Good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC

Glaciers and the IPCC-The Economist

Full Credit to The Economist

Some major issues:

1. Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, explains that a timescale of centuries, not decades, is far more plausible for the Himalaya.
2. To melt a glacier at an altitude above 6,000 metres, where many of the Himalayan glaciers are found, requires a lot more warming than can be expected by 2035—a point made forcefully in a letter to Science by Dr Kaser and others, published this week. Jeff Kargel of the University of Arizona, one of its authors, stresses that its criticism is aimed at this specific claim, not at the IPCC in general, and should not be seen as undermining the panel’s conclusions.
3. Meanwhile, the future of water resources in the places served by the glaciers remains unclear. Glaciers in monsoonal climates, unlike high-latitude glaciers, gain mass from precipitation during the same warm season in which they lose mass from melting, which makes their behaviour complex. And there are other water-related questions to be addressed, including possible changes to the monsoons and massive depletion of groundwater. There is an urgent need to study these things, and to synthesise the results in a way that can be relied on.