Sky Blue Pony

CLIMATE CHANGE

Patterns in the Sky...Patterns in the Rain...

There is a lot of information available about Climate Change so I'm going to limit what I post here to articles that also relate Climate Change to some of the other issues I explore in these pages, like Scalar Weapons, Chemtrails and Peak Oil. If Scalar and 'weather modification' weapons are indeed out there and operational it is not unreasonable to link these devices to the current global issues of Climate Change and erratic and severe weather patterns. Also some would have it that Chemtrails are a secret project to mitigate against Climate Change and others go so far as to state that Climate Change is a solar system wide phenomena which the 'powers that be' are aware of and acting on.

Make your own mind up after reviewing the data, but what is not in doubt (except by those who remain in total denial) is that Climate Change is happening now and rapidly getting worse.

Could it be the Sun? - all other excuses could be just that, convenient excuses to help the powers that be sustain a capitalist consumer society and get us all 'carbon trading' and ever more firmly under their thumbs, when the reality is that Climate Change is way beyond our control as it is being caused by the Sun!

unknown

Perhaps we have reached the 'Tipping Point' of no return in regard to our global climate and we have no choice but to prepare and adapt. The articles below give a good general overview:

Global warming, in capsule form

David Roberts, Gristmill  http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/10/18/16151/159

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

In the midst of a long post on Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer's coal-to-liquid-fuel plans, Oil Drummer Stuart Staniford provides a handy one-paragraph-long roundup of evidence on global warming. The next time someone you know asks about it, just cut and paste this paragraph and send it to them. Warming cliff notes!
[W]e are reaching the point where we can see that we are starting to make massive, probably irreversible, changes to our climate. The glaciers are in full retreat almost everywhere, the Arctic is melting (with total melting of the summer sea ice possible, though not certain, as early as 2020), the permafrost is melting, and releasing large amounts of methane, which is a very powerful global warming gas, while in the last thirty years, droughts have doubled due to warming, hurricanes are much more intense all over the globe, and are showing up in places they never did before in recorded history. Scientists have been projecting changes in ocean circulation, and lo-and-behold, they are starting to show up, including changes to the North Atlantic Circulation, although major change here was previously thought unlikely this century. There is some possibility of changes in deepwater circulation destabilizing methane hydrates in the ocean, particularly in South East Asian deeps. Oh, and the Greenland ice sheet is now melting much faster than climatologists expected, and the West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse, though again, this was previously thought unlikely. Also paleoclimatological studies have made it clear that in the past the climate abruptly flipped between modes, sometimes with dramatic change in as little as three years. And we are making rapid changes in carbon dioxide, known to be critically important in regulating the temperature of this sensitive climatic system for a century now.
As he says, "maybe there's some scientific doubt still on any individual piece of the picture, but the gestalt is starting to look extremely alarming." Yes.

This page will highlight current news stories and information on Climate Change from a variety of sources, starting here with a couple of recent articles in the mainstream media. Firstly from the Independent newspaper in the UK

"some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers.."

The Cooling World
By Peter Gwynne

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production — with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas — parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia — where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually.

During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree — a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.

“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras — and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.

Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 — years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases — all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.”

Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.

They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Newsweek’s 1975 Article About The Coming Ice Age
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/newsweeks-1975-article-about-the-coming-ice-age

"Earth" (noun) - from ancient Alien language, meaning 'Planet of Idiots'

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/article316604.ece

Melting Planet
Species are dying out faster than we have dared recognise, scientists will warn this week. The erosion of polar ice is the first break in a fragile chain of life extending across the planet, from bears in the north to penguins in the far south
By Andrew Buncombe in Anchorage and Severin Carrell in London
Published: 02 October 2005

