Glacial loss accelerates

In a press release this weekend, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) stressed the importance of coming to an international agreement on combating climate change, citing findings from the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) in Switzerland that demonstrate ice loss from the world’s glaciers is not only continuing unabated, but has in fact been accelerating. Findings like these were covered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007):

Satellite data since 1978 show that annual average Arctic sea ice extent has shrunk by 2.7 [2.1 to 3.3]% per decade, with larger decreases in summer of 7.4 [5.0 to 9.8]% per decade. Mountain glaciers and snow cover on average have declined in both hemispheres. The maximum areal extent of seasonally frozen ground has decreased by about 7% in the Northern Hemisphere since 1900, with decreases in spring of up to 15%. Temperatures at the top of the permafrost layer have generally increased since the 1980s in the Arctic by up to 3°C.

So this isn’t exactly news, but it is certainly not news everyone has heard, and its implications and possible repercussions are the subject of heated debate. In America, the fact that some of our major water systems are synched to glacial cycles could be a real problem in the not too distant future. Although it’s not clear if this is only normal variation or a real trend, the sea level is also rising an accelerating level (the IPCC reports that the global average sea level rose 1.8 mm/yr from 1961 to 2003, and 3.1 mm/yr from 1993 to 2003).

I used the phrase “heated debate”, but where is this debate happening? Do a simple internet search for “glacial ice loss” and you get one recent result from the UK paper The Independent, and one from an Irish paper, both based on the UNEP press release mentioned above. All the other results are from early 2007 or before. Try “receding glaciers” or “rising sea level”; nothing much better. For the poster child topic of global warming, isn’t it a little strange that there’s not more dialog about it?

It’s not so much that the science can be challenged or discussed endlessly, but the effects of glacial loss are not just long-term. There’s a possibility that they could be quite short-term as well: UNEP’s press release warns that “a two degree C warming by the 2040s is likely to lead to sharply reduced summer flows coinciding with sharply rising demand.” This is well within the purview of current generations. If “do nothing” is Plan A, I believe it’s the responsibility of current generations to start working on a Plan B.