Posts Tagged ‘Himalayan glaciers’

New study debunks Himalayan glacier melting alarm – again

January 27, 2016

Over the next two decades we are going to see the gradual disappearance of global warming as the favourite meme for alarmists (after all, global warming has been solved by the Paris Agreement). Every alarmist theme over the last 80 years has been debunked, but the eco fascists merely move on to the next doomsday scenario. Whatever happened to peak oil and a world without energy? or the population bomb and the death of humanity? or peak food, mass starvation and starving billions? or the banning of DDT for the now failed elimination of mosquito borne threats? One wonders what the next alarmist theme will be? Global cooling could always come back. Vaccinations or GMO or gene selection for humans perhaps. Radiation from cellphones?

One of the much hyped stories in the last decade was the “melting of the Himalayan glaciers” and the consequent loss of clean water for one billion or more people. This story was hyped and overhyped before it was shown to be based on newspaper speculation put out by the usual suspects (WWF, Greenpeace, FoE and similar ecofascists). The IPCC – with Pachauri at its head – made idiots of themselves – again. Now comes a new paper in Nature – Global and Planetary Change that in Tibet “water supplies will be stable and may even increase in the coming decades”.

EurekAlert:

University of Gothenburg Press Release

The Tibetan Plateau has long been seen as a “hotspot” for international environmental research, and there have been fears that water supplies in the major Asian rivers would drastically decline in the near future. However, new research now shows that water supplies will be stable and may even increase in the coming decades.

A report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2007 suggests that the glaciers in the Himalayas will be gone by 2035. This statement was questioned and caused a great stir. …..

 ….. Since the statement by IPCC in 2007, the Tibetan Plateau has been a focus of international environmental research.

A research group led by Professor Deliang Chen at the University of Gothenburg, in close collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, headed by Professor Fengge Su, has studied future climate change and its effect on the water balance in the region. The great Asian rivers have their source on the Plateau or in the neighbouring mountains.

The researchers recently published a study in Global and Planetary Change which modelled the water flows upstream in the Yellow River, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra and the Indus. The studies include both data from past decades and simulations for future decades.

The results show that water flows in the rivers in the coming decades would either be stable or would increase compared to the period from 1971-2000. …..

….. Dr. Tinghai Ou, who was responsible for the climate projections in the study, has commented that increased precipitation and meltwater from glaciers and snowfall are contributing to increased water flows in the region.

Ah well!

Time to find a new doomsday scenario.

 

 

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Apocalypse delayed – Himalayan researchers reverse earlier predictions of water shortages

August 6, 2013

I sense that some of the alarmism and the apocalyptic futures always associated with global warming hysteria are beginning to moderate.

Earlier predictions of water shortages due to the shrinkage of Himalayan glaciers are being reversed by new research which now predicts increased water flow in two Himalayan watersheds.

W. W. Immerzeel, F. Pellicciotti & M. F. P. Bierkens, Rising river flows throughout the twenty-first century in two Himalayan glacierized watersheds, Published online 04 August 2013, Nature Geoscience  (2013) doi:10.1038/ngeo1896

EnergyWire comments:

One of the big unknowns of climate change predictions — and one that has led to considerable contention — lies in knowing the future of water runoff from the Himalayas. The snow- and ice-rich region supplies water for billions of people in Asia and is sometimes referred to as the Earth’s “Third Pole.”

For years, scientists struggled to understand how precipitation will change in these mountains (ClimateWire, Oct. 24, 2011). They have also had difficulty determining how much glacier melt from the mountains contributes to water supply. 

A study out yesterday in Nature Geoscience by Walter Immerzeel, a physical geographer at Utrecht University, suggests that, in at least two major Himalayan watersheds, river flows and runoff should rise until 2100.

“We show that the peak in meltwater is later than we previously thought, which in combination with a projected increase in precipitation results in an increase in water availability until the end of the century,” he said.

