A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report

At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people.

Melting ice on Khumbu glacier in the Everest-Khumbu
region. Himalayan glaciers are a water source for
250 million people.

Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.

The glaciers are a critical water store for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region, and 1.65 billion people rely on the great rivers that flow from the peaks into India, Pakistan, China and other nations.

Read the story from The Guardian by Damian Carrington - “A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report.”

After Back-to-Back Hurricanes, North Carolina Reconsiders Climate Change

After North Carolina was hit by two major hurricanes within two years and flooding rainfall from a third, the state that once spurned the science of sea level rise in its zoning rules is starting to take climate change more seriously.

Days of rain from Hurricane Florence flooded homes
across a wide area of North Carolina in September
2018. In Spring Lake, nearly 100 miles from the coast,
 Bob Richling carried items from a home as the Little River flooded. 

A new governor has a different policy agenda that incorporates the risks from climate change, and polls suggest a growing number of North Carolina residents are concerned about climate change and want policies that help protect them from extreme weather.

Read the Inside Climate News story by James Bruggers - “After Back-to-Back Hurricanes, North Carolina Reconsiders Climate Change.”

The end of the oceans

In June this year, scientists from the University of Tasmania and the University of Technology Sydney published research showing that over the past decade the biomass of large fish in Australian waters has declined by more than a third. The results may have jarred with government claims of Australian fisheries being among the most sustainable in the world, but they closely matched official figures showing a 32 per cent decline in Australian fishery catches in the same period. The declines were sharpest in species targeted for fishing and areas in which fishing is permitted, but even populations of species not exploited by fishing declined across the same period.

Vanitas of the Anthropocene. Plastic waste and the remains of
 coastal wildlife, Swansea Bay, Wales. Series by Jasmine Färling

The notion that a third of large fish in Australian waters disappeared in just 10 years should be of profound concern to all. The health of marine food webs depends upon healthy populations of the predator species that regulate populations of smaller species; declines in their numbers are likely to lead to hastening disruption of ocean ecosystems.

Read the essay by James Bradley from The Monthly  - “The end of the oceans.”