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The world has a third pole – and it's melting quickly
Khawa Karpo lies at the world's "third pole". This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau, home to the vast Hindu Kush-Himalaya ice sheet, because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – the Chinese glaciers alone account for an estimated 14.5% of the global total. However, a quarter of its ice has been lost since 1970. This month, in a long-awaited special report on the cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists will warn that up to two-thirds of the region's remaining glaciers are on track to disappear by the end of the century. It is expected a third of the ice will be lost in that time even if the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is adhered to.
Whether we are Buddhists or not, our lives affect, and are affected by, these tropical glaciers that span eight countries. This frozen "water tower of Asia" is the source of 10 of the world's largest rivers, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yellow, Mekong and Indus, whose flows support at least 1.6 billion people directly – in drinking water, agriculture, hydropower and livelihoods – and many more indirectly, in buying a T-shirt made from cotton grown in China, for example, or rice from India.
Joseph Shea, a glaciologist at the University of Northern British Columbia, calls the loss "depressing and fear-inducing. It changes the nature of the mountains in a very visible and profound way."
Yet the fast-changing conditions at the third pole have not received the same attention as those at the north and south poles. The IPCC's fourth assessment report in 2007 contained the erroneous prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This statement turned out to have been based on anecdote rather than scientific evidence and, perhaps out of embarrassment, the third pole has been given less attention in subsequent IPCC reports.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:49AM
Guardian journalist can't tell the difference between a pole and an ice cap because she only previously knew of two ice caps, the polar ice caps (yes, I'm using colloquial nomenclature in this whole sentence, we're talking about a newspaper read by members of the public, not academic literature read by academics who wish to take terms with common meanings and then make them mean something different. c.f. "nut" in botany), and therefore associated "ice cap" with "polar". When she discovers there's another "ice cap", she considered it to be another "pole", and writes shitty headline.
Guradina journalist is Grauniad journalist. News at 11.
However, all respect to her, she was happy to highlight an instance of the IPCC being bullshitting scare merchants in the article. With enough sunlight, perhaps they will eventually be disinfected.
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