Assignment for the WB Mooc

This is Everest.
My photo, amazingly. I took it two years ago, almost to the day. My cousin and I decided to join a charity group and walk/stagger/climb/huff-and-puff the full nine days up from Lukla into the cold to base camp 5364m up. No air, tummy bugs, potatoes and carrots every day and did I mention the cold?!

What was the most extraordinary thing was experiencing the Khumbu ice fall which is a tumble of blue ice blocks very slowly cascading down the side of the mountain and into the glacial valley. We had to clamber over and around the enormous chunks of glacier and freak out about falling into the crevices.


But what does all this have to do with climate change? This landscape is so vast, so forbidding and hostile, so stark that it gives an impression of being sturdy and ancient and impervious to human influence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The agriculturalists who live on the Himalayan hinterlands farm shallow-growing vegetables as the mountain soils are thin, lacking in nutrients and easily erodible. This is why we ate spuds, carrots and spinach each day for two weeks: because that's what there is.

The spectre of climate change hangs heavily over the Khumbu Valley. More erosion from either more rainfall, or rainfall which might fall very intensively is a real danger. It can cause lethal landslides, bleach the soil for future generations to farm, and drive people into other livelihoods, or poverty. There is measurable risk now to the availability of drinking and irrigation water in the Himalaya, as studied by Xu et al (2009).

Climate change is creating atmospheric conditions that encourage the melting of glaciers and permafrost land and doesn't allow for seasonal refreezing (NASA). If this impacts the delicate ecosystem in the high Himalaya, the beautiful pristine landscape in these photos will be changed forever. There are mountain lakes which are held together by natural glacial dams which split and burst when they melt, releasing millions of gallons of water to gush downhill and flood villages, ruin farms and cause landslides. Meltwater from Nepal and Tibet has fed the largest rivers in Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, and the millions of people who depend on them to survive. However the recent spike in atmospheric changes has created a succession of disasters for people who are unable to cope with unexpected impacts that are larger, longer or otherwise unexpected compared to the events in the communities past (Wisner et al 2004)

My personal experiences of one of the most natural and untouched places on earth just reminds me how much it is being affected, or at least threatened, by the unthinking actions of society. If we can somehow lessen the flow of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, there is a chance that some of the most precarious ecosystems might escape total and irreversible transformation.

How to get to lower emissions? Well, as Narain and Agarwal demonstrated in 1991, not all emissions are the same; the black carbon released by burning a brick of dried dung for cooking some rice in a shelter in Mumbai cannot be treated economically, ethically or in regulation as a rich person's second luxury car or holiday in the Bahamas. The solution to consumption must be answered by political and sociological treatment, not by science alone, as asserted by Mike Hulme (2009). We need to work together.


References

Agarwal, A., & Narain, S. (1991). Global Warming in an Unequal World: A case of Environmental Colonialism. Centre for Science and Environment. Rose Mwebaza.

 

Hulