The Global Cold Center Dustier

Some twenty-five years ago, I remember reading an article about 'Tibet, global cold center'.
At that time, global warming and climate change were not yet in fashion .
The scientific theory expounded in the article was that Tibet, being covered by glaciers and seasonal snows was like a mirror reflecting the light and the heat (thereby keeping the cold). Though, the term 'third pole' is today preferred, 'global cold center' was a good image. 
At that time, the scientific predictions were that with the melting of the glaciers, there will be less white patches reflecting the heat, increasing its absorption by the earth. The process would accelerate and bring about global changes. The scientists predicted an exponential movement. 
The new phenomena described below is even more worrying: the more dust, the less heat reflected, the warmer will become the region (and the planet), with all the consequences known today. 

Is Global Warming Making Tibet Dustier?
by Eli Kintisch
5 January 2011
Global warming may be increasing winds that blow dust onto the Tibetan Plateau, and the sunlight-absorbing dust may be accelerating the melting of glaciers there.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—Sediments taken from the bottom of a lake on the Tibetan Plateau suggest that changes in wind patterns caused by global warming may be making the area dustier. That trend could accelerate the melting of crucial glaciers in the Himalayas and affect already imperiled water supplies.
Jessica Conroy, a graduate student in paleoclimatology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues collected sediment cores from the bottom of Kiang Lake in southwestern Tibet using equipment suspended from rafts. The cores track the history of climate in the region back to 1050 C.E. According to Conroy, who presented the data here at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on 15 December, the amount of fine-grained dust in the lake sediment increased over the 20th century. Finer dust arrives from distant desert regions hundreds of kilometers away, suggesting stronger winds with the power to deliver the material.
Scientists have previously noted the rise of dust in the region but attributed it to the increase in agriculture, grazing, and other relatively local developments. Data Conroy presented showed that dusty periods coincide with summers when a Northern Hemisphere atmospheric phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation is in a "positive phase." A positive phase of this pattern in the summer leads to stronger winds in desert areas to the north of the lake as well as south of the Himalayas.
Global warming seems to be keeping the Arctic Oscillation in its positive phase more often, which Conroy says could mean that climate, not just changes in the local landscape caused by human activity, could be making southwestern Tibet dustier. Lonnie Thompson, a paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, who did the earlier work noting the rise of dust, says he was "impressed" with the data and called the work "thoughtful." The findings mirrored patterns he had documented within ice in a Himalayan glacier called Dasuopu, "particularly the increase in the past century or so of dust," he says. Conroy's hypothesized link between dust levels and the Arctic Oscillation "probably warrants more investigation," Thompson says.
"It's going to continue to be dusty in this region, and dust can accelerate the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas," says Conroy. That's because the dust lands on the white ice and makes it darker, absorbing radiation and accelerating melting in the Himalayas. These glaciers, which provide water for hundreds of millions of people across Asia, are in serious danger—although a well-documented typographic error in the 2007 IPCC report exaggerated the rate of their disappearance. Dust also warms the air above the Tibetan Plateau, enhancing monsoon circulation patterns, which could affect rain and alter rainfall patterns across the southern Asia.

The Chinese way to protect the environment

Can you believe this:
"Living in the mountains brought many difficulties to the villagers such as education, transportation, water supply, medical care and even marriage," said an official surnamed Zhao of the town of Zhenluoying in Pinggu district [in Beijing Municipality]. The Chinese official adds that the relocation will bring much convenience to their life and some job opportunities and it will also be good for mountain forestry.
It is difficult to understand how emptying the mountains of its traditional inhabitants will help 'mountain forestry'.
The same theory has been applied in Tibet where the chang-thang, traditionally the habitat of the Tibetan nomads has been emptied of its nomads to ...'preserve' the environment.
Last year a report of Xinhua News Agency affirmed that: "China has settled nearly 50,000 Tibetan nomads into sedentary communities in a drive to protect the remote alpine region's fragile ecology from their herds". The report continued: "49,631 people from nomadic families were settled over the past four years…[after being] relocated from a rugged region on the Tibetan plateau that is home to the headwaters of three of Asia's major rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong."
Unbelievable! 
If the Chinese leaders are serious, they should do an operation à la Pol Pot and remove the inhabitants of the big cities like Beijing which are polluting much more than the nomads or the mountain folks. Such a non-sense!


