With all of the politics going on in the world, it can be hard to remember that climate change is rearing its ugly and melting head in places as we speak. Today’s news has to do with the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau where melting glaciers, albeit slower than what was predicted in the flawed statistics of the 2007 UN report, are in fact still threatening the food security of millions in Asia. Especially Pakistan. 

For this set of results and warnings, a group of scientists in Holland studied the impacts of climate change on five major Asian Rivers- 1.4 billion people depend on that water for drinking and crop irrigation- so this is a big deal.

The difference this time through is that past studies worked under the assumption that a warmer world would accelerate glaciers melting, but now they are approaching the study with an admission that the lack of accurate data does not allow more precise predictions about how melting will go or how it will affect the people dependent on the water for life. What they can say, though, is that things are for sure not good if the glaciers continue to melt. Governments need data to figure out what is going to happen and plan for what the future will bring as far as water issues, stability vs. instability.

This time, lead author Walter Immerzeel, a hydrologist at Dutch consultancy FutureWater and Utrecht University, said he believe that his team is the first to combine computer modeling with satellite imagery with local observations.

This is a wakeup call, folks. This is not an alarmist call from climate change fanatics, or even a UN report with research done in magazines. This is the most comprehensive use of the tools available, combined with conservative estimates on how much the warming planet will actually affect the melting of the glaciers. They are taking real people into account with available data and not assuming that things will get worse over time, just that they will essentially stay the same. And even then the signs are bad:

"The effects in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins are likely to be severe owing to the large population and the high dependence on irrigated agriculture and meltwater," said authors in the study.

Severe. That’s not the kind of word you gloss over. Hundreds of millions of people depend on this water, and they are going to be facing shortages and new water crises over the coming decades. And we are all arguing about cap and trade.

At least this study is talking about what can be done and how to deal with the inevitability (so it sounds) of what is going to happen.

"The focus should be on agriculture as this is by far the largest consumer of water. You could think of measures such as different crop varieties which are less water consuming, different water management, or by providing economic incentives to farmers to use less water."

How do we use less water? The problem is challenging enough as it is, but there will be even more people as the problem gets bigger.

Photo Credit: arsalank2