China's water supply could be cut off as Tibet's glaciers me
China's water supply could be cut off as Tibet's glaciers melt
By Clifford Coonan in Jiuzhaigou National Park
Published: 31 May 2007
Independent UK
The clear water of the Min river in the Jiuzhaigou National Park is a candidate for the cleanest in China. It is filtered by 108 lakes as it makes its way down from the glaciers of this vast nature reserve before feeding into the Yangtze river.
Back up through the mists, along a spectacular cliff-lined valley, there is Long Lake, a blue glacial expanse of water, while higher up in this mountainous park you can find corrie glaciers. Waterfalls line the route, azure pools brim over with fresh water.
Yet this beautiful park, completely defined by water, is threatened by climate change. Normally a winter wonderland, there was no snow at all last year. The glaciers will get warmer and melt, the rivers will have less water, although rainfall makes up much of the water flowing through the park.
With one eye on the attempt to forge a climate change pact at the forthcoming G8 meeting in Berlin, the environmental group Greenpeace has warned that the melting of Tibet's mountains could choke off water sources vital for large parts of China.
Sichuan province in south-western China relies on water from the Tibetan peninsula. At Kanding, several hundred kilometres away from Jiuzhaigou, there are valley glaciers which are seriously imperilled by rising temperatures. All across the Qinghai-Tibet highland that spans much of western China, global warming is speeding the retreat of glaciers, stoking evaporation of glacial and snow run-off, and leaving dwindling rivers that are dangerously clogged with silt, says Greenpeace in a report on climate change in the region.
Chinese government research shows that global warming is melting the plateau at 7 per cent annually. These glaciers account for 47 per cent of the total coverage in China. Water from the mountain region feeds the Yellow, Yangtze and other rivers that feed hundreds of millions of people across China and South Asia, said Li Yan of Greenpeace's Beijing office.
"Climate change is the major factor leading to the overall ecological degradation in this region while localised human activities, such as industry and agriculture, have aggravated the situation," the Greenpeace report says.
The Qinghai-Tibet plateau covers 2.5 million square kilometres - about a quarter of China's land surface - at an average altitude of 4,000m above sea level. "The river itself is under threat from this deterioration in its birthplace," the report says of the Yellow river. The environmental group cited one forecast that 80 per cent of the glacial area in Tibet and surrounding parts could disappear by 2035. It is still unclear exactly how quickly the glaciers will melt.
Conservationists working in the region say the issue is climate change, which can mean both warming and cooling, although they say the impact of both could be immense on rain and snowfall.
Multiplying pools of water accumulating from melted glaciers are building up and then bursting, endangering people living downstream, Ms Li said.
Greenpeace researchers who surveyed the slopes of Mt Everest this year and last to document glacier retreat said that local herders were not seeing more abundant water from the melting. Instead increased evaporation and accumulation in unstable glacier lakes were making water flows less predictable and more dangerous, Ms Li said.
In a video shown by the Greenpeace team, a Tibetan monk who has lived on the lower slopes of Everest for many years, said: "Now the winter is as hot as summer. The weather change is obvious."
miniTAX wrote:"Climate change denial, I discovered at the Hay festival, shares the same characteristics as religion.
George Monbiot "
Ha ha. Monbiot must be negligent in his rhetorics.
CC denial CAN'T be a religion since he kept saying there is almost no deniers left. It's may well be a sect then. The mainstream "religion" is by all standards Climate Change Doom with its dogma, its priests and followers and Monbiot is himself one of its prominent predicators. In the past, if it can be of any hint for the future, religious doomers were always wrong: the proof of it? We're still here and well.
Monbiot has obviously gone off the deep end - he can't even see that "climate change" could be for warmer OR for cooler, so that "denial" is impossible, unless delta T is very small in which case the climate can stay the same. Truly nonsensical observations.
Btw, if Walter reads this post, pls refer to my post for you on previous page here - tks!
Re: China's water supply could be cut off as Tibet's glacier
The glacier grossly exagerated scare is yet another red herring.
If the glaciers melt, water will be cut off. If the glaciers DON'T melt, water will also be cut off. We are doomed in any case ... to the sensationalist media.
In Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam... all densely populated areas, they don't have glaciers. They don't even know it was a water supply
Re: China's water supply could be cut off as Tibet's glacier
miniTAX wrote:The glacier grossly exagerated scare is yet another red herring.
If the glaciers melt, water will be cut off. If the glaciers DON'T melt, water will also be cut off. We are doomed in any case ... to the sensationalist media.
In Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam... all densely populated areas, they don't have glaciers. They don't even know it was a water supply
Oh no, it's much, much, worse than that. Recently published official (official!) Chinese statistics show that 10% (ten percent) of the Yellow River - one of the most major rivers on the planet - is sewage effluvia.
These are their numbers, and satellite pictures indicate they may be optimistic.
So now Bush is talking about a global plan to set targets to cut man-made greenhouse gases, about setting a framework until 2008 that would reduce the production of CO2....
Quote:Bush calls for climate change talks, new target by 2008
U.S. President George W. Bush has called for a meeting of major greenhouse gas emitting countries by the end of the year and a global emissions target by next year.
In a speech delivered Thursday, Bush proposed a meeting of 15 countries identified as major emitters of greenhouse gases, including the U.S., China and India. The meeting could take place as early as this fall, said Bush.
He called on countries to hold a series of meetings, starting within months, to reach a global emissions target by 2008. Each country then would have to decide on how to achieve the goal, said Bush.
"Each country would establish mid-term management targets and programs that reflect their own mix of energy sources and future energy needs," Bush said.
"In the course of the next 18 months, our nations will bring together industry leaders from different sectors of our economies, such as power generation, and alternative fuels and transportation."
...
Interesting.
Yes, very interesting. His proposal is far more serious and substantial than the goofy Kyoto agreement that would have exempted China, India and the entire former Soviet empire from any action for the entire period of the treaty, and thereby created a lasting and seriously disruptive and dangerous imbalance in the world economy during a period of rapid change.
On the other hand Europe doesn't appear to be meeting the obligations it so self-righteously assumed under Kyoto, so perhaps one shouldn't take them seriously.
I'm hoping we won't be taking these folks too seriously, either.
OXFAM TO U.S.: PAY HALF OF GLOBAL WARMING TAB
As in, let's just not pay it and see what happens.
I would ask at this point is anyone anywhere listening and or believing anything our doofus president has to say?
Hot Enough in Here?
June 2, 2007
New York Times Editorial
Hot Enough in Here?
Michael Griffin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is renowned for speaking bluntly so it was no surprise when he stuck his foot in his mouth during a recent interview. The disturbing element is that he may have inadvertently revealed one reason the space agency has been cutting back on satellite missions to study global warming.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Mr. Griffin acknowledged that global warming is happening but then, remarkably, suggested that it might not be a problem ?- or at least one that had to be fixed. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate," he said, adding that he wasn't sure there was any "need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change."
Those comments were a jarring denial of the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is serious and requires mitigation. It even lagged behind the thinking of President Bush who ?- under strong domestic and international pressure ?- has now called for a long-term global goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
In response to the mini-furor over his comments, Mr. Griffin stressed that NASA simply collects and analyzes data; it does not make policy on issues like climate change. But the scary thing was the lens his comment provided into his innermost thoughts. The Bush administration has been justly criticized for cutting the agency's earth sciences budget and downgrading NASA's once-prominent goal "to understand and protect our home planet." Tight budgets are one key reason for the cuts in earth sciences, as is the administration's long refusal to grapple with global warming. But now it seems that Mr. Griffin's own belief that climate change may be no big deal accounts in part for his agency's ill-conceived retreat from environmental studies.
Not sure why people expect freaking NASA, sclerotic bureaucracy that it is, to have anything to do with global warming.
Want to do a climate study from space, need a satellite lofted? Okay, they do that. What else do you want? It's not like they can replace rocket engines with freakin' hybrids!
Shoot, next they'll be yelling at the CIA and the Department of the Treasury that they're not showing the proper commitment to opposing global warming. "Look, this is not my job" is a perfectly valid response when you get asked a goofball question, no?
Avatar ADV wrote:Not sure why people expect freaking NASA, sclerotic bureaucracy that it is, to have anything to do with global warming.
Want to do a climate study from space, need a satellite lofted? Okay, they do that. What else do you want? It's not like they can replace rocket engines with freakin' hybrids!
Shoot, next they'll be yelling at the CIA and the Department of the Treasury that they're not showing the proper commitment to opposing global warming. "Look, this is not my job" is a perfectly valid response when you get asked a goofball question, no?
Laser-based rocket propulsion systems, man - way of the future.
Cycloptichorn
Sheyeah, sure, once you get up the well and can string up a huge sail in zero-G. Nowhere near enough thrust to get UP the well, which is what we do these days.
How is the fact of so many leftist losers getting sucked into such a stupid piece of junk science (global warming) supposed to ain't be happy news? I mean, it (having inept opposition) makes ME happy.....
Well now the Bush administration accepts AGW.
