The Third Pole Water Line - 2

The Boss Determines Water Level

In the first post of this series we focused on Pakistan in the context of "The Third Pole Water Line".

But there is more to it than that:

"Unprecedented and largely irreversible changes to the Hindu Kush Himalayan cryosphere, driven by global temperature rises, threaten two billion people and are accelerating species extinction.

ICIMOD’s new report – Water, Ice, Society, Ecosystems in the Hindu Kush Himalaya – is the most accurate assessment of changes to the Asia high mountain cryosphere to date. It is also the first time their impacts on water, biodiversity and society have been properly mapped.

The report urges policymakers to prepare for the cascading impacts of climate change in this critical mountain biome, which provides freshwater services to a quarter of the world’s population.

It calls for urgent international support and regional cooperation for inevitable, near-term loss and damage, and to help communities adapt."

(Snow and ice in the Hindu Kush Himalaya are fast disappearing, with grave implications for people and nature, emphasis added). Wow, everyone must be really into avoiding such a catastrophe eh?, and must be doing everything required to avoid it eh?:

"The world is falling well short of the progress needed to meet the United Nations’ sustainable development goals by 2030 in areas ranging from poverty to clean energy to biodiversity, with a growing gap between wealthy and developing nations, according to a report Tuesday from the nonprofit tracking the goals.

Ocean Heat

The coronavirus pandemic stalled the limited progress made in the years after United Nations member states adopted the goals in 2015. Now, halfway through the 15-year time frame, not a single one of the goals is on target to be met.

'We’re at the risk of a lost decade for sustainable development,' said Guillaume Lafortune, a lead author of the report and vice president and head of the Paris office of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the nonprofit launched by the UN to foster and track sustainable development. “And there’s actually a risk that the gap between rich and poor countries on sustainable development might be bigger in 2030 than it was in 2015.'"

(World well short of pace needed to meet UN’s 2030 sustainable development goals). Yikes ...

Meanwhile:

"On the heels of a new annual heat record set in 2022 — the latest in a string of record-setting years — average ocean surface temperatures around the globe have spiked since early March. Excluding polar regions, they are about two-tenths of a degree Celsius warmer than scientists have ever observed at this time of year via satellite data.

Translation: What might seem like a small uptick in temperature can have profound effects.

“Averaged over the planet, that’s a really big anomaly,” said Alex Sen Gupta, a research scientist at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia."

...

"'You’ve got this relentless rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,' said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 'We just know unless that turns around in some way, we will continue to set records.'"

(What an ominous surge in ocean temperatures means for the planet). It is called "doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result each time" (On The Origin of Genieology).

Yeah, that's the ticket (The Authoritarianism of Climate Change, Ice sheets can collapse at 600 metres a day, far faster than feared, study finds).

The previous post in this series is here.

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"It wouldn't do to say ..."

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