and cutting snowfall. If world leaders fail to honor their promise to try to limit global warming to 1.5 C, between half and two-thirds of the total ice mass in the mountains of Central Asia will have disappeared by the end of the century.
World leaders are failing to honor their promise.
World leaders are always too busy worrying about the price of oil, inflation, recession, The Economy, industry, growth, profits, to do anything about global boiling. It’s the short term versus the slower but fatal long term.
World leaders, at least the democratically elected ones, would find themselves voted out of office if they honoured their promise, and so would cease to be World leaders. And the autocrats clearly don’t give a shit. It’s a hell of a bind we find ourselves in.
Exactly. The elected ones can’t, the unelected ones won’t. I don’t see any escape from this bind.
I used to think we could “fix it” through political processes. I was wrong.
I used to think technology would come to our aid. Wrong again.
The sole solution is a dramatic reduction in population, and it looks like the planet will make that happen.
The Billionaires and Oligarchs will emerge with their billions saved, but nothing to buy, no workers to exploit, sharing their left over miserable lives with cockroaches.
Ron Cobb
The planet will make it happen and it will carry so much else off with it.
can’t and won’t are meaningless in the context of eight billion people and industrial civilization. Mad Mad ahead.
No they’re not. Eight billion people and industrial civilization are exactly why they’re not.
Eight billion people and industrial civilization didn’t happen all by themselves, particularly the industrial part. Human decisions have brought us to where we are. Our situation was not inevitable. The course we’ve taken was full of historical accidents, but it was not accidental. Choices and trade-offs were made. We could have left fossil fuels in the ground; we could have used them at a lower rate, we could have shared this wealth more equitably, perhaps reducing the spike in human numbers.
The carrying capacity of Earth for human population depends very much on the lifestyle(s) those humans lead. The planet can’t support eight billion people living a billionaire lifestyle; even eight billion of us leading an average North American or European lifestyle is impossible. Hell, it won’t handle eight billion at an even more modest level for very long either. The question we should be asking is not how much can we extract before everything collapses, but how little can we get by on in order to buy ourselves time? What is it we’re trying to save? Business as usual got us where we are; do we carry on in the same course? If we try to bring our baggage into the lifeboat with us, everybody dies. What is our choice? It’s a matter of “sustainable development” vs sustainable life.
How is it that we’ve managed to bring the human story of a quarter of a million years so close to destruction in the course of the last five hundred? I think the beginning of our end lies in the global expansion and competition of European empires, which ushered in the collision of the “Old World” with the “New,” and shaped and drove the ensuing exploitation and destruction of the latter by the former. There’s more to it than that, but I think this epochal usurpation is one of the main turning points that has brought us to the edge of the abyss we now face. Combine this planetary scale social and ecological turnover with the sudden, one-time, unregulated injection of hundreds of millions of years worth of stored carbon-based energy within social structures that valourized, rewarded and depended upon extreme inequalities of wealth, and the road to disaster was well and truly charted, if not yet fully paved. This sudden, brief period of unprecedented material wealth and comfort (for some) has been built within a fragile bubble pumped into grotesque tumescence by the immolation of the necessities of life for all beings. It cannot last. It will not last. We’re about to learn that the Invisible Hand of the marketplace is no match for the Invisible Hand of bioenergetic, material, and physical limits, which has been operating for far longer, and is much less forgiving of bad decisions.