alt Hacker NewsHimalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn
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It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.
If you know languages, the 'phrase Himalayas bare and rocky' is particularly sad, because himālaya/हिमालय in Sanskrit literally means 'house of snow'.
Even in optimistic scenarios we won’t see this actual global temperature decrease again in our lifetimes. We can only hope to minimize the impact so that the curve softens and maybe in a century starts to go down.
Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that has the potential to - *checks notes* - poison North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).
I always considered the conflict between India and China a bit silly, considering the size of those countries compared to tiny disputed territories. But the are totally are going to war over Himalayas water resources, aren't they?
IIRC the Himalayas are still being pushed up, as the indian plate pushes against Eurasia. That makes me wonder if the loss of ice will result in taller mountains, with less ice to grind the upwelling rock.
I’m disappointed at the lack of before/after photos in that article. My ape brain would love them.
Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.
Anecdotal but this is not dissimilar to how Japan has been lately with snowfall in the northern regions. It was once 30cm a night, almost every night during winter, fairly stable and predictable weather, we're still getting a lot of snow most winters, but it seems to happen in these major storm events now. Not consistent manageable snowfall, but more like a snow bomb goes off once a week, it gets warm, quite a lot of melt occurs and then boom, hit again. It's actually. taking some getting used too and requires adaption. It's a small thing but it makes it quite hard to plan for, and it makes life generally quite stressful. Also due to the rapid warming and cooling ice is a bit more of an issue now, like more injures from people getting hammered on icy / slick roads and paths.
Climate change is obviously the cause and this is not good for the environment.
But on the flip side, does this mean it's never been easier to climb the Himalayan mountains?
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What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system. More pertinently, today we also have the intellectual tools to come with the right solutions for a good part of this problem. Solutions most likely won't require dramatic breakthroughs in fundamental science; probably just more clever engineering and better social and political coordination.
The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.
More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.
"cLiMaTE cHaNgE" ("man-made")
Al Gore would be proud of you guys.
Question is, is this human-caused change or the usual natural climate shift that Earth goes through every few thousand centuries or millennia? And is there anything humans should do about it, other than adapting to it?
A third of humans are fed as a result of the melt of the Himalayan ice sheet. No ice sheet, no runoff, no flooding the rice paddy's, no rice…. famine.