A Team of 2, Following the Scent of Polar Bears
June 5, 2007
Scientist at Work | Linda J. Gormezano
A Team of 2, Following the Scent of Polar Bears
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
New York Times
The hunt begins with a loud shout in Spanish by Linda J. Gormezano.
"¡Búscalo!" Seek.
Waiting with ears pricked and tail wagging, Quinoa, her black male Dutch shepherd, leaps to work, straining at the leash, nose down, weaving left and right.
He is doing something that comes naturally to dogs, which spend many waking hours sniffing out traces left by other animals ?- the smellier the better.
That skill has been transferred over the centuries to help humans find prison escapees, game, bombs, drugs, avalanche victims and more. The quarry sought by Quinoa, named for the Andean grain, is something utterly conventional and doglike: feces, poop or, as field biologists prefer to call it ?- scat.
What makes this dog special is his behavior when he finds his goal. No peeing or rolling. He simply sits. He stares attentively back at Ms. Gormezano, 35, awaiting an inevitable torrent of praise and then the toss of a plastic ball, his sole reward, before returning to the hunt.
The other thing special on this particular training day is the nature of the scat he seeks.
It comes from polar bears.
Although this exercise is taking place in the Mianus River Gorge Preserve, a wooded nook tucked in Bedford, N.Y., 40 miles northeast of Manhattan, the small hidden heaps contain things as foreign to New York as can be ?- the bones and feathers of snow geese, kelp and lyme grass, a trace of seal.
The samples, hidden ahead of time (on Petri dishes), came from the collection Ms. Gormezano has been amassing since 2005 in fieldwork on the grassy coastal plains ringing the western shore of Hudson Bay in central Canada, one of the southernmost bastions of the great ice-roaming predators.
With biologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York, where she is pursuing a doctorate, Ms. Gormezano is using scat to track the wanderings, genetics and condition of the bears, which in that northern region, particularly, have shown signs of stress that could be related to the warming Arctic climate and retreating sea ice.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which in December proposed designating polar bears around the Arctic as a threatened species because of climate change and the ice retreat, is halfway through a yearlong assessment of that question.
"There's a need to do this right now, and it's never been done on polar bears before," Ms. Gormezano said of the research on scat.
Other methods for tracking shifts in populations involve chasing the bears in helicopters, sedating them with darts and tagging or collaring them. But such methods can pose risks or alter the bears' behavior, she said. Some Canadian national parks require a shift from darting. In contrast, bear scat, and also tufts of fur left in dens or sleeping spots, can be collected without affecting the bears. Tests of DNA in the feces can distinguish individual animals. So the dispersion of scat provides a map of a particular bear's wanderings.
"All the issues with global warming are going to affect southernmost populations, especially around southern Hudson Bay and western Hudson Bay, where they're already starting to see changes, reduced reproductive output, thinner subadults," Ms. Gormezano said. "So this is a great opportunity to try out a new method."
The Mianus gorge was chosen for a final spring tune-up for Quinoa because Ms. Gormezano has another research project under way there on a very different predator ?- coyotes.
In contrast to the polar bear, which is under study because some populations appear to be in retreat, coyotes have become a conservation concern because they have been expanding, growing physically and in pack size, in the deer-rich woods and lawns surrounding New York City.
Quinoa is an equal-opportunity seeker of polar bear and coyote poop. With coyotes, it is particularly important that the dog not touch the scat, Ms. Gormezano said, given that their DNA is nearly identical. Those samples are placed in paper bags, allowing air to circulate and desiccate the material, with the location noted using a global positioning system device.
Up north, she said, bear scat is handled differently.
"Each sample, regardless of how I initially store it, is subsampled and dried in a food dehydrator for a few hours at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then vacuum sealed in plastic," Ms. Gormezano said. "Basically, I turn it into scat jerky. Getting rid of moisture is the key to preserving the DNA most effectively until it can be extracted."
As she followed Quinoa in his sniff, sit, play and hunt routine through woods and fields, Ms. Gormezano reflected on the odd trajectory that brought her to this place. She grew up in Queens in New York City and studied classical percussion at Queens College. Then she started pursuing internships in field biology, mainly on predators. Later came work for the National Park Service with overabundant deer on Fire Island and in Front Royal, Va.
The polar bear study grew out of fieldwork that her thesis adviser, Robert F. Rockwell of the City University, had been conducting for decades in the far north on lesser snow geese. Like deer, the lesser snow goose is mainly a focus because it, too, is overabundant.
