Category: RT Newswire

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“As temperatures rise around the world, the effects on mountain
ice and snow are just as serious as those on the polar icecaps.”

” … not just people in the mountains who are at risk. 1.3 billion
people living downstream ….”
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NEPALI TIMES
Climactic change
http://www.nepalitimes.com/print.php?id=14644&issue=393

Seen and unseen dangers as global warming thaws the Himalaya
TOM OWEN-SMITH

From Issue #393 (2008-03-28 – 2008-04-03)

The snowline is moving higher, mountain streams
are rushing earlier in the year, the monsoons are
erratic and giant ropes of glaciers throughout
the Himalaya are retreating rapidly, swelling
newly-formed lakes at their snouts.

These Himalayan symptoms of global climate change
are happening within one generation. And their
impact won’t just affect countries like Nepal,
but also the wider Asian region.

Alarmed by the rapidity of warming and the lack
of reliable data on which to make predictions,
the Kathmandu-based International Centre for
Integrated Mountain Development is hosting an
international conference on the cryosphere
starting Monday.

“The cryosphere,” explained Mats Eriksson of
ICIMOD “is the part of the earth which is frozen
– icecaps, glaciers, snow cover, permafrost, and
frozen lakes and rivers.” As temperatures rise
around the world, the effects on mountain ice and
snow are just as serious as those on the polar
icecaps.

Over 50 scientists from Asia, North America and
Europe will attend the ICIMOD conference to share
information, plan future monitoring activities
among the world’s highest mountains and discuss
risk management strategies.

ICIMOD has led efforts to raise awareness of the
effects of climate change, and this month is
also sponsoring the Eco-Everest Expedition, which
aims to collect data on shrinking glaciers like
the Imja and Khumbu below Chomolungma, and
publicise the issue internationally. Political
tensions and much of the Himalaya being a war
zone make cross-border collection of snow
precipitation data and mapping difficult.

The conference will look at what will happen when
Himalayan glacial lakes burst, and other
hazards such as subsidence of land caused by
melted permafrost. ICIMOD’s Vijay Khadgi
said: “Many of these dangers are not immediately
obvious and may not manifest themselves
until there is a major earthquake, but we have to be prepared for them.”

The Himalayas are one of the world’s most
earthquake-prone regions. This fact combined
with fragile glacial lakes and destabilised
mountain slopes poses grave and growing danger of
flashfloods and landslides.

Long-term changes to the seasons, temperature and
precipitation are also making the
precarious lives of people here even more
insecure. More water falls as rain and less as
snow, and at different times of the year. In dry
areas such as Ladakh and northern Pakistan, which
depend on snowmelt for much of their water,
agriculture is already suffering from reduced
water in the growing season.

And it’s not just people in the mountains who are
at risk. 1.3 billion people living downstream in
the Indo-Gangetic plains, Burma, Southeast Asia
and China will also suffer when glacial ice on
the Tibetan Plateau is depleted.

The International Panel on Climate Change has
predicted that many Himalayan glaciers could melt
completely by as early as 2035. Meltwater-fed
rivers such as the Ganges, Indus, Huang He and
Yangtze may be reduced to trickles or stop
altogether in the dry season. This will
precipitate a food crisis not just for the
massive populations living in the river valleys,
but for the whole world which imports grain from
these regions.

Due to remoteness and lack of resources, the
processes and effects of climate change have
been researched less in the Himalaya than anywhere else in the world.

“There is a big need to understand what is
happening here,” said Eriksson. ICIMOD hopes
more coordinated research in the Himalaya can
provide the basis to prepare for the
after-effects of climate change.

Climate change is least understood in the Himalaya

Richard Armstrong is a senior research scientist
at the University of Colorado. He is in Kathmandu
this week to participate in an international
seminar by ICIMOD on ice and
snow induced disasters. Nepali Times asked him
about the dangers of climate change on our
glaciers.

Nepali Times: Is it now proven beyond doubt that
carbon emissions are causing climate change?

Richard Armstrong: We cannot prove the extent to
which the artificial carbon in the air has
contributed to climate change. However, if we
combine the temperature and carbon dioxide
records at the surface of the earth, we can easily see the correlation.

Is climate change causing Himalayan glaciers to shrink?

Glacial retreat is the most visually convincing
evidence of climate change for non-specialists.
Compare pictures from 50 years ago with today,
you don’t need complex data. But in the Himalaya
a possible secondary aspect that might have
contributed to the melting of the glaciers is the
Asian Brown Cloud, or particles that change the
reflectivity of the glaciers. But we have very
little data on that, and need more research.

How does glacial retreat here compare with other mountain regions?

Compared to other parts of the world, the pace of
glacial retreat is slowest in the Himalaya.
In the western hemisphere, the retreat rate is
very high due to their climatic pattern which
includes low precipitation and low humidity. The
glaciers of the European Alps and the
Rockymountains of North America have lost 40
percent of their area in the last hundred years.
The Himalaya is the least understood area with
regard to climate change.

Why is that?

The elevation range in the Himalayas has no
equivalent anywhere else in the world. We don’t
fully understand the climate above 6000m so at
such high elevations, we can only make
assumptions. We are fairly sure that European
glaciers will continue to shrink, but it’s
possible that global warming could even increase
the mass of some of the Himalayan
glaciers, as if the monsoon is enhanced there
will be an increase in precipitation, hence more
snow in very high areas.

