Tibetan Glaciers Melting?
Those who think there is no need to worry about the environment, and who pass
off global warming and climate change as a liberal fantasy are going to be sorry they didnt
give the science a closer look.
Tibetan Glaciers Melting, Dalai Lama Claims
04/ 2/11 06:54 AM ET
NEW DELHI -- The Dalai Lama said Saturday that India should be seriously concerned about the melting of glaciers in the Tibetan plateau as millions of Indians use water that comes from there.
The Tibetan spiritual leader quoted Chinese experts as saying that the Tibetan glaciers were retreating faster than any elsewhere in the world.
He called for special attention to ecology in Tibet. "It's something very, very essential," he said.
The glaciers are considered vital lifelines for Asian rivers, including the Indus and the Ganges. Once they vanish, water supplies in those regions will be threatened.
As these major rivers come from the Tibetan plateau and "since millions of Indians use water coming from the Himalayan glacier, so you have certain right to show your concern about ecology of that plateau," the Dalai Lama told an audience of about 400 Indians.
He was speaking at the centenary celebrations of India's former President R. Venkataraman in New Delhi.
"India, a free country, I think should express more serious concern, that's I think important. This is nothing to do with politics, just everybody's interest, including Chinese people also," he said.
Rising demand has put a strain on access to freshwater in India and China – which are home to more than a third of the world's population.
Koch-Funded Climate Skeptic's Own Data Confirms Warming
by Brian Merchant
This week, a climate hearing was held in the US House of Reps. Six 'experts' on climate were brought in, but only three were scientists. And it turns out that one of the GOP's star witnesses -- a scientist who's been vocal in his skepticism of global temperature records, the physicist Richard Muller, of University of California, Berkeley, didn't quite help them disprove climate change. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Good reports on what's got to be my favorite anecdote from the climate hearings. But first, some background:
[Richard] Muller has been working on an independent project to better estimate the planet's surface temperatures over time. Because he is willing to say publicly that he has some doubts about the accuracy of the temperature stations that most climate models are based on, he has been embraced by the science denying crowd. A Koch brothers charity, for example, has donated nearly 25 percent of the financial support provided to Muller's project.
Skeptics of climate science have been licking their lips waiting for his latest research, which they hoped would undermine the data behind basic theories of anthropogenic climate change. At the hearing today, however, Muller threw them for a loop with this graph ...
That's the one above.
{here} http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011...ms-warming.php
As you can see -- and more importantly, as Muller himself has come to believe -- the established data collected by temperature stations around the world are accurate. Muller's independent work confirms that the data on which the majority of the best climate models rely upon is actually quite good.
Which is why it must have pissed off the GOP Reps, who were counting on him to offer testimony skeptical of climate change, when he announced the following: "We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends."
In other words, Muller's Koch-funded project, which skeptics had hoped would call into question the validity of the data backing the projections of climate models, instead provided even further evidence yet that they are correct. There's even better reason to believe that the climate models are accurate than there was before. It's science, folks.