The polar bear is one of the natural world's most famous predators - the king of the Arctic wastelands. But, like its vast Arctic home, the polar bear is under unprecedented threat. Both are disappearing with alarming speed.
Thinning ice and longer summers are destroying the bears' habitat, and as the ice floes shrink, the desperate animals are driven by starvation into human settlements - to be shot. Stranded polar bears are drowning in large numbers as they try to swim hundreds of miles to find increasingly scarce ice floes. Local hunters find their corpses floating on seas once coated in a thick skin of ice.
It is a phenomenon that frightens the native people that live around the Arctic. Many fear their children will never know the polar bear. "The ice is moving further and further north," said Charlie Johnson, 64, an Alaskan Nupiak from Nome, in the state's far west. "In the Bering Sea the ice leaves earlier and earlier. On the north slope, the ice is retreating as far as 300 or 400 miles offshore."
Last year, hunters found half a dozen bears that had drowned about 200 miles north of Barrow, on Alaska's northern coast. "It seems they had tried to swim for shore ... A polar bear might be able to swim 100 miles but not 400."
His alarming testimony, given at a conference on global warming and native communities held in the Alaskan capital, Anchorage, last week, is just one story of the many changes happening across the globe. Climate change threatens the survival of thousands of species - a threat unparalleled since the last ice age, which ended some 10,000 years ago.
The vast majority, scientists will warn this week, are migratory animals - sperm whales, polar bears, gazelles, garden birds and turtles - whose survival depends on the intricate web of habitats, food supplies and weather conditions which, for some species, can stretch for 6,500 miles. Every link of that chain is slowly but perceptibly altering.
Europe's most senior ecologists and conservationists are meeting in Aviemore, in the Scottish Highlands, this week for a conference on the impact of climate change on migratory species, an event organised by the British government as part of its presidency of the European Union. It is a well-chosen location. Aviemore's major winter employer - skiing - is a victim of warmer winters. Ski slopes in the Cairngorms, which once had snow caps year round on the highest peaks, have recently been closed down when the winter snow failed. The snow bunting, ptarmigan and dotterel - some of Scotland's rarest birds - are also given little chance of survival as their harsh and marginal winter environments disappear.
A report being presented this week in Aviemore reveals this is a pattern being repeated around the world. In the sub-Arctic tundra,caribou are threatened by "multiple climate change impacts". Deeper snow at higher latitudes makes it harder for caribou herds to travel. Faster and more regular "freeze-thaw" cycles make it harder to dig out food under thick crusts of ice-covered snow. Wetter and warmer winters are cutting calving success, and increasing insect attacks and disease.
The same holds true for migratory wading birds such as the red knot and the northern seal. The endangered spoon-billed sandpiper, too, faces extinction, the report says. They are of "key concern". It says that species "cannot shift further north as their climates become warmer. They have nowhere left to go ... We can see, very clearly, that most migratory species are drifting towards the poles."
The report, passed to The Independent on Sunday, and commissioned by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), makes gloomy predictions about the world's animal populations. "The habitats of migratory species most vulnerable to climate change were found to be tundra, cloud forest, sea ice and low-lying coastal areas," it states. "Increased droughts and lowered water tables, particularly in key areas used as 'staging posts' on migration, were also identified as key threats stemming from climate change."
Some of itsfindings include:
* Four out of five migratory birds listed by the UN face problems ranging from lower water tables to increased droughts, spreading deserts and shifting food supplies in their crucial "fuelling stations" as they migrate.
* One-third of turtle nesting sites in the Caribbean - home to diminishing numbers of green, hawksbill and loggerhead turtles - would be swamped by a sea level rise of 50cm (20ins). This will "drastically" hit their numbers. At the same time, shallow waters used by the endangered Mediterranean monk seal, dolphins, dugongs and manatees will slowly disappear.
* Whales, salmon, cod, penguins and kittiwakes are affected by shifts in distribution and abundance of krill and plankton, which has "declined in places to a hundredth or thousandth of former numbers because of warmer sea-surface temperatures."
* Increased dam building, a response to water shortages and growing demand, is affecting the natural migration patterns of tucuxi, South American river dolphins, "with potentially damaging results".
* Fewer chiffchaffs, blackbirds, robins and song thrushes are migrating from the UK due to warmer winters. Egg-laying is also getting two to three weeks earlier than 30 years ago, showing a change in the birds' biological clocks.
The science magazine Nature predicted last year that up to 37 per cent of terrestrial species could become extinct by 2050. And the Defra report presents more problems than solutions. Tackling these crises will be far more complicated than just building more nature reserves - a problem that Jim Knight, the nature conservation minister, acknowledges.
A key issue in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, is profound poverty. After visiting the Democratic Republic of the Congo last month, Mr Knight found it difficult to condemn local people eating gorillas, already endangered. "You can't blame an individual who doesn't know how they're going to feed their family every day from harvesting what's around them. That's a real challenge," he said.
