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Bleak outlook for Asian glaciers: Climate study

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Asia’s mountain glaciers will lose at least a third of their mass through global warming by century’s end, with dire consequences for millions of people who rely on them for fresh water, researchers said on Wednesday.


This is a best-case scenario, based on the assumption that the world manages to limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels, a team wrote in the journal Nature. “To meet the 1.5oC target will be a task of unprecedented difficulty,” the researchers said, “and even then, 36 per cent (give or take seven per cent) of the ice mass in the high mountains of Asia is projected to be lost” by 2100. With warming of 3.5oC, 4.0oC and 6.0oC respectively, Asian glacier losses could amount to 49 per cent, 51 per cent or 65 per cent by the end of the century, according to the team’s modelling study.


The high mountains of Asia (HMA) comprise a geographical region surrounding the Tibetan plateau, holding the biggest store of frozen water outside the poles.


It feeds many of the world’s great rivers, including the Ganges, the Indus and the Brahmaputra, on which hundreds of millions of people depend.


Nearly 200 nations adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, which sets the goal of limiting warming to a level “well below” 2.0oC, while “pursuing efforts” to achieve a lower ceiling of 1.5oC.


Earth’s surface has already warmed by about 1.0oC, according to scientists. For high warming scenarios, experts predict land-gobbling sea-level rise, worsening storms, more frequent droughts and floods, species loss, and disease spread. The Asian high mountains, the new study said, were already warming more rapidly than the global average.


A global temperature rise of 1.5oC would mean an average increase in the region of about 2.1oC, with differences between mountain ranges — all of which will warm by more than 1.5oC.


Swathes of South Asia and China depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers for drinking water, electricity generation and irrigation.


At the same time, the regions are also vulnerable to more intense flooding from accelerated glacier melt, combined with heavier rains and superstorms boosted by global warming. A study in July in the journal Nature Climate Change, said there was only a five per cent chance of holding global warming under 2.0oC. — AFP


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