Tibet's Warming Provides Global Warning
While it's impossible to attach a current economic value, Tibet's most important export arguably is water. Twenty per cent of the world's population depend for fresh water on one of four great rivers that originate on the Tibetan plateau.
Given that fact, the world should be concerned that, as New Scientist magazine reported this week: "The Tibetan plateau is heating up by 0.3°C each decade, more than twice the worldwide average, according to a new study from the Tibet Meteorological Bureau"
Where climate change is concerned, too many people have taken reassurance from the small numbers and long time frames that always seem to define global warming predictions: 0.3°C each decade, for example.
But if faster melting means that the torrential rivers that now burble out of Tibet's great glaciers start to flow more quickly, the downstream devastation could be severe. And if those glaciers melt completely - as they are predicted to do by 2035 - there are huge risks that those rivers will slow, or dry up all together, in the hot summers on the Chinese and Indian plains.
It's time people stopped taking refuge in the climate change averages and start contemplating the likely results of the increasing climate extremes. That's NOT an extremist position; it is modestly prudent - the least we should expect of the world's leaders.
expectations
They somehow always seem to fail with respect to our lowest expectations. Therefore we must do more than expect, we must demand.
This predicted glacier
This predicted glacier meltdown is ridiculous, based on a short term trend that doesn't support the facts. In as little as one more 10 year period, the trend will be reversed and the glacier will grow. Why can't "environmental" (so called) scientists pay attention to other firelds like geology, solar studies and soil surveys to understand that in their short lives, they will never have a real opportunity to predict Global Change.
Most experts in these fields are predicting a return to colder climate in the next 4-6 years, probably just after the Media and Politicians lead the Nations of the World into spending wasted billions of Citizen's money on hopeless legislation to fix a problem that isn't caused by man.....
Interesting
Can you please send along the scientific articles backing these claims... I can then send them out to all those obviously incompetent scientists worried about mass water shortages.
opportunity!
Dave, with your finger on the pulse of these other scientific fields and your ability to divine or synthesize a temporal prediction, you have the opportunity to make heaps of money through bets with these 'environmental' scientists (do you mean climatologists?). Then you can use your earnings to help the Citizens who have been ripped off by these charlatans. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1552092,00.html
Need more facts
It is interesting that the "scientific" community has noticed a problem. Where my beef lies is in the solution of the problem. Why are people sanctioning the control of carbon emmissions, when it is one of the least of the greenhouse gasses? My other question concerns the carbon trading scam. The only way to reduce carbon footprints is to change your usage, not trade with other people who change their usage and you pay penance.
On another note, The north coast of Oregon has experienced its coldest July on record! It is not "global warming." It is climate change. I wonder what Greenland will look like when it turns green again.
Need more consideration
Wow, Stenberg below wanted to focus on the solution, too. This is a banner day! Okay, here you go: 1. Define least -- CO2 concentration is less than water vapour (which we can only affect through pollution) and more than other greenhouse gases. 2. I'm not big on carbon trading either, but it worked for acid-rain pollution, so your logic fails. 3. Does the fact that atmospheric CO2 concentrations decrease in some locations and times mean that the atmosphere isn't increasing in CO2 concentration? You think we have to say "change in CO2" instead of "increase in CO2"? You're wrong! 4. I wonder, too, but we'll both be dead by then, and our kids will feel guilty because our actions (I should say "inactions") led to all the environmental refugees they have to watch on TV.
The Earth's atmospheric
The Earth's atmospheric temperature has been rising since Merapti's eruption in about 1350 kicked of the "Little Ice Age". The earth is slowly returning to its natural state. The great land masses of Russia, Mancuria and Canada, are becoming more temperate garden spots. Greenland might just become green again, and capable of exporting food and fiber, as it once did.
The world might just become a better place, even though some areas will be harmed, forcing some of the migrations that our human race has lived through before.
Greenland
I'm glad that you are ready to get past all the whodunnit aspects of global warming and to discuss the pros and cons of what to do about it. Your name, Sternberg, reminds me that some scholarly work has been done on the issue of the costs and benefits of doing something -- look up the Stern report. Look up Mark Jaccard for that matter (for a Canadian perspective). That kind of work isn't my forte and I guess your opinion is as valid as mine. You might want to look at a globe rather than a mercator projection of the great northern land masses (like Greenland), however, and then consider the number of people living there versus the number living in China and India and Bangladesh. And then you might consider that aboriginal people in the far north are complaining about global warming rather than dancing in the permafrost. And then you might consider that Greenland won't be ice free and soil-rich for a long time after Pacific Islanders, Bangladeshis, and various (numerous!) others are hurt by global warming. And finally you might think about the fact that even if they could use a time machine to move to a garden Greenland many years in the future, they probably would be upset at having to do it.... You know what? Your opinion probably isn't very valid.
Did you mean to say "Mt Merapi"?
Sternberg said: "The Earth's atmospheric temperature has been rising since Merapti's eruption in about 1350 kicked of the "Little Ice Age.""
Did you mean Mt. Merapi rather than Mt. Merapti? If you did it seems that Mt. Merapi did not erupt in 1350 as you suggest. Recent massive eruptions happened in 1006, 1786, 1822, 1872 and most recently in 2006.
Ian Forrester
Apparently there were
Apparently there were eruptions in California, in the Mono-Inyo craters starting from around 1345 to 1469. Maybe they were big enough to affect the climate in Europe.
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:
GZ7A6XeVN78J:www-personal.umich.edu/~essene/
field%2520trips/longvalley.davidson.doc+mono+eruption&hl=
en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=ca
{I've added spaces between the four line of that one large address.}
"Statistically, however, the more likely site for future eruptions in the regions is along the Mono-Inyo Craters volcanic chain where eruptions have occurred most recently about 450, 700, 1200, and 1345-1469 A.D. (Miller, 1985; Sieh and Bursik, 1986; Sieh, unpubl. data). The potential hazards associated with possible future eruptions in the area have been outlined by Miller et al. (1982). "
The Canadian Shield might
The Canadian Shield might get warmer too, but it's still rock and not agricultural land. And I fear the prairies will likely turn to desert.
Sudden climate change is generally not a pleasant thing.