And the clash between nature and human need - a critical issue across Africa - is likely to worsen. As its savannah and forests begin shifting south, migratory animals will shift along with them. Some of the continent's major national parks and reserves - such as the Masai-Mara or Serengeti - may also have to move their boundaries if their game species, the elephant and wildebeest, are to be properly protected. This will bring conflict with local communities.
There is also a gap in scientific knowledge between what has been discovered about the impact of climate change in the industrialised world and in less developed countries. Similarly, fisheries experts know more about species such as cod and haddock, than they do about fish humans don't eat.
Many environmentalists are pessimistic about the prospects of halting, let alone reversing, this trend. "Are we fighting a losing battle? Yes, we probably are," one naturalist told the IoS last month.
The UK, which is attempting to put climate change at the top of the global agenda during its presidency of the G8 group of industrialised nations, is still struggling to persuade the American, Japanese and Australian governments to admit that mankind's gas emissions are the biggest threat. These three continue to insist there is no proof that climate change is largely manmade.
And many British environmentalists suspect that Tony Blair's public commitment to a tougher global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at a 60 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, is not being backed up by the Government in private.
Despite President George Bush's resistance to a new global climate treaty, many US states are being far more radical. Even the G8 communiqué after the Gleneagles summit in July had Mr Bush confirming that the climate was warming.
In Alaska last week, satellite images released by two US universities and the space agency Nasa revealed that the amount of sea-ice cover over the polar ice cap has fallen for the past four years. "A long-term decline is under way," said Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre.
The Arctic's native communities don't need satellite images to tell them this. John Keogak, 47, an Inuvialuit from Canada's North-West Territories, hunts polar bears, seals, caribou and musk ox. "The polar bear is part of our culture," he said. "They use the ice as a hunting ground for the seals. If there is no ice there is no way the bears will be able to catch the seals." He said the number of bears was decreasing and feared his children might not be able to hunt them. He said: "There is an earlier break-up of ice, a later freeze-up. Now it's more rapid. Something is happening."
And now, said Mr Keogak, there was evidence that polar bears are facing an unusual competitor - the grizzly bear. As the sub-Arctic tundra and wastelands thaw, the grizzly is moving north, colonising areas where they were previously unable to survive. Life for Alaska's polar bears is rapidly becoming very precarious.
Vanishing from the earth
Mountain gorilla
Already listed as "critically endangered", only about 700 mountain gorillas, including the distinctively marked adult male silverbacks, migrate within the cloud forests of the volcanic Virunga mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. After a century of human persecution it faced extinction. Now its unique but marginal mountain forests - already heavily reduced by forestry - are shrinking, because of climate change. It will be forced to climb higher for cooler climates, but will effectively run out of mountain.
Across Africa, habitats are shifting as temperatures rise, or disappearing in droughts, affecting the migrations of millions of wildebeest, and savannah elephant and Thomson's gazelle. This will hit game reserves and national parks - forcing many to move their boundaries.
Green turtle
The number of male green turtles is falling because of rising temperatures, threatening their survival. Turtle nests need a temperature of precisely 28.8C to hatch even numbers of males and females. On Ascension Island, where nest temperatures are up 0.5C,females now outnumber males three to one. On Antigua too, nest temperatures for hawkbill turtles are higher than the ideal incubation level. Hatchling survival rates are also cut by higher temperatures. Egg-laying beaches for all species of turtle are being lost to rising sea levels. A third of nesting beaches in the Caribbean would be lost by a 50cm rise in sea level.
Saiga antelope
This rare antelope, thought to be half-way between an antelope and a sheep, and found in Russia and Mongolia, is "critically endangered". Hunted heavily, its autumn migration to escape bitter weather and spring migration to find water and food are being hit by unusual weather cycles. The antelope will be forced by climate instability to find new grazing areas, coming intoconflict with humans. Bad years can cut its numbers by 50 per cent, because of high mortality and poor birth rates.
Sperm whale
The migration of the sperm whale, one of the earth's largest mammals, made famous by Herman Melville's epic Moby-Dick, is closely linked to the squid, its main food source. Squid numbers are affected by warmer water and weather phenomena such as El Niño. Adult male sperm whales up to 20m long like cold water in the disappearing ice-packs. Warm water cuts sperm whale reproduction because food supplies fall. Around the Galapagos Islands, a fall in births is linked to higher sea surface temperatures. Plankton and krill, key foods for many cetaceans such as the pilot whale, have in some regions declined 100-fold in warmer water.
trpix
trpix AND ONE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

