The Guardian – Half of glaciers will be gone by 2100 even under Paris 1.5C accord, study finds
This article from The Guardian summarizes a new study, published in Science, describing the devastating effects of rising global temperatures on the world’s glaciers. Even if the world is able to meet the Paris 1.5°C accord, half of the glaciers may be gone by 2100. Currently, global temperatures are predicted to rise by 2.7°C with a 68% loss of glaciers worldwide, with half of that loss occurring over the next 30 years. These melting glaciers will have major effects on hydrologic systems across the world and by the end of the next century, no glaciers will be left in Western Canada, the US or Europe, endangering the water supply of up to 2 billion people.
Not only do glaciers provide water for many, but they are crucial to the economy of many regions like Central Europe or High Mountain Asia. These features attract tourists and bring societies together. Additionally, this melt means the chances of natural disasters are much higher with flooding being a pressing concern. If the global temperature were to rise 2.7 °C, sea levels would increase by around 115mm compromising many people's homes. Mountain glacier melt is responsible for over a third of the sea level rise. The loss of glaciers is not entirely avoidable however the scale is due to the temperature increase. If the remaining 32% of glaciers were to melt, the loss would be much more substantial and devasting for our planet.
Understanding this extreme shift in glacier melt is one goal for the Canada1Water project, as it will become increasingly important to understand what effects this melt will cause on regional hydrology. Being able to model these situations will be helpful to anyone and everyone who is in proximity to glacial melt. However, the impacts of glaciers melting are not limited to people living in the mountains, as glacier melt is a critical component of hydrologic balances at the watershed scale.
Click here to read the article in The Guardian.
“In California, the water needed to sustain agriculture comes from glaciers directly from the end of July. In Spain, the disappearance of the Sierra Nevada glaciers means an almost complete reduction in water availability there from that time onwards, and the same applies to the glaciers in the Pyrenees. In India and China, they depend crucially on the Himalayan glaciers.”
“Researchers wrote in the paper: “The rapidly increasing glacier mass losses as global temperature increases beyond 1.5C stresses the urgency of establishing more ambitious climate pledges to preserve the glaciers in these mountainous regions.”
“The team used two decades of satellite data to map the planet’s glaciers with greater precision than ever before. Previous models had relied on measurements of specific glaciers, and that information was then extrapolated, but now researchers could get data points on each of the planet’s 200,000 glaciers. For the first time, this gave them insight into how many would be lost under different climate change scenarios.”
Glacier 3000 ski resort in the Swiss Alps shows the Tsanfleuron pass in September 2022 free of the ice that has covered it for at least 2,000 years. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty