55,000 glaciers

Deutsche Welle last July on South Asia and the melting glaciers:

Heat waves are melting Himalayan glaciers on which hundreds of million people rely, flooding villages and leaving residents without drinking water. Climate change heats up Asia’s highlands faster than other regions.

The central Asian mountain region – also known as High-mountain Asia – includes the Himalayan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains. Stretching from China to Afghanistan, it is home to 55,000 glaciers that together store more fresh water than anywhere else on the planet outside the North and South Poles. The meltwater feeds the 10 biggest riverrs in Asia, in whose basins almost 2 billion people live. The Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra rivers alone are sources of water for the livelihoods of 750 million people, according to a 2015 World Bank report. The Yangtze river in China – the biggest on the continent – and the Mekong in South-East Asia also dependend on Himalayan waters.

But hotter temperatures put them at risk. According to the United Nations Development Program, temperatures in the Himalayas are rising twice as fast as the global average, melting ice and cutting snowfall. If world leaders fail to honor their promise to try to limit global warming to 1.5 C, between half and two-thirds of the total ice mass in the mountains of Central Asia will have disappeared by the end of the century.

World leaders are failing to honor their promise.

World leaders are always too busy worrying about the price of oil, inflation, recession, The Economy, industry, growth, profits, to do anything about global boiling. It’s the short term versus the slower but fatal long term.

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