Himalayan Glaciers Not Melting because of Climate Change

JOHANNESBURG, 27 January 2011 (IRIN) - A new study shows that while some glaciers in the Karakoram region of the northwestern Himalayas, which feed the River Indus, are stable, more than 65 percent of the glaciers fed by monsoons in the central Himalayas are melting.

"Our study shows that there is no uniform response of the Himalayan glaciers to climate change," said Dirk Scherler, one of three researchers who produced the study published in the current edition of Nature Geoscience, a monthly journal.

Monsoon-influenced glaciers have been retreating in the central rugged Himalayan region. The researchers found that debris from the mountains was choking the flow of water into a number of glaciers, which was not a good sign. Scherler said there was a need to study the debris so as to understand the demise of glaciers.

A number of studies between 1999 and 2001 have backed the link between climate change and glacier melting. "The Himalayan glaciers have retreated by approximately a kilometre since the Little Ice Age [from 1350 to 1900]," said a joint study by ICIMOD and UNEP. http://www.rrcap.unep.org/reports/file/ ... Change.pdf

"Himalayan glaciers are retreating at rates ranging from 10m to 60m per year, and many small glaciers (less than 0.2sq km) have already disappeared."

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change famously predicted they could disappear as soon as 2035. It turns out that guesstimate was based on misquoting a researcher in a 1999 news article—not a result from any kind of peer-reviewed scientific study. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... nline-news

The incident reflects a breakdown in the IPCC process but it doesn't undercut the reality that glacier loss, particularly in what are technically tropical regions such as the Andes and Himalayas, continues to accelerate in the 21st century. Though they likely won't disappear entirely for centuries, losing the glaciers will eventually be bad news for the billions around the world who rely on meltwater to survive.

Himalayan glaciers: In a regional chapter on Asia in Volume 2, written by authors from the region, it was erroneously stated that 80% of Himalayan glacier area would very likely be gone by 2035. This is of course not the proper IPCC projection of future glacier decline, which is found in Volume 1 of the report. There we find a 45-page, perfectly valid chapter on glaciers, snow and ice (Chapter 4) http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repor ... apter4.pdf , with the authors including leading glacier experts (such as our colleague Georg Kaser from Austria, who first discovered the Himalaya error in the WG2 report). There are also several pages on future glacier decline in Chapter 10 (“Global Climate Projections”) http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repor ... pter10.pdf , where the proper projections are used e.g. to estimate future sea level rise. So the problem here is not that the IPCC’s glacier experts made an incorrect prediction. The problem is that a WG2 chapter, instead of relying on the proper IPCC projections from their WG1 colleagues, cited an unreliable outside source in one place.

Grady wrote: When does weather become climate?

The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time.

When we talk about climate change, we talk about changes in long-term averages of daily weather.

What Weather Means
Weather is basically the way the atmosphere is behaving, mainly with respect to its effects upon life and human activities. The difference between weather and climate is that weather consists of the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere. Most people think of weather in terms of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and atmospheric pressure, as in high and low pressure.

What Climate Means
In short, climate is the description of the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area.

Some scientists define climate as the average weather for a particular region and time period, usually taken over 30-years. It's really an average pattern of weather for a particular region.

When scientists talk about climate, they're looking at averages of precipitation, temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind velocity, phenomena such as fog, frost, and hail storms, and other measures of the weather that occur over a long period in a particular place.

In short, weather is a data point. Climate is a collection of data.

Global Warming — An overall warming of the planet, based on average temperature over the entire surface.

Climate Change — Changes in regional climate characteristics, including temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind, and severe weather events.

Climate change is about much more than how warm or cool our temperatures are. Whereas "global warming" refers to increasing global temperatures, "climate change" refers to regional conditions. Climate is defined by a number of factors, including:

* Average regional temperature as well as day/night temperature patterns and seasonal temperature patterns.
* Humidity.
* Precipitation (average amounts and seasonal patterns).
* Average amount of sunshine and level of cloudiness.
* Air pressure and winds.
* Storm events (type, average number per year, and seasonal patterns).

To a great extent, this is what we think of as "weather." Indeed, weather patterns are predicted to change in response to global warming:

* some areas will become drier, some will become wetter;
* many areas will experience an increase in severe weather events like killer heat waves, hurricanes, flood-level rains, and hail storms.