The two watersheds Immerzeel reports on in the paper are those of the Baltoro and Langtang glaciers, which feed the Indus and Ganges rivers, respectively. In the Baltoro watershed, this is largely due to more glacier runoff from melt. In the Langtang, increased precipitation drives the extra runoff.

Immerzeel and his co-authors used the output of the latest global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) to look at temperature and precipitation projections. They combined that data with a hydrologic model of glacier responses to climate change.

They found that in both watersheds, runoff from glaciers should increase until the 2040s or 2060s, later than previous estimates, depending on which climate scenarios are applied.

….. In the paper, Immerzeel points out that his new finding contradicts previous work he has published, suggesting that runoff in the Indus and Ganges basin would decrease. At least for now, this is good news for people and farmers who rely on that water, he said.

“Strong increases in water demand are projected in the Indus as the food production needs to grow to feed the quickly rising population,” Immerzeel said. “An increased water availability from the mountains may help to sustain this growing demand.”

Abstract: Greater Himalayan glaciers are retreating and losing mass at rates comparable to glaciers in other regions of the world. Assessments of future changes and their associated hydrological impacts are scarce, oversimplify glacier dynamics or include a limited number of climate models. Here, we use results from the latest ensemble of climate models in combination with a high-resolution glacio-hydrological model to assess the hydrological impact of climate change on two climatically contrasting watersheds in the Greater Himalaya, the Baltoro and Langtang watersheds that drain into the Indus and Ganges rivers, respectively. We show that the largest uncertainty in future runoff is a result of variations in projected precipitation between climate models. In both watersheds, strong, but highly variable, increases in future runoff are projected and, despite the different characteristics of the watersheds, their responses are surprisingly similar. In both cases, glaciers will recede but net glacier melt runoff is on a rising limb at least until 2050. In combination with a positive change in precipitation, water availability during this century is not likely to decline. We conclude that river basins that depend on monsoon rains and glacier melt will continue to sustain the increasing water demands expected in these areas.

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The arrogance of belief: What now Pachauri?

February 9, 2012

What now Pachauri?

Back in November 2009, Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC were accusing those who were not true believers in climate scientology and the loss of Himalayan ice as being “arrogant”.

This article in The Guardian today reports on new measurements which show zero loss of ice over the last 10 years.

Perhaps the climate scientologists and the global warming brigade should pause to consider their own amazing arrogance of belief (and by corrollary – their lack of science).

(Image above from EU Referendum)

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New study confirms Himalayan glaciers will not disappear any time soon

January 24, 2011
This NASA image shows the formation of numerou...

Glacial lakes, Bhutan: Image via Wikipedia

Reuters reports:

(Reuters) – Some Himalayan glaciers are advancing despite an overall retreat, according to a study on Sunday that is a step toward understanding how climate change affects vital river flows from China to India.

“Our study shows there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover,” scientists at universities in Germany and the United States wrote in the study of 286 glaciers.

The findings underscore that experts in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were wrong to say in a 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035 in a headlong thaw. The panel corrected the error in 2010.

The report said that 58 percent of glaciers examined in the westerly Karakoram range of the Himalayas were stable or advancing, perhaps because they were influenced by cool westerly winds than the monsoon from the Indian Ocean.

Science News says:

Glaciers largely stable in one range of Himalayas

Dirk Scherler of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and his colleagues report in the January 23 Nature Geoscience. ……. but in Karakoram, 58 percent of studied glaciers were stable or slowly expanding up to 12 meters per year…..

The new findings are consistent with what Kenneth Hewitt of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, has observed, and point to the fact “that the picture of climate change effects in high Asia is much more complicated than most people realize.”

Indeed, for much of the past century Karakoram’s glaciers were in retreat. A 2005 paper by Hewitt described a turnaround that commenced only in the late 1990s. In the new study, Scherler’s team looked for factors that might affect the responsiveness of Himalayan glaciers to regional warming. A rocky blanket quickly emerged as a major one.

D. Scherler, B. Bookhagen and M.R. Strecker. Spatially variable response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change affected by debris cover. Nature Geoscience (in press, online January 23, 2011). DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1068.

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