Another Global Warming Menace: Black Carbon!

ZOMG! Run! Shovel a few trillion dollars to the Third World before it is too late!!!

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5955/924

The report, by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, seeks to correct a widely held misimpression based on measurements of a handful of glaciers: that India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers are shrinking rapidly in response to climate change. That’s not so, Raina says. Even if it were, other researchers argue that severe loss of ice mass would not entail drastic water shortages in the Indian heartland, as some fear. Both concerns were cited in the Asia chapter of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) 2007 Working Group II report, which asserted that Himalayan glaciers “are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

Raina’s report, Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change, concurs with that assessment. But it questions a link to global warming. Findings in the past few years, it states, demonstrate that “many” Himalayan glaciers are stable or have advanced and that the rate of retreat for “many others” has slowed. The report does not enumerate glaciers in either category.

Several Western experts who have conducted studies in the region agree with Raina’s nuanced analysis—even if it clashes with IPCC’s take on the Himalayas. The “extremely provocative” findings “are consistent with what I have learned independently,” says Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Many glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains, which straddle India and Pakistan, have “stabilized or undergone an aggressive advance,” he says, citing new evidence gathered by a team led by Michael Bishop, a mountain geomorphologist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, who just returned from an expedition to mountain K2, says he observed five glacier advances and a single retreat in the Karakoram. Such evidence “challenges the view that the upper Indus glaciers are ‘disappearing’ quickly and will be gone in 30 years,” Hewitt says. “There is no evidence to support this view and, indeed, rates of retreat have been less in the past 30 years than the previous 60 years,” he says.

The bottom line is that IPCC’s Himalaya assessment got it “horribly wrong,” asserts John “Jack” Shroder, a Himalayan glacier specialist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. “They were too quick to jump to conclusions on too little data.” IPCC also erred in its forecast of the impact of glacier melting on water supply, claims Donald Alford, a Montana-based hydrologist who recently completed a water study for the World Bank. “Our data indicate the Ganges results primarily from monsoon rainfall, and until the monsoon fails completely, there will be a Ganges river, very similar to the present river.” Glacier melt contributes 3% to 4% of the Ganges’s annual flow, says Kireet Kumar.

Oh no, Alex! Don’t invoke the wrath of the secret rulers of the universe!!!1! The scientists will kill us with their secret psychokinesis for stepping out of line!!!

third worlders shouldn’t consume like first worlders (because they’re not as good as we are),

so they should reduce their emissions (and by extension, economic development and production) so we can keep over-consuming.