Villagers told to descend
Global Times
April 28 2010
By Li Yanhui
Thousands of villagers in the city's mountainous areas must leave home in October to live down in the valleys.
Started in 2005, the mountainous villager relocation project has already moved 50,000 villagers, meaning 221 villages have disappeared off the map of the city, according to the Beijing Daily.
About 80 families of Zhangjiatai in Pinggu district are preparing to move to their new village at the foot of the mountain.
Some 6,000 other mountain villagers around Beijing will also be moved before No-vember to new homes.
"Living in the mountains brought many difficulties to the villagers such as educa-tion, transportation, water supply, medical care and even marriage," said an official surnamed Zhao of the town of Zhenluoying in Pinggu district.
"The relocation will bring much convenience to their life and some job opportunities."
Relocation will also be good for mountain forestry, she said.
The government has invested more than 1.2 billion yuan ($175.78 million) in new homes and infrastructure, according to the Beijing Daily.
Government previously had to invest large sums each year repairing roads and maintaining water and power supplies to these remote villages.
"Relocating a village can save more than 1.3 million yuan ($190,429) investment in infrastructure," an official at the Beijing Municipal Commission of Rural Affairs told the Beijing Daily.
An investigation carried out for the mountainous villager relocation project concluded that the 68,000 farmers living in mountainous areas faced daily living difficulties and threats from natural disasters such as rivers bursting their banks.
Some Liulitai villagers involved in the pilot project had doubts about the idea, as they had to invest about 200,000 yuan ($29,296.73) in a new home, said resident Liu Hai.
"I now have to walk about four kilometers to the farmland to take care of the fruit trees on the mountain," he said.
The move proved a success, he said, when families found they were able to repay their debt within two or three years by supplying accommodation to travelers.
The relocation project has also made 2,000 mu (133 hectares) of farmland available for planting trees, according to the Beijing Daily.

Dollars, Renminbis and Climate Change

I came across many such articles recently. I was wondering if the Chinese have been able to 'convince' some Indian intellectuals that whatever Beijing does on the Yarlung Tsangpo is China's internal business and that India should have no say in it. 
Of course, when journalists, scholars or politicians visit the Middle Kingdom, Chinese 'hospitality'  is  very well known. It always helps to 'understand' the Chinese point of view. 
It is a bit frightening to think that lacks of foreigners will be visiting the World Exhibition in Shanghai during the coming months. Hopefully they will not all experience Chinese 'hospitality'.
PS: By the way, don't accept an iPhone or a Blackberry while in China, a MI5 document recently affirmed that most of these instruments have embedded  spywares.


Dollars, Sense and Climate Change
9 Apr 2010
ISN Security Watch
By Claudio Guler
Reflecting the cycles of change, brought on by pollution and climate
The myriad facets of climate change denial are thrown into relief, as dollars and sense ally, Claudio Guler writes for ISN Security Watch.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“With all the hysteria, all the fear, all the phony science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? I believe it is.” – US Senator James M Inhofe (Republican – Oklahoma), 28 July 2003.
Such is the rallying cry of the climate change denial movement. Since Senator Inhofe made this statement seven years ago, the drive to discredit climate change and the science that underpins it has enjoyed considerable success, even as awareness about climate change and the threat it poses to humanity has gone mainstream.
The US, widely seen as an indispensable participant in the fight against climate change, remains among the most skeptical internationally. A Gallup poll published last month found that concerns over climate change among Americans declined during the past two years.
The recent 'Climategate' scandal, the product of hacked e-mail correspondence from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in the UK suggesting collusion to manipulate data, and a row over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) use of non peer-reviewed sources to claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 have cast further doubt.
The deluge of criticism culminated in the US with the publishing of In Denial by Steven F Hayward in the conservative Weekly Standard, a piece accompanied by an illustration of Al Gore standing somewhere near the North Pole, nude, shivering and clutching his groin to shield it from the biting cold while being ridiculed by polar bears.
What then keeps the climate change denial movement, a campaign shunned by all but a handful of scientists, alive and kicking? Examination suggests a confluence of factors.

Economics
Money talks. At the individual level, curbing emissions will result in higher energy costs, generating resistance at the polls. The businesses that provide energy to consumers equally do not want to see their profit margins squeezed and regard the status quo – and their position in it – as advantageous.
A lackluster economy, moreover, has likely shifted some of the political urgency elsewhere.
Corporate sector pushback comes in the form of congressional lobbying and public relations campaigns. James Hoggan from DesmogBlog, a website launched in 2006 to track and expose the interests and personalities behind climate change denial, explained to ISN Security Watch, “The oil, gas and coal industries are clearly the leaders in the climate denial campaign, although the big fossil fuel players have also made common cause with other energy intensive industries and even with industries like tobacco, which are also motivated to promote mistrust of science and government.
“Major energy industries like Exxon Mobil [Greenpeace critique] and Koch Industries [Greenpeace critique] (the largest privately owned fossil fuel company in America) have been revealed as big spenders in the campaign to deny climate science. And industry associations like the American Chambers of Commerce are also heavily implicated. But increasingly, industries have started hiding behind ‘non-profit’ think tanks, which can campaign aggressively – and expensively – while concealing the source of their funding.”
Koch Industries is co-owned by the $14 billion (each) brothers Charles and David Koch. David Koch quipped to Portofolio.com in October 2008, “My joke is that we’re the biggest company you’ve never heard of.”

The public space
The role of think tanks, as Hoggan maintains, is to provide a veneer of academic legitimacy to the campaign as well as to ensure maximum influence in the media to perpetuate doubt about the science of climate change. Poison the public discourse, establish a skeptical normative environment, kill legislation.
Some of the think tanks and lobbying groups in the vanguard include: the American Petroleum Institute (API), the Western Fuels Association (WFA), the CATO Institute, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the George C Marshall Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the now-defunct Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP) in Canada and The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) headed by famed lobbyist and FOX News contributor Steve Milloy.

The individual
The lack of a congenial atmosphere for discussion, moreover, helps taint already strained individual attitudes, argues Kari Norgaard, assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, US.
In a background paper to the 2010 World Bank Development Report entitled Cognitive and Behavioral Challenges in Responding to Climate Change, researched in Norway, Norgaard concludes that the presence of negative emotions in conjunction with global warming (fear, guilt and helplessness), and the process of emotion management and cultural norms leads to the construction of a social reality in which climate change is held at arms length.
In other words, the complexity of climate change and the menace it implies overwhelms individuals and creates a cognitive dissonance. Rather than trying to internalize the concerns and marshal them for action, people cast them aside altogether.
Hoggan further complements Norgaard’s findings with the notion of burgeoning mistrust at the individual level: “Public opinion polls are increasingly revealing unprecedented levels of mistrust in the public mind. People don’t trust government. They don’t trust industry. Some polls show that they don’t even trust one another. And the denial industry has taken full advantage of this mistrust, even promoting it by questioning the motives, integrity and competence of some of the world’s greatest scientific bodies.”
Asked about the divergence in US and European responses to climate change by ISN Security Watch, Norgaard reckoned, “In Europe, where a limited emissions control regime with the EU Emissions Trading System is in place, concern for the environment is more institutionalized than in the states, generating more momentum. But again, even there, comprehensive steps are wanting.”
The climate change denial movement has tentacles the world over, but it is most influential and caustic in the US. Without America’s leadership, other countries, including China and India, have little incentive to act. Obama’s presidential directives, although welcome, only go so far.
For a bipartisan solution, legislators in Washington should look to the CLEAR Act currently being discussed in the US Senate.
Otherwise, it will be up to geoengineering to resolve the matter. That is an exceedingly risky fix.

Will water lead to an India-Pak war?

Site of one of the dams being built by China on the Brahmaputra


My article Will water lead to an India-Pak war? on the strategic consequences of global warming is posted on in Sify.com. Click to read.

Climate Change and Strategic issues

Map: http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.com


Pakistan has become hysterical again. This time it is not about Kashmir, Islamabad has found a new issue: water.
According to the Pakistani media (and politicians), New Delhi has started a ‘water war’ against Pakistan, having decided to ‘starve’ the country of its due share of water.
Pakistan’s de facto boss, General Ashfaq Kayani stated that India will remain the main focus of his nation military doctrine so long as the issues of “Kashmir and water were not solved”.
And at the end, there is always a veiled threat: the ‘water war’ may trigger a ‘nuclear war’ if Delhi does not listen to Islamabad and Pakistan’s American sponsors do not immediately ‘restrain’ India.
Dr. Arvind Gupta in an IDSA paper entitled Vicious anti-India propaganda in Pakistan on Water issues lists some of the pearls of wisdom found in the Pakistani press and in the mouth of Pakistani politicians.
For example, on March 3 in Daily Times, a commentator warns: “unless Pakistan was assured on the supply of water, it will never abandon the proxies that can keep India on its toes.” He further added: “For Pakistan the territory of Kashmir may not be as important as the water issue.”
This last comment is the most significant, “Kashmir is not as important as the water issue”. Retrospectively, the motivation of Jinnah for ‘recovering’ Kashmir in 1947-48 was perhaps not the Two-Nation Theory, but the waters of the State which were (and are) an existential issue for the Land of the Pure.
Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Tayiba founder (and mastermind the 2008 Mumbai attacks) added to the hullabaloo by asserting that the next war between India and Pakistan would be fought over water. Saeed called on the people of Pakistan to stand united against India.
It has been forgotten that since 1960 the Indus Water Treaty has been able to legally deal with all water issues facing India and Pakistan. The ‘water war’ gimmick is only orchestrated by the Army which finds that to keep Pakistan ‘together’, the best way is to point a finger at the ‘eternal’ enemy, India.
However a new element will soon come into play: Climate Change. This is not going to improve the relations between the two neighbours as the water scarcity will soon be real. It does not augur well for the future of the subcontinent.

Not a new issue
The strategic and political implications of climate change are not new. A friend mine, Michel Danino recently sent me his latest book The Lost River: on the Trail of the Sarasvati. His research is a mind-opener on the fate of the mythic river. Taking into account the latest research in fields as different as satellite imagery, archeology, linguistics, paleontology or mythology, Michel says: “The Indian subcontinent was the scene of dramatic upheavals a few thousand years ago. The Northwest region entered an arid phase, and erosion coupled with tectonic events played havoc with river course. One of them disappeared.”
He further explains: “It has been accepted that the loss of the Sarasvati played a role in the dissolution of the Harappan city states. Why did this remarkable civilisation with its excellent town planning, standardised writing and weight system suddenly collapse?” He adds: “Scholars believe that the Sarasvati river system disappeared creating a domino effect on other settlements”.
My point is that climate changes have occurred in the past and will occur again in the future. Though today Pakistan is screaming without factual basis, water wars are looming large on the horizon of the subcontinent. It could bring about tremendous strategic changes in the region.
In view of today’s hysteria of our neighbouring, the past Sarasvati scenario is quite frightening.

A Global Issue
Traditional strategic studies look at national boundaries between Nation-States as the prime triggering factor for most tensions/conflicts. War often originates from ‘historically non-defined’ (or at least not accepted) borders, i.e. Pakistan’s claim over Kashmir or China’s of Aksai Chin or Arunachal, but in the case of climate change the source and consequences are far beyond national borders, making the issues more complicated to grasp and eventually to solve.
The only way to tackle these global issues is through consultation and collaboration; ‘global’ solutions have to be found. In this respect, it is unfortunate that most of India’s neighbours do not understand the meaning of ‘collaboration’.

The Mekong
The strategic issue does not concern India alone. Take the Mekong and the severe draught currently experienced in the Indochinese peninsula. The 4,350 km river has its source on the Tibetan Plateau. It flows downstream to the Yunnan province of China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Chinese experts assert that Tibet contributes 20% only the Mekong's waters. The remaining 80% are fed from water sources in downstream countries.
Now China has built several dams on the upper reaches of Mekong without consulting its neighbours.
This year, the draught has been so severe that the cargo traffic on the river has stopped, affecting the lives of 65 million people in the peninsula.
Though some environment scientists claim that the lack of rainfall alone is responsible for the low level of the river, a group of affected countries — Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam — met in Thailand to discuss this hot issue.
When Panitan Wattanayagorn, a Thai government spokesman asked Beijing for "more information, more cooperation and more coordination", China immediately denied any wrong doing.
Environmental NGOs in the peninsula however blame China for ‘drying’ the Mekong and provoking the crisis.
China, a dialogue partner of the Commission took the ‘attack’ seriously and sent a delegation led by Vice-Foreign Minister Song Tao to the two-day conference in Thailand.
Liu Ning, the Chinese Vice Minister of Water Resources affirmed that the dams and irrigation projects upstream have actually helped stave off some of the effects of drought and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang further stated: "China attaches great importance to developing good-neighbor, friendly and cooperative relations with these countries in its commitment to dialogue, communications and cooperation".
Whatever it is, there is no doubt that climate change is going to provoke similar tensions and conflicts elsewhere in Asia in the future (mainly thanks to the Chinese dams!).

Environmental migrants
Global warming will probably radically change the face of the planet in many ways. A recent report No Place Like Home published by The Environmental Justice Foundation, a UK-based NGO states: “Every year climate change is attributable for the deaths of over 300,000 people, seriously affects a further 325 million people, and causes economic losses of US$125 billion.
Four billion people are vulnerable to the effects of climate change and 500-600 million people – around 10% of the planet’s human population – are at extreme risk.”
Sea rise may be one of the phenomena that the planet will soon witness. It will create tens of millions of ‘environmental migrants’ who are defined as “persons or groups of persons who, for reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to have to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their territory or abroad.”
Imagine tens of millions of ‘migrants’ having to leave Bangladesh! Where would they go? It is not difficult to guess: to their hospitable neighbor, creating serious disturbances in the North-east. Who is thinking about this in Delhi?

The strategic importance of the Tibetan rivers
For India, there is another serious issue: the diversion of Tibet’s rivers towards China. Beijing’s problem No 1 in the years to come will be how to feed its 1.3 billion people, for which water is needed.
The only solution to save China is to divert the water from the South to North. The water diversion project was already mentioned in The Draft Outline of the Tenth Five-year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (2001 2005). According to the 10th Five-year Plan, water should be diverted from the South via three channels in the eastern, central and western regions, respectively.
For us in South Asia, the main concern is the Eastern Diversion.
The perennial run of the rivers originating from the Tibetan glaciers also results in a stable flow of water to regions which are dominated by monsoon rainfalls (with rain pouring for only a few months of the year). Consequently, the Tibetan rivers, independent of seasonal precipitation patterns, are an important factor in sustaining hydrological regimes of South Asia.
As in the case of the Mekong, the Chinese deny any wrong doing on the Brahmaputra though the work to dam the lifeline of Assam and Bangladesh has started. Last year, the Gezhouba Corporation, one of China's largest engineering companies, was awarded a $167 million contract to build the Zangmu Hydropower project on the Brahmaputra, north of Arunachal Pradesh.
The project is expected to be completed in December 2015. It will be followed by a string of 4 other dams in this sensitive area. While their Pakistani counterparts are vociferous about non-existent ‘water diversion’ in India, the South Block diplomats remain very shy to strongly take the matter with Beijing.
These issues are bound to increase with the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and the climate change on the “Third Pole”, as the Tibetan plateau is also called.
And contrary to the drying of the Sarasvati, this time the catastrophe will be man-made.

Shrinking, shrinking, shrinking

This seems more reliable information than Patchauri's, and it is shrinking! Slowly, but surely!
The government should wake up and stop their per capita theory.



Himalayan glaciers shrank 16% in 50 yrs: ISRO
PTI, Mar 28, 2010,
BANGALORE: Himalayan glaciers retreated by 16% in the last nearly five decades due to climate change, investigations by India’s scientists in selected basins in four states has revealed. The retreat of Himalayan glaciers and loss in a real extent were monitored in selected basins in J&K, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Sikkim, under a programme on space-based global climate change observation by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
“Investigations on glacial retreat were estimated for 1,317 glaciers in 10 sub-basins from 1962. This has shown an overall reduction in glacial area from 5,866 sqkm to 4,921 sqkm since 1962, showing an overall de-glaciation of 16%”, says the latest annual report of Isro. Snow cover monitoring of all basin has been completed, it said.
Atlases for three years are ready and one for the fourth year is being prepared. Modeling response of Himalayan cryosphere to climate change has been initiated, Isro added. Meanwhile, a study on the impact of temperature and carbon dioxide (CO²) rise on the productivity of the four major cereal food crops — wheat, rice, maize and pearl millet — revealed that yield of all of them showed reduction with increasing temperature.
Assessment after taking field data showed that wheat was the most sensitive crop and maize the least sensitive to temperature rise among the four, Isro pointed out. Another study for climate change impact on hydrology was carried out using “Curve Number” approach to study the change in run off pattern in India at basin level. “Analysis shows there will be significant increase of run off in the month of June in most of the major river basins”, the 2009-10 report of the Isro said. Isro has also observed a strong correlation between agriculture vegetation (mainly rice areas) and methane concentration.

Forest fire raging in Tibet

Climate is changing very fast. This year, Yunnan province of China has suffered from a severe drought and several areas of Zayul County, north of Arunachal Pradesh are witnessing damaging forest fires. 
In a way, it is nearly-instant Karma, the Chinese have for years deforested these areas.


Forest fire raging in Tibet 
Xinhua
March 22, 2010
LHASA - About 1,000 soldiers and civilians have been mobilized to put out a fire raging since Sunday noon in a forest area in southwest China's Tibet autonomous region.  
The fire has spread over 26 hectares in the forest, only 500 meters away from a school in Chayou [Zayul] County, Nyingchi [Nyintri] Prefecture. No casualty has been reported, but the fire is still raging amid windy and dry weather, according to the fire control headquarters.  
Meanwhile, another fire that broke out Sunday noon was put out  by about 2,000 policemen and firefighters by Sunday midnight in Chongqing Municipality, to the north of Tibet. 
The fire ravaged at least 20 hectares of a forest in Dadukou District. No casualties have been reported, as residents near the fire had been evacuated. The cause of the fire is being investigated, officials said.

Bad News. But who is responsible?

The Chinese today admit that the warming on the Tibetan plateau will have consequences for the entire Asian continent. A question could be asked: who is responsible for this change of climate in the first place?
Who cut millions of hectares of forest for decades on the Roof of the World?
Where did the wood goes?
The answers are obvious, but it is now too late and the climate becomes warmer and nothing can stop the glaciers melting. Asia will pay for the greediness of the People's Republic of China. I presume it is the fate of the colonies to be looted, but in this case, China will also have a price to pay (at least environmentally and probably karmically).

Warming of plateau is 'threatening all Asia'

By Miao Xiaojuan from Xinhua
August 18, 2009 (China Daily)
Due to global warming, glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are retreating extensively at a speed faster than in any other part of the world.
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, one of the most susceptible areas on the planet to global warming, is heating up at such an alarming rate that experts fear it will suffer environmental deterioration and water shortages that may threaten the entire continent.
"The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is among the regions worst hit by global warming," said Qin Dahe, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). "In turn, this will have a deleterious effect on the global climate and also the livelihood of Asian people."
Qin, who is the former head of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), was the first Chinese person to cross the South Pole.
He pointed out that the temperature in the Tibet autonomous region rose by an average of 0.32 degrees Celsius every 10 years between 1961 and 2008. That rate of warming was much faster than the average across China, where temperatures rose by between 0.05 and 0.08 degrees.
Tibet's average temperature in July was the highest since 1951, according to CMA data.
And, during the same month, there was between 30 and 80 percent less rain in western and southern Tibet than in the same month in previous years.
"Due to global warming, glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are retreating extensively at a speed faster than in any other part of the world," Qin said. "In the short term, this will cause lakes to expand and bring floods and mudflows."
He said the climate changes will cause widespread problems across the region.
"In the long run, glaciers are vital lifelines for Asian rivers, including the Indus and the Ganges. Once they vanish, water supplies in those regions will be in peril."
Yao Tandong, one of China's leading glacier experts and director of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Research Institute of CAS, echoed Qin's view, adding that glaciers were accurate archives of climate changes.
"Glaciers on the plateau show warming has been abrupt and exceptional. It is warmer now than at any time during the past 2,000 years," Yao said.
The plateau is the world's third-largest store of ice. So far, 82 percent of glacier surfaces on the plateau have retreated and the glacier area itself has decreased by 4.5 percent during the past 20 years.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body studying global warming, predicted in May that Himalayan glaciers (including the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau) could vanish within three decades at the present rate of warming.
Another huge threat from warming is the degradation of the permafrost - the perennially frozen ground, Qin said.
"Permafrost plays a vital role in protecting the ecological environment and hydrological cycles. But it has been breaking down during the past 50 years," Qin said.
He pointed out that if vegetation on the plateau decreases, "consequent absorption of solar radiation will change the intensity of summer monsoons in Asia. This will bring drought to north India and intensify floods in southern China and droughts in the north".
He said construction in the area will also suffer.
"The Qinghai-Tibet railway and highway surfaces may possibly become deformed in the future," Qin warned.
But Cheng Guodong, a CAS researcher and member of the Qinghai-Tibet railway project team, was more optimistic.
"After we took measures to cool the permafrost under the railway, it hasn't melted during the past three years. I believe the railway will be safe over the next 50 years," he said.
And Qin pointed out there were also positives associated with warming on the plateau.
"Warming is good for agriculture and tourism. It has increased the growing season of crops," Qin said.
Scientists agree that the Himalayan region is one of the most sensitive and vulnerable to global climate change. It has seen consistent warming during the past 100 years.
"The region is like an antenna and reacts quickly to global warming," said Andreas Schild, director general of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal, when speaking at the 5th International Symposium on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in Beijing last week.
"Warming will also evaporate more water into the stratosphere and thus accelerate warming, which will influence or even alter global climate," said Schild.
As the world's highest and most complex mountain range, the Himalayas stretch across six countries, including China, India and Nepal. Several major rivers in Asia, including the Yangtze, begin there, and their combined drainage basin is home to more than 2.7 billion people, Qin said.
Schild said Asian nations should make systematic efforts and boost regional cooperation and look for ways to slow warming, as well as find ways to adapt to it.
Warming has become "a cruel reality that many countries and regions in the world have to face, but it is not a problem that can be handled by one region or country alone", Qin said.