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A glacier in the Himalayas. (Photo: Karunakar Rayker / Flickr)Three quarters of a billion people is a lot of people.

And that’s how many people, within the next 22 years, will almost certainly run low on water – a necessity of life – in just the regions whose rivers are supplied with water from the glaciers in the Himalayas.

To put that in perspective, 750 million people is more than twice the current population of United States. It’s about the population of all of Europe. In the year 1900 there were only 500 million people on the entire planet. Seven hundred fifty million people is a lot of people.

The IPCC – the international body of scientists analyzing global climate change – is releasing its new report in stages over the next week and this early piece was reported on by the Financial Times on Monday. Under the headline “Climate Change Chief Sounds Alert on Himalayan Glaciers,” the opening sentence of the article by Pilita Clark summarizes a very tightly:

“The glaciers of the Himalayas are melting so fast they will affect the water supplies of a population twice that of the US within 22 years, the head of the world’s leading authority on climate change has warned.”

And that’s just the Himalayas and the rivers flow out of their glaciers toward South Asian regions including India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. There are similar glaciers along the mountain ranges of western South America that supply water to other hundreds of millions of people – they are all at risk, too. We’re even seen it here in the United States, with last year’s drought in the West. Glaciers are changing in Europe, and the regions of Tanzania supplied by the famous “Snows Of Kilimanjaro,” are drying up in ways that are creating serious drought problems for the people in those parts of Africa.

Contrary to what the front groups funded by the fossil fuel industry would have you believe, climate change doesn’t just mean the winters are milder. Or the plants have more carbon dioxide.

It means that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced, will starve, and will die. It means wars. It means famines. It means raging forest fires and the death of grasslands. It means the acidification of our oceans and the destruction of our ocean ecosystems. It means that we stand on the edge of tipping points that hurtle humanity toward extinction.

Yes, extinction.

There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth, times when more than half of all life died and all the top predators – animals like us – vanished or nearly finished. All of these mass extinctions were provoked by geologically-sudden global warming.

And now we are driving a similar process by burning fossil fuels.

People around the world are already dying from global climate change. Wars are already being fought because of climate change. The Earth is changing before our very eyes.

There are solutions, ranging from a carbon tax to rapid transitions into alternative energy. We need to be pursuing them now.

The debate is long over. The world is waking up.

And the fossil fuel Industry is being shown for what it is – fossils promoting fossils, intellectual frauds and greedheads.

It’s time to move from the energy forms of the 19th century into the modern, clean, nonpolluting energies currently available in the 21st-century. Now.

Global warming is irreversible without massive geoengineering of the atmosphere’s chemistry. This stark warning comes from the draft summary of the latest climate assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Delegates from national governments are discussing the draft this week, prior to its release on Friday morning.

According to one of its lead authors, and the latest draft seen by New Scientist, the report will say: “CO₂-induced warming is projected to remain approximately constant for many centuries following a complete cessation of emission. A large fraction of climate change is thus irreversible on a human timescale, except if net anthropogenic CO₂ emissions were strongly negative over a sustained period.”

In other words, even if all the world ran on carbon-free energy and deforestation ceased, the only way of lowering temperatures would be to devise a scheme for sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Much of this week’s report, the fifth assessment of the IPCC working group on the physical science of climate change, will reaffirm the findings of the previous four assessments, published regularly since 1990.

It will point out that to limit global warming to 2 °C will require cumulative CO₂ emissions from all human sources since the start of the industrial revolution to be kept below about a trillion tonnes of carbon. So far, we have emitted about half this. Current emissions are around 10.5 billion tonnes of carbon annually, and rising.

Since the last assessment, published in 2007, the IPCC has almost doubled its estimate of the maximum sea-level rise likely in the coming century to about 1 metre. They also conclude that it is now “virtually certain” that sea levels will continue to rise for many centuries, even if warming ceases, due to the delayed effects of thermal expansion of warming oceans and melting ice sheets.

The draft report says the available evidence now suggests that above a certain threshold of warming, the Greenland ice sheet will almost disappear within approximately 1000 years, which will result in 7 metres of global sea-level rise. It estimates that the threshold may lie between 1 °C and 4 °C of warming, but is not confident of this figure.