While working along Hudson Bay, Dr. Rockwell and Ms. Gormezano began collecting polar bear scat. For her doctoral thesis, she began parallel studies, using scat and hair samples, of the potentially threatened polar bear populations around western Hudson Bay and also the expanding coyote ranks of suburbs north of New York.
To find more samples, Ms. Gormezano decided to use a dog. She began canvassing biologists around the country using dogs to seek other species, or their scat, including the black-footed ferret, cougar -- even killer whales, on Puget Sound.
She toured the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms center for training detection dogs., learning how to select the right animal and motivate it. Some dogs used in field research are dropouts from that program. Ms. Gormezano found her research partner through a breeder in Rhode Island two years ago.
"He was 6 months old," she recalled as she followed him across a field in the gorge preserve. "He has to be play obsessed, and he is. So I reinforced that from the very beginning. Now he just loves to work, too."
Dr. Rockwell and Ms. Gormezano said they reserved judgment on whether the Hudson Bay bears stand to fade or adjust in a warming climate. For now, they clearly derive most of their sustenance from seals that they hunt in winter out on the sea ice, instead of ashore where they travel to forage, breed and seek dens in summer.
Their scat reveals an extraordinarily varied diet, including snow geese and their eggs. The bear populations also show signs of shifting north a bit along the coast in response to shifting climate patterns. Among the other merits of the scat studies, Ms. Gormezano said, is that they lay down a baseline of data on the animals that will be useful for years to come.
Dr. Rockwell said t the bears' earlier arrival onshore in spring could potentially lead to more overlap with the hundreds of thousands of nesting geese, potentially providing a vast store of bear food in the form of birds and their eggs.
The threesome of researchers headed north late last month, and in e-mail messages over the last few days, Ms. Gormezano and Dr. Rockwell provided updates. On Sunday, Dr. Rockwell wrote: "Quinoa is on fire with poop finding ?- we got 71 samples one day."
Steve 41oo wrote:Well now the Bush administration accepts AGW.
Steve - perhaps you would be kind enough to read what the Bush administration says before quoting it. The wording mentions "climate change" - you're aware the planet's climate tends to change, are you? - and not "A", nor "GW", or "AGW"! Precision, please
Steve 41oo wrote:Well now the Bush administration accepts AGW.
But evidently not enough (or not in the fantastic versions advocated by some) to advocate the imposition of external authoritarian rules & enforcement structures that apparently so attract the soft-headed zealots who are so eager to surrender their freedoms. This strantge malady appears to be particularly pervasive in Britain.
That's not quite fair, George, Germany seems even more afflicted. Reading some pronouncements by Chancellor Merkel (herself a nuclear physicist!) is enough to make you wonder if they're all sitting in "vertigo chairs" - for those unfamilian an explanation follows:
Quote:Spatial Disorientation - an erroneous sense of one's position and motion with respect to the ground - is the most lethal general aviation accident precursor. The seminar presenter guides pilots in discussion of the many faces of spatial disorientation and suggests practical strategies and tactics for coping with this acknowledged killer. In this seminar you'll learn how to identify potentially disorienting situations before it's too late. You'll also learn the most likely flight environments for spatial disorientation and how to avoid them. Additionally, the ?'Vertigo Chair' will be used to demonstrate the effects of spatial disorientation.
Synthetic Vision Systems represent the latest revolution in both portable and certified cockpit avionics. By combining attitude sensors with GPS and terrain databases, these systems allow pilots to "see" outside of the aircraft in IMC conditions. This technology has the potential to dramatically reduce accidents caused by spatial disorientation and controlled flight into terrain.
http://www.faasafety.gov/SPANS/event_details.aspx?eid=15077
Anyway, Mrs Merkel at least has the intelligence and technical expertise to promote nuclear energy whereas Blair is only uttering panicky squeals - possibly the original assessment about the Brits was correct after all....
High Seas wrote:
Anyway, Mrs Merkel at least has the intelligence and technical expertise to promote nuclear energy whereas Blair is only uttering panicky squeals - possibly the original assessment about the Brits was correct after all....
I knew you would finally come around to my thinking on the matter. :wink:
I think there is a bit of a self-serving element in Merkel's reaction, in that Germany's Kyoto goal performance appears relatively good (or less bad), mostly because of the boost they got from shutting down the wasteful and highly polluting industrial complex of the former GDR. In a similar vein Russia looks very good, mostly because the old Soviet economy collapsed after the 1990 reference year.
On this matter though the British appear to be in a class by themselves. Perhaps soon they will begin the export of modern day environmental Calvanist Inquisitors (the metaphor is mixed, but meaningful) to stamp out the non carbon-neutral among us.
