Climate Letter #1590

The Phys.org  science website, an operation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, ran a series of stories today, written by associated authors, dealing with the devastating effects of climate change on the lives of people dependent on the great rivers emerging from the Tibetan Plateau. The stories are all related and worth reading as a group in order to get a sense of the full picture of what may be the biggest single crisis humanity faces in the near future.

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“Asia’s Great Rivers:  Climate crisis, pollution put billions at risk.”  The overall picture is introduced in this way:  “The year is 2100. The glaciers of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region—the world’s “Third Pole”—are vanishing as the planet warms, the ice that once fed the great rivers of Asia is all but lost, and with it much of the water needed to nurture and grow a continent.    Further stressed by extreme heatwaves, erratic monsoons, and pollution, the waterways are in crisis and the lives of hundreds of millions hang in the balance.”
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How life is changing for people who live along these waterways.  The heaviest and most densely populated nations on Earth all face problems of sustainability because of their dependence on deeply troubled rivers.
–A separate story elaborates on the problems of the Yangtze River, the one most greatly affected by industrial pollution, serving the vital needs of 400 million people.
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Majuli island, in the heart of the Brahmaputra River, holding a population of 170,000 persons, is rapidly being washed away and could disappear entirely by 2040.  “The Brahmaputra and many of India’s other major rivers are reliant on snow and ice from the mountains, and while an increase in melting means more water in the short term, it’s arrival is uncontrolled—and intense.”
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Pakistan faces grave and immediate danger from glacial melting.  Everything in Pakistan depends on the Indus River.  “The waterway’s basin produces 90 percent of Pakistan’s food, according to the UN, and agriculture is dependent on irrigation from the river, which heavily relies on meltwater from the ice sheets.  With its surging population experts warn the nation faces “absolute water scarcity” by 2025, with the loss of the Himalayan glaciers a key threat.”
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And finally, a related story published by The Guardian reports about a study which describes the way shrubs and grasses are springing to life across the Himalayas on newly-exposed lands between the treeline and the snowline.  The impact of this increase is unknown for certain, but it could have the ability to accelerate both the rate of warming and amount of flooding in the near future.  The entire ecosystem covers between five and 15 times the area of permanent glaciers and snow in the region.
Carl

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