Climate Change Threatens Everest, Other World Heritage Sites - BBC

[hatrack]

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This campaign involves three "priceless and irreplaceable" places: the Belize Barrier Reef, where, conservationists say, coral is dying as water warms; Huascarán National Park in Peru, and Sagarmatha National Park in the Himalayas. In these two mountain ranges, the dossiers say, ice is melting away; even the world's highest mountain, Everest, could one day be nothing but rock.

Mark New, a climatologist from Oxford University, UK, who works on the Himalayas, told BBC News: "We know that over the last 30 years, in the eastern Himalayas, snow cover and ice cover have decreased on average by about 30%; so there's 30% less ice and snow than there was 30 years ago."

Relatively little science has been done on the highest mountains, because they're so hostile and inaccessible. But a documentary to be released this week, made by the independent British film-maker Richard Heap, with support from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), shows anecdotal evidence that the Himalayas are changing. At an altitude of over 4,000m, the crew found a vast glacier lake, which according to their maps, had not been there a few decades before. There had, though, been a glacier.

They also found large tracts of ice which were, in mountaineers' terms, "rotten" - wetter, and less stable than they had been on previous expeditions decades earlier.

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The organisation would, though, first have to prove that what is happening is undeniably down to global climate change - which, in the Himalayas at least, might be difficult. "At the moment it's not possible," said Mark New. "The Himalayas are a climatologically very complex area - there's a lot of variability in the climate system that tends to obscure what might be a climate change signal." Even if Unesco did command the big emitters to make big cuts, there is nothing in the World Heritage Convention which could force them to comply - rather like Kyoto itself, the convention is long on good intentions, but lacks a big punitive stick."

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4018261.stm

[idiosyncratic]

1. Climate change vs. Global Warming. The name change begins.

I was going to post this when I saw it because this is the first time I have seen the "Global Warming" term changed to the more innocuous, almost-normal-sounding "Climate Change."

Here is another link

[hatrack]

2. I've been using "Climate Breakdown" more often these days

It's a bit handier than Climate Destabilization, which is somewhat more accurate.