The "Roof of the World" is melting - rapidly

Guambat's associate just returned from a visit to his home in Beijing and complained of the dust storms. That Son of a Guambat lived not too far outside Beijing for a while and also reported severe dust storms.

It'll only get worse.

Xinhua News reports:

NANNING, April 30 (Xinhua) -- Pouring over four decades of research based on data from China's 681 weather stations, the country's scientists have found that global warming is seriously affecting the "roof of the world", as west China's Qinghai-Tibet plateau is known.

Professor Dong Guangrong with the Chinese Academy of Sciences is calling for world attention to the environmental deterioration of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau caused by global warming. [Call it "global" warming and you don't have to take responsibility for the awful state of China's air quality and industrial waste problems.]

He has discovered that the "roof of the world" glacier, accounting for 47 percent of China's total glacier coverage, is shrinking at a rate of seven percent annually.

Dong concludes that the melting glacier will ultimately trigger more droughts, expand desertification and increase sandstorms.

Han Yongxiang of the National Meteorological Bureau Global agrees that global warming has led to expanding deserts on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. He says statistics from the Tibet weather bureau show that average temperatures in Tibet has risen 0.9 centigrade since the 1980's accelerating the melting of the glacier and tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.

Statistics provided by the Tibet regional government show that Tibet has lost 3.4 billion yuan (about 425 million U.S. dollars) to 9.5 billion yuan (about 1.19 billion U.S. dollars) annually due to desertization.

Reuters adds to the story:

The Qinghai-Tibet plateau covers 2.5 million square km (0.96 million square miles) -- about a quarter of China's land surface -- at an average altitude of 4,000 metres (13,000 ft) above sea level.

Dust and sandstorms are a growing problem, particularly in North China, due to deforestation, drought and the environmental depredations of China's breakneck economic growth.

A strong sandstorm swept across one eighth of China's territory on April 16 and 17, dumping 330,000 tons of dust on Beijing and reaching as far as Korea and Japan.

China's weathermen might soon launch a "dust forecast" in their bulletins, Xinhua quoted a China Meteorological Administration official as saying.

Of course, it is an issue not unique to China as NASA's Earth Sciences divsion reports:

Visit the world’s high mountain ranges and you’ll probably see less ice and snow today than you would have a few decades ago. More than 110 glaciers have disappeared from Montana’s Glacier National Park over the past 150 years, and researchers estimate that the park’s remaining 37 glaciers may be gone in another 25 years. Half a world away on the African equator, Hemingway’s snows of Kilimanjaro are steadily melting and could completely disappear in the next 20 years. And in the Alps, glaciers are retreating and disappearing every year, much to the dismay of mountain climbers, tourist agencies, and environmental researchers.

“Receding and wasting glaciers are a telltale sign of global climate change,” said Jeff Kargel, head of the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) Coordination Center at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Flagstaff, Arizona. Kargel is part of a research team that’s developing an inventory of the world’s glaciers, combining current information on size and movement with historical data, maps, and photos.