Arctic Could Be Ice-Free By Century's End... 500,000 Extra Square Miles Melted This Year
In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around

The New York Times September 29, 2005 By ANDREW C. REVKIN http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/science/29ice.html?ex=1285646400& en=7b3487fa5bc2d915&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping, continuing a trend toward less summer ice, a team of climate experts reported yesterday.
That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said.
The change also appears to be headed toward becoming self-sustaining: the increased open water absorbs solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which compiled the data along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
"Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold," Dr. Scambos said.
The data was released on the center's Web site, www.nsidc.org.
The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century, when much of the once ice-locked ocean would routinely become open water in summers.
Expanding areas of open water in the summer could be a boon to whales and cod stocks, and the ice retreat could create summertime shipping shortcuts between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
But a host of troubles lie ahead as well. One of the most important consequences of Arctic warming will be increased flows of meltwater and icebergs from glaciers and ice sheets, and thus an accelerated rise in sea levels, threatening coastal areas. The loss of sea ice could also hurt both polar bears and Eskimo seal hunters.
The Arctic ice cap always grows in the winter and shrinks in the summer. The average minimum area from 1979, when precise satellite mapping began, until 2000 was 2.69 million square miles, similar in size to the contiguous area of the United States. The new summer low, measured on Sept. 19, was 20 percent below that.
Before 1979, scientists estimated the size of the ice cap based on reports from ships and airplanes.
The difference between the average ice area and the area that persisted this summer was about 500,000 square miles, an area about twice the size of Texas, the scientists said.
This summer was the fourth in a row with the ice cap areas sharply below the long-term average, said Mark C. Serreze, a senior scientist at the snow and ice center and a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Dr. Scambos said the consecutive reductions in the ice cap "make it pretty certain a long-term decline is under way."
A natural cycle in the polar atmosphere called the Arctic oscillation, which contributed to the reduction in Arctic ice in the past, did not appear to be a factor in the past several years, Dr. Serreze said.
He said the role of accumulating greenhouse gas emissions had become increasingly apparent with rising air and sea temperatures. Still, many scientists say it is not yet possible to determine what portion of Arctic change is being caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide and other emissions from human sources and how much is just climate's usual wiggles.
Dr. Serreze and other scientists said that more variability could lie ahead and that the area of sea ice could actually increase some years. But the scientists have found few hints that other factors, like more Arctic cloudiness in a warming world, will reverse the trend.
"With all that dark open water, you start to see an increase in Arctic Ocean heat storage," Dr. Serreze said. "Come autumn and winter that makes it a lot harder to grow ice, and the next spring you're left with less and thinner ice. And it's easier to lose even more the next year."
The result, he said, is that the Arctic is "becoming a profoundly different place than we grew up thinking about."
Other experts on Arctic ice and climate disagreed on details. For example, Ignatius G. Rigor at the University of Washington said the change was probably linked to a mix of factors, including influences of the atmospheric cycle.
But he agreed with Dr. Serreze that the influence from greenhouse gases had to be involved.
"The global warming idea has to be a good part of the story," Dr. Rigor said. "I think we have a different climate state in the Arctic now. All of these feedbacks are starting to kick in and really snuffing the ice out by the end of summer."
Other experts expressed some caution. Claire L. Parkinson, a sea ice expert at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said a host of changes in the Arctic - including rising temperatures, melting permafrost and shrinking sea ice - were consistent with human-caused warming. But she emphasized that the complicated system was still far from completely understood.
William L. Chapman, a sea ice researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said it was important to keep in mind that the size of the ice cap could vary tremendously, in part because of changes in wind patterns, which can cause the ice to heap up against one Arctic shore or drift away from another.

