Himalayan glaciers actually GAINING ice, space scans show
An inconvenient truth
A new study of survey data gleaned from space has shown a vast region of Himalayan glaciers is actually gaining ice steadily, mystifying climate scientists who had thought the planet's "third pole" to be melting.
The study was carried out by comparing two sets of space data, the first gathered by instruments aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2000 and the second by the French SPOT5 satellite in 2008. The results were unequivocal. Across the targeted 5,615km2 region of the Karakorum mountains lying on the Chinese border with India and Pakistan, the glaciers had gained substantial amounts of mass by the time the second survey was carried out. Satellite pictures had previously shown the glaciers there spreading to cover more area, but some climate scientists had argued that they might nonetheless be losing ice by becoming thinner: this has now been disproven.
“This is a solid, high-grade measurement,” glaciologist Graham Cogley commented, reviewing the paper published in Nature Geoscience. The study was led by Julie Gardelle of Grenoble uni in France.
The melting or non-melting of the high Asian glaciers provides key underpinnings to climate models and sea-level forecasts and is thus crucial to the climate-change/global-warming debate. However it's actually very difficult to find out what's happening up in most of the valleys of the "third pole", as they are extremely hostile and inaccessible environments. This has led in recent years to attempts to get a proper handle on the situation using space surveys. As in this case, some of these new improved measurements have provided surprising results: a recent survey by the GRACE [Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment] satellites showed that overall the third pole appears not to be losing any mass at all.
The new discoveries are in sharp contrast to the general narrative until recent times, which had assumed that the Asian glaciers were melting away rapidly. As recently as 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change formally predicted that all the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035: this was later found to be based on a bogus study issued by the hard-green campaigning group WWF. The IPCC retracted the claim, but stuck to its assertion that rapid melting is taking place. ®
COMMENTS
Re: So which is it?
Neither.
The "shrinking" glaciers are downwind from the heavily polluted India.
The "growing" glaciers have virtually no industry upwind from them for thousands of miles. See the jetstream map for the area - before it reaches Karacorum it blows across Afganistan and the virtually uninhabited portions of Iran and Northern Pakistan.
It is not warming which melts Himalayan glaciers, it is particulate polution. Most moisture coming up from the Indian ocean across India with the monsoons settles on the windward (facing India) slopes (along with all pollution it picks up on the way). The slope facing China is a mountain desert with rainfall comparable to the middle of the Sahara.
Even 1% albedo change from tar which industry, badly maintained internal combustion engines and diesels put in the air can make more damage to glaciers and snow cover than all of the annual temperature changes reported so far combined.
Nothing to see here, move along, it is still humans who make for the "melting", just nobody wants to admit "how" they do it.
Doesnt matter
They would still make up taxes for global warming if we where stuck in an ice age.
Re: Watch the excuses come out
@Leslie Graham.
Well, my sister is a scientist (not anything to do with climate change) and she gets a salary, but the money for the salary comes from a grant and therefore she is effectively paid by grant. Every so often, lots of ideas go for grant money and if successful, the salary keeps getting paid. If none of the grant applications are successful, she is made redundant...
So, although technically she is paid a salary, without the grant, the salary disappears too. So, the grant is rather important to continued employment, hence my comment.
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