In 2004, with the aid of a hardy villager who joined me in one of the most arduous physical experiences of my life, I hiked for four hours high in the mountains of Tibet with a group of Chinese scientists who were studying the alarming retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas. At nearly 12,000 feet above sea level, we reached a formidable ice sheet the scientists had been studying for some time. There, at the receding edge of a steep glacier, had formed a river, newborn in geological time, and yet already raging in a ferocious torrent less than 100 meters from its point of origin. The leader of the Chinese observation team, a man named Yao Tandong, told me that this particular glacier had lost 100 meters in thickness through melting, which had accelerated continuously over the previous 30 years. “If you come back here in another 30 years, one thing is for sure,” Dr. Yao said at the time. “There will definitely be no more ice here.” For a host of reasons, it is unlikely that I will ever get back to the Zepu Glacier that I climbed that day, but this week brings news that suggests the grim forecast of my Chinese host is likely to be correct. A new survey of 15,000 glaciers in the region has found that they are melting at rates that well exceed the speed imagined even at the time of my visit to Tibet—and that are still accelerating. Both the causes and consequences of this are, of course, part of the far larger phenomenon of global warming. Just this month, scientists have issued separate, alarming studies of how climate change is ravaging ice coverage of both poles. In one of these studies, for example, it was confirmed that in 2020 the North Pole experienced a previously unheard of peak temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Along with this, recent studies have revealed a drastic decline in winter snow cover on the pole, as well as dramatic changes in the way that sea currents have begun to lap the North Pole with warming waters from the south, thereby accelerating the change.
One particularly alarming prospect is the collapse of a portion of the northern ice sheet the size of the state of Florida. Some now predict that if this entire glacier were to plunge into the ocean, sea levels could rise by 2 feet globally. News from the Southern Hemisphere is hardly more encouraging. There, ice sheets so prodigious they once seemed like permanent features of global geography are also in rapid decline. There is already strong and deepening scientific consensus that as ice on both poles shrinks, global sea levels will soon begin to rise faster than ever before and in increasingly catastrophic ways. By now, many are used to seeing surveys showing how daily life in coastal cities in every region of the world will be utterly transformed by these rising sea levels. Places like Miami and Shanghai, both of which have been my homes over the years, have nary a hill and will inevitably be swept up in this mounting catastrophe. But that is only the beginning. A huge number of coastal cities worldwide will face a dramatic reckoning. In New York City, a place that had never previously thought of itself as being especially vulnerable, a late-season hurricane named Sandy served up a devastating forewarning in 2012, damaging much of the city’s vital but ancient subway system. The Himalayas tend to get left out of many Western discussions of climate change. For anyone who has flown over the world’s most formidable mountain range, as I have many times, it is easy to see why it has been called the Third Pole. Imagine the Alps, only much taller, stretched over a far wider area, almost entirely draped in white, and with far fewer visible signs of habitation from above.
Albeit much less famously than the polar glaciers, the loss of ice in those mountains will contribute hugely to the rise of sea levels. “There’s lots of different parts to sea level rise, but mountain glaciers historically and probably in the coming decades have been the most significant contributors,” Summer Rupper, a geographer at the University of Utah, told The Wall Street Journal. The impact of this change, though, is likely to wreak far more damage than rising sea levels alone. Most of Asia’s great rivers, along with many small but nonetheless important ones, all originate in Himalayan melt. These include the Yellow River, the Yangtze and the Ganges, as well as the Indus, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween and Mekong. Along their banks sit some of that continent’s, and hence the world’s, biggest cities. In the short term, they will be rendered extremely vulnerable to flooding from these waterways. In the longer term, though, the opposite threat paradoxically looms. As glacial ice cover disappears, water so vital for human use, especially irrigation, will become scarce, and this poses the prospect of heightened geopolitical competition, and possibly war, to control this most fundamental resource. A potential conflict like this already looms in Africa between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt over the waters of the Nile River, following Ethiopia’s recent construction of a major new dam that it sees as a must for its emergence from widespread poverty. Some studies project that mountain glaciers could disappear completely from many regions by 2100. In Asia, a future competition over Himalayan water could pit nuclear powers like China and India into direct competition with one another, and could drive many other nations into coalition or conflict.
A situation like this should be front page news every week, if not every day, but it isn’t. Most of the world’s largest and most powerful countries are fiddling at the margins of this crisis, contenting themselves with symbolic gestures and posturing, waiting as if in a game of chicken for others to make big sacrifices first. The latest manifestation of this problem came from the United States this week, where Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator from the lightly inhabited, coal-mining state of West Virginia, declared his opposition to President Joe Biden’s signature legislation, his so-called Build Back Better program. Among its key provisions were incentives for American power companies to move much more quickly away from the use of fossil fuels. Not only does the state Manchin represents produce coal, the senator himself has investment interests in that poisonous industry. It is tempting to conclude that the United States’ political system is uniquely ill designed for dealing with a crisis like this, because it allows a narrow, parochial interest like Manchin’s to block any bold initiative. In fact, the workings of political systems vary widely across the world, but where badly needed climate change reforms are concerned, narrowness and parochialism are on display almost everywhere.
2021, World Politics Review LLC.