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Antarctica’s underwater ice loss is more significant that scientists thought

Sea ice loss remains a concern.

Antarctica’s ice shelves have an “Achilles’ heel,” and it’s the melting that’s taking place beneath the surface, not on the surface, according to an international climate study newly published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study urges scientists to pay more attention to sub-shelf melting, which in some glaciers accounts for 90% of the continent’s ongoing annual ice loss.

Jonathan Bamber, a professor with the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences, coauthored the study with colleagues at Utrecht University and the University of California. The researchers relied on a combination of satellite data and computer-model simulations to track the present and future melting that the Antarctic glaciers’ surfaces and undersides are undergoing. The simulations repeatedly showed that what’s going on beneath the surface is as important as—if not more important than—any ice loss that scientists have been witnessing taking place aboveground.

This underwater ice loss affects some ice shelves more than others. Bramber and his colleagues can already pinpoint some of the more affected ice shelves by looking at the current extent of their ice loss. Further research may quantify the underwater melt levels of many more.

That Antarctica is losing ice is certainly not news to climate scientists. Topographic data collected over the last few decades has made clear that surface-level iceberg production and melting has been causing extended trends of continental ice shrinkage in much of the continent.

That shrinkage amounted to about 70 gigatons of the continent’s land ice a year from 1992 through 2011. The continent’s sea ice made some shrinkages in many areas, as well, coupled with a few smaller increases in a few others as a direct result of the melting. This led to some slight increases in a few areas of the continent’s sea ice—increases that, while too small to compensate for the larger losses, still fueled some false claims by a few climate-change skeptics that “Antarctica’s ice is expanding.”

Overall ice loss is not only happening, but there is even more of it taking place sub-surface than researchers may have thought, Bramber and his colleagues conclude. This challenges conventional thinking in that researchers over the last few decades have primarily focused on the surface-level processes of icebergs forming and breaking away from the main ice shelves. This, they believed, was the main driver of long-term ice loss.

Bramber and his colleagues encourage scientists to reconsider. Recognizing the role of subsurface melting, which in many cases may be far larger than that of iceberg breakage, may be critical to a more precise understanding of how ice sheets may interact with oceans and the changing climate in the decades to come.

Commonwealth customers: It’s time to divest

Dear friend,

Have you heard? Prime Minister Tony Abbott wants to change the law so that consumers like you and me can’t run divestment campaigns against companies that engage in environmentally destructive activities.

Over the past six months, Market Forces and 350.org have been working hard to expose the Big 4 Bank’s multi-billion dollar support for the fossil fuel industry.

More than 2800 of you have signed our open letter and you’ve pledged to shift over $42 million of your money if the Big Banks don’t stop funding damaging fossil fuel projects.

Now it’s time to turn these pledges into action. There’s a reason Prime Minister Abbott wants to stop divestment campaigning – he knows it works. It’s time we show him just how well it works.

Starting in October, we’ll be supporting our Melbourne members to close their ANZ accounts. And in early November, we’ll support Commonwealth Bank customers in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth to do the same. We’ll be providing information to help you choose a bank that doesn’t invest in the fossil fuel industry.

If you’re a Commonwealth Bank customer and you’re ready to switch banks, then register for one of the following events:

• Melbourne
• Sydney
• Brisbane
• Canberra
• Perth

We’ll be organising activities for other cities and banks in due course. Register your interest here.

It’s time to seize our consumer power for good and show the Big 4 that we won’t stand by as they fund the destruction of our local communities, ecosystems and climate. This will also demonstrate why laws protecting our right to boycott environmentally destructive companies need to be protected.

If you care what your money’s doing, then join us in the growing divestment movement.

Warmest wishes,

Charlie on behalf of 350.org Australia and Julien on behalf of Market Forces

P.S. Here’s the news that the Abbott Government wants to make environmental boycotts illegal. These plans, if they even get up, won’t take effect until at least next year, so you’re safe if you choose to participate in our upcoming activities.

P.P.S. There’s still time to register for our ANZ action in Melbourne. Sign up here.