GLACIERS ACROSS the globe are melting so fast that many will disappear by the middle of this century, the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) said yesterday.
The announcement of the annual results from monitoring in nine mountain ranges on four continents comes as doubts have been cast on how much climate scientists have exaggerated glacier melt, seen as a leading indicator of how much the planet is heating up.
Last week, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change apologised for a paragraph in its 2007 report that warned of a “very high” risk that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.
However, the director of the WGMS, Prof Wilfried Haeberli, said the latest results indicated most glaciers were melting at historically high rates.
“It’s less extreme than in years [immediately before] but what’s really important is the trend of 10 years or so, and that shows an unbroken acceleration in melting,” he said. – (Guardian service)