The Benign Face of Climate Change

The world appears to have suddenly awakened, become alert to the challenge facing us as a species, the result of our climate rapidly changing from what we've long lived with and become accustomed to, to one that promises to give us many surprises in the near and distant future. Ice caps and glaciers are melting at an alarming pace, and although people can only see incremental alterations in how they receive the seasons of the year, the rapidity of the changes have alarmed environmentalists sufficiently to issue dire warnings.

We like to laugh at the concept of global warming when we're shivering through the inclement weather situations the northern hemisphere is used to. As we've done for decades, while scientists were warning us even decades earlier that something called greenhouse gases were changing our atmosphere, our environment, our climate. But life is good and it's hard to give up technological advances that permit us to alter our environment in so many different ways, all of which add to our enjoyment of life.

This past January of 2007 is officially recognized now as having been the warmest on record - ever since environmental records have been maintained. Winter was extraordinarily slow in arriving; we were in an arrested late autumn and winter was just too shy to bring in the snow and chill we normally are assailed with. Instead, that weather did appear, but elsewhere, in areas not normally celebrated for snow and cold, further confusing the issue.

Now here's an interesting story, that of farmers of the Tibetan plateau who simply cannot delight enough in their good fortune at the alteration of the weather conditions they normally face throughout their winters. These are the world's loftiest mountain ranges, the Himalaya, where battling inclement weather is an acknowledged way of life; its tough and capable people long accustomed to facing winter head on.

They herd their flocks of sheep and goats, yaks and other livestock, living at a height above sea leavel we couldn't imagine coping with. They wonder at these changes they see in their winter landscape: "...you can see there is less snow on the mountains. In the old days, all those rocks would be covered. I don't have to take my sheep so far away from the mountain in lambing season now."

Tibet's glaciers, some 46,000 permanent icefields feeding China's and India's largest rivers, supplying water to the largest concentration of people on the globe are fast shrinking. In some areas, average loss is in excess of 10%. The UN Development Program warns that the plateau's glaciers could disappear entirely by the end of the century.

While the sheepherders and farmers in Tibet celebrate their newly-clement weather systems, three hundred million farmers in China's western regions can anticipate a steep decline in the volume of water flowing from glaciers. The Yangtze and Yellow rivers rise on the plateau, as do rivers such as the Mekong, the Salween and the Brahmaputra flowing into south and southeast Asia.

The phenomenally record-breaking and potentially devastating changes in our climate promise opportunities for some regions of the world, and utter disaster for others. For every high-altitude-living population standing to benefit from warming, there are infinitely higher numbers of people living in deltas, low-lying areas sometimes just above sea level, in others below, whose very existence will be vulnerable to rising seas.

But even on the Himalayan plateaus all will not be sweetness and light, since with the melting of the permafrost expansive grasslands used for grazing of animals will eventually turn into arid semi-desert conditions meeting the huge expanses of the Gobi and the Taklamaken.

But to the farmer looking out over his high plateau things look better and better, with fewer lost animals thanks to the beneficent weather.