How will people in the Himalayas be affected by these changes?

Water resources and human impact in terms of
water aren’t well quantified. What we need to
know is to what extent are people taking
advantage of excess water that wasn’t previously
available.

We hear you have been working with Al Gore.

Yes, two months ago Al Gore came for a half day
visit. Since he uses our data in his
presentations he had a lot of questions. He’s
doing a fabulous job in raising awareness about
global climate change, and meeting him was an
amazing experience. But it was also
depressing, because there is no doubt that
environmentally it would have been a different
world if Al Gore had been elected president.

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 Published on Thursday, March 27, 2008 by The Independent/UK
Million Acres of Guyanese Rainforest To Be Saved In Groundbreaking Deal
by Daniel Howden

A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests – paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as “utilities” that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation.0327 04

The agreement, to be announced tomorrow in New York, will secure the future of one million acres of pristine rainforest in Guyana, the first move of its kind, and will open the way for financial markets to play a key role in safeguarding the fate of the world’s forests.

The initiative follows Guyana’s extraordinary offer, revealed in The Independent in November, to place its entire standing forest under the protection of a British-led international body in return for development aid.

Hylton Murray-Philipson, director of the London-based financiers Canopy Capital, who sealed the deal with the Iwokrama rainforest, said: “How can it be that Google’s services are worth billions but those from all the world’s rainforests amount to nothing?” The past year has been a pivotal one for the fast- disappearing tropical forests that form a cooling band around the equator because the world has recognised deforestation as the second leading cause of CO2 emissions. Leaders at the UN climate summit in Bali in December agreed to include efforts to halt the destruction of forests in a new global deal to save the world from runaway climate change.

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Any questions?

ASW

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8VJVVVG1.htm
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS March 24, 2008, 3:21PM ET
Plum Creek Timber CEO earns $3.6M

By LAUREN SHEPHERD

NEW YORK

Plum Creek Timber Co. Inc. Chief Executive Rick R. Holley received
compensation the real estate investment trust valued at $3.6 million
in 2007, less than 1 percent higher than his 2006 pay.

According to a proxy statement filed Monday with the Securities and
Exchange Commission, Holley received $800,000 in base salary. He
earned a performance-based bonus of $816,200.

Holley also received $56,848 in other compensation, or “perks.” That
total included $27,925 for a company-leased car and $13,500 in company
matching contributions to a thrift savings plan.

Nearly half of Holley’s compensation was in the form of stock and
stock options, which were valued at about $1.9 million when granted.

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“We demarcate borders that often make no
ecological sense: dissecting watersheds,
fragmenting forests, disrupting animal migratory
routes. …. setting a target of protection of
12% of our land base for all the other species
means that we seem to take it for granted that we
can take over 88% of the land. …. We have
spread our toxic debris in the air, water and
soil so that every one of us now carries dozens
of toxic compounds in our bodies.”

” … Shapley calculates every breath we take has
millions of argon atoms that were once in the
bodies of Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ. Every
breath you take has millions of argon atoms that
were in the bodies of dinosaurs 65 million years
ago.”

“Consider this: in 1900 there were only a billion
and a half human beings in the world. In a mere
one hundred years, the population of the planet
has quadrupled. …. Australians elected four
consecutive Conservative governments that denied
the reality of human-induced climate change and
refused to ratify Kyoto even though the country
suffered severe drought for years.”

“I am a geneticist by training, and history
indicates we are in for similar surprises with
genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. We are
now manipulating the very blueprint of life,
creating organisms that have never existed
before. Any scientist who tells you they know
that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it is
either ignorant of the history of science or is
deliberately lying.”

” … the David Suzuki Foundation, working with
the Union of Concerned Scientists, came up with a
list of ten effective actions that we call the
Nature Challenge [8].  We are challenging
individuals to commit to doing at least three of
the suggested steps in the coming year and to
date have more than 365,000 Canadians signed on.”

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the 2008 Commonwealth Lecture in London, England

“The Challenge of the 21st Century: Setting the Real Bottom Line”
– Dr David Suzuki

I am a born and bred Canadian (although I did
spend eight years in the United States for my
university education in the 1950s and early ’60s)
and that shapes my perspective on the world.
Although Canada is a sovereign nation, the
country’s border allows the influx of American
movies, television and products that do influence
us greatly. We Canadians have struggled to
maintain our values and identity in the face of
the most powerful nation on earth. So I was proud
when Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002
and I’d like to believe that our ratification
influenced Mr Putin to sign on as well and make
it international law.

Last year I spent thirty days on a bus going from
St Johns, Newfoundland, on the east coast, all
the way across Canada to Victoria in British
Columbia on the west coast. I spoke in 41
communities to more than 30,000 people and also
taped more than 600 interviews with people across
the country telling me what they would do for the
environment if they were Prime Minister of
Canada. What I learned is that Canadians value
nature as a part of who we are; they want it
protected and they are willing to pay more taxes
to do that. They want Canada to meet its Kyoto
obligations. They want efficient, affordable
public transportation. They want a carbon tax but
they also want government and the corporate
community to do their share.

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