Indian glaciologist fires back at skeptics

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA28Df01.html


"It is a fact that global warming is happening. If the Arctic Sea ice is melting, how can the Himalayan glaciers not be melting?" glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain asked indignantly.

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But Hasnain, who found himself at the center of the Himalayan meltdown controversy, said it is "ridiculous" to assume that the glaciers are not melting.

The scientist was reported to have pegged 2035 as the year the Himalayan glaciers would disappear due to global warming in a 1999 interview with a British publication, New Scientist. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) picked up the date from the ensuing article and reported it eight years later in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, only to retract it last week.

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Hasnain, who denied ever having given the 2035 time frame to the writer, said Pearce had gone on record in the same Sunday Times article, saying a 1999 report prepared by the scientist, which he read, "does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glacier will melt".

Hasnain, a senior fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), said the date cited in the New Scientist article was a "journalistic assumption interpolated by the interviewer over which I had no control".

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The issue of climate change has been on the forefront of vigorous discussions worldwide and the focus of earnest efforts by the international community to deal with its impact, including rapid glacier melting that has been known to trigger a wave of natural disasters.

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Hasnain said vested interests are trying to denigrate scientists who are "diligently doing their best to research the issue".

(ain't that the truth)

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China is the only country in the region that has been conducting long-term mass balance studies of some glaciers. It will expand this study to more Himalayan glaciers in the future, said ICIMOD.

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Norphel, known popularly as India's "glacier man", has been building high-altitude water-conservation channels that freeze over as "artificial glaciers" to beat the lack of water from the receding Himalayan glaciers.

(I previously posted a thread about the 'glacier man')

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She added that migration routes of communities on the Tsokar lake at Leh, which weave the world-famous Pashmina shawls, "have become more frequented as these pastoral communities migrate due to degrading pastures".
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I've never seen a Pashmina shawl that I know of. I'm thinking they must be beautiful. changes, changes.

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1. kicking back to pg.1 as the ice melts faster and faster

(and people scream 'so what! there is nothing we can do about it. its too late')