Water crisis looms as Himalayan glaciers melt

NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- Imagine a world without drinking water  CNN  http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/09/himalayan.glaciers.reut/index.html

It's a scary thought, but scientists say the 40 percent of humanity living in South Asia and China could well be living with little drinking water within 50 years as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, the region's main water source.
The glaciers supply 303.6 million cubic feet every year to Asian rivers, including the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, the Ganga in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh and Burma's Irrawaddy.
But as global warming increases, the glaciers have been rapidly retreating, with average temperatures in the Himalayas up 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s.
A World Wide Fund report published in March said a quarter of the world's glaciers could disappear by 2050 and half by 2100.
"If the current scenario continues, there will be very little water left in the Ganga and its tributaries," Prakash Rao, climate change and energy program coordinator with the fund in India told Reuters.
"The situation here is more critical because here they depend on glaciers for drinking water while in other areas there are other sources of drinking water, not just glacial."
Experts are alarmed.
About 67 percent of the nearly 12,124 square miles of Himalayan glaciers are receding and in the long run as the ice diminishes, glacial runoffs in summer and river flows will also go down, leading to severe water shortages in the region.
The Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganga, India's holiest river, is retreating 75 feet a year. And the Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, where Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent of Everest, has lost more than 3 miles since they climbed the mountain in 1953.
"The cry in the mountains is that water has gone down and springs have dried up," Jagdish Bahadur, an expert on Himalayan glaciers.
"Global climate change has had an effect, but water has also dried up because agriculture in the mountains has increased," he said.
In Nepal, there are more than 3,000 glaciers that work as reservoirs for fresh water and another 2,000 glacial lakes.
Experts estimate numerous rivers originating in Nepal's mountains contribute about 70 percent to the pre-monsoon flow of the Ganges that snakes through neighboring India and Bangladesh.
"The glaciers are shrinking due to global warming posing a risk to water availability not only in Nepal but also in parts of South Asia," said Arun Bhakta Shrestha, an expert on Himalayan glaciers at the government Hydrology and Meteorology Department.
"But how soon or to what extent this problem will arise is difficult to say now."
Tulsi Maya, a farmer on the outskirts of Kathmandu, has never heard of global warming or its impact on the rivers in the Himalayan kingdom, but she does know that the flow of water has gone down.
"It used to overflow its banks and spill into the fields," the 85-year-old farmer said standing in her emerald green rice field as she looked at the Bishnumati river, which has ceased to be a reliable source of drinking water and irrigation.
"Maybe God is unkind and sends less water in the river. The flow of water is decreasing every year," she said standing by her grandson, Milan Dangol, who weeds the crop.
In the Indian Himalayas, there are already signs of water shortages in the summer: Tourists in the rugged mountains of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh have to carry buckets of water while trekkers say temperatures are much warmer than a decade ago.
The effect can also be seen in the rest of the country.
During the summer, thousands of people in India's villages trek for miles in search of water and even in cities water is a precious commodity, sometimes leading to street fights.
Indian scientists studying Himalayan glaciers fear an acute shortage of natural drinking water in Himachal Pradesh state based on studies of the Beas and Baspa basins from 1962 to 2001.
Two scientists from India's Space and Research Organization using remote sensing satellites found a 23 percent drop in glacial water in 19 of 30 glaciers mapped in the region.
Already, the impact of climate change is evident in the soaring summer temperatures in South Asia, which go up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and the erratic nature of the monsoon, one of the world's most widely watched phenomena.
"Our research indicates the economy of the region may be affected due to these conditions and investigations suggest that all glaciers are reducing which could create an acute scarcity of water," said Anil Kulkarni, who headed the team studying the Himachal Pradesh glaciers.

HOME >
CLIMATE CHANGE >

Information for a Changing World