Climate of Our Future

Source: Climate Crisis Coalition

By Sam Taylor, Agence France-Presse, June 4, 2007. “Himalayan glaciers are retreating fast and could disappear within the next 50 years, experts warned at a conference in Nepal’s capital looking at the regional effects of global warming. The melting ice fields have also caused a dramatic increase in the number and size of glacial lakes now risk bursting and devastating mountain communities, delegates at the conference said. ‘If temperatures continue to rise as it is, then there will be no snow and ice in the Himalayas in 50 years time,’ said Surendra Shrestha, the regional director for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Glaciers in the Himalayas, a 2,400-kilometre (1,500-mile) range that sweeps through Pakistan, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan, provide headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers, a lifeline for the 1.3 billion people who live downstream. But temperatures in the region have been increasing by between 0.15 and 0.6 degrees Celsius (0.27 and 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade for the last 30 years.”