If you happen to be an intrepid outdoor type
who enjoys winter sports like skiing then you may have been one of the tens of thousands of
holiday makers that found themselves with a little less snow to slide around on in the Alps
this season as a result of an extremely unusual winter heat wave that scientists are suggesting
is the most extreme event in European history. Some mountain regions reached temperatures
of 20 degrees Celsius in December which is very pleasant if you're sunbathing but
absolutely useless if you want to practice your parallel turns. I imagine it must have been
extremely frustrating for those involved because, let's face it, skiing holidays aren't cheap are
they? If you're not an outdoor type and you think that skiing is just an extravagant luxury enjoyed
by affluent westerners then I imagine you may be suppressing an ironic smirk at the news of all
those poor lambs who've not been able to enjoy their expensive Christmas getaway this year.
This season's high Alpine temperatures were a bit of a freak of nature to be fair, driven
largely by currents of very warm air drifting northwards from the west coast of Africa. But
conditions like these are made much more likely by a globally warming atmosphere so they may
well become more commonplace in the future, and that won't just mean a bit of
inconvenience for winter sport enthusiasts, it'll start to affect many hundreds of millions
of people all over the world because as mounting snowfall diminishes in the colder months and
temperatures continue to soar in the summer, glaciers all over the world are shrinking at
an alarming rate. And those Glaciers are in many cases a vital source of fresh water for
human communities further down the valley not to mention innumerable species of flora and fauna
that also rely on it for life. So how bad is it and how much worse could it get? Well that's a
very good question, and in January 2023 a new research paper was published that provides us with
the answer. So let's dive in and see what it says. Hello and welcome to just have a think. Most of us
probably don't spend a great deal of our precious time thinking about glaciers do we? They're just
something hidden away high up in a remote mountain range with little or no relevance to our daily
lives. But according to a 2019 study published by the online journal Nature almost 2 billion people
all over the world rely directly on mountain glaciers and snowpack as their main source of
fresh water supply. In many cases the seasonal melt also drives hydropower generation and
irrigation for agriculture. So that's no less than a quarter of the entire human population who are
in deep doo doo if glaciers disappear. This latest publication is the result of research by teams at
various academic institutions led by David Rounce, who is Assistant Professor of Environmental
Engineering at Carnegie University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The team looked at projected changes
in all the world's glaciers, not including the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, based on data
from the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways or SSPs, and Representative Concentration Pathways or
RCPs published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC. Those are the projection
charts you often see on the news or on channels like this one that estimate future levels of
greenhouse gas emissions depending on how rapidly human societies achieve the transition to a more
sustainable way of life and the impacts of those greenhouse emissions on average global surface
temperatures over the course of the 21st Century. To keep things relatively simple the team
based their calculations on four separate temperature increases - Firstly the 1.5
degrees Celsius target set out in the Paris agreement in 2015 and then two degrees, three
degrees and four degrees of warming by 2100. Depending on which pathway our civilization
chooses over the next few decades the world's glaciers are projected to lose anywhere between
26% and 41% of their total combined mass by the end of the century compared to 2015 measurements.
As a reference the net outcome of all existing national climate policies from countries attending
the COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 is a projected average global temperature rise
of 2.7 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. That's assuming
we actually meet all those policies of course, which is not something the world
is currently on course to achieve. There are more than 200,000 glaciers
stretching right around the planet. Some of them are only about a kilometre across but
they nevertheless provide an essential seasonal service to their local habitat. The team found
that even in the now vanishingly unlikely event that we manage to keep global temperature rises to
only 1.5 degrees Celsius, about a hundred and four thousand of those small glaciers would disappear
completely. That's pretty much half of all the glaciers on the planet effectively gone forever.
And about 50,000 of them would actually be lost by 2050 - less than 30 years from now. If on the
other hand we managed to stray all the way up to four degrees of warming, which is the trajectory
our global society is currently following, then we'd be looking at permanent loss
of as much as 90 percent of all glaciers. That would cause more than 15 centimetres or six
inches of sea level rise, which would represent about eight percent of the total rise under
a four degree scenario. That's obviously very bad news for the lives and livelihoods of people
living in coastal regions around the world but it's the areas directly dependent upon glaciers
that'll suffer the most devastating consequences. We're already seeing some of those consequences
happening in real time right before our eyes. A study published in 2021 by the public university
ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France found that the world's glaciers lost nearly
300 billion tons of ice every year between 2015 and 2019. That was found to be a 30% increase in
the rate of retreat compared to the previous five years. Alaska, Iceland and the European Alps are
among those already disappearing at an alarming rate. Switzerland's 1400 glaciers, for example,
which represent about 50% of all the ice sheets in the Alps, lost half of their volume between
1931 and 2016. They lost another 12 percent by 2021 and, according to the Swiss Academy of
Sciences, during the extreme summer temperatures of 2022 they lost another 6.2 percent or three
cubic kilometres of ice, just in a single season! Now Switzerland's got quite a bit of cash in the
coffers of course, so while the loss of their glaciers is nothing short of an environmental
tragedy, the country will no doubt find a way to adapt and survive. It's not quite such a rosy
outlook over in the Himalayas though. This vast mountain range is home to something like 15,000
glaciers that provide a crucial lifeline to about 500 million people every summer by releasing
their melt waters into the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers that flow through Pakistan,
India and Bangladesh. When those glaciers go, all three of those countries will experience
catastrophic droughts and food shortages. And in the meantime the vastly increased level of melt
water cascading down the mountains during the hotter months will regularly overwhelm those river
systems causing disastrous levels of flooding like those we witnessed in 2022 in Pakistan as a result
of glacial melt from a summer heat wave combining with a monster monsoon season. The countries below
the Himalayas don't possess the economic resources of Switzerland nor do they have well-established
and well-organized infrastructure and services that can deal with these kinds of events.
The result in Pakistan was that 33 million people were displaced and more than a thousand
people died. And to use a very hackneyed phrase "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!" The main cause of
all this warming and melting is essentially the profligate use of fossil fuels since the start
of the Industrial Revolution releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere,
which of course is something that Pakistan and the other countries of the global south played very
little part in. So I guess it's understandable that there was such fierce debate at COP 27
in Sharm el Sheikh on the subject of loss and damage funding for vulnerable countries who will
be hardest hit by climate disasters. That debate did result in a historic agreement by the majority
of rich western nations, eventually even including the United States of America, to create a specific
fund to assist developing nations in responding to their loss and damage challenges. Governments also
agreed to establish a transitional committee to make recommendations on how to operationalize both
the new funding arrangements and the fund itself at COP 28 later in 2023, with the first meeting of
the transitional committee expected to take place before the end of March. But we do also still need
to do everything in our power to slow down the warming in an effort to prevent these existential
crises happening in the first place. The authors of the Carnegie Mellon University paper sum it up
quite well "Our projections", they say, "reveal a strong linear relationship between global mean
temperature increase and glacier mass loss. This strong relationship at global and
regional scales highlights that every increase in temperature has significant consequences.
The rapidly increasing glacier mass losses as global temperature increases beyond 1.5 degrees
Celsius stresses the urgency of establishing more ambitious climate pledges to preserve
the glaciers in these mountainous regions." No doubt you've got views and information
that you'd like to add to the debate, so if you do then why not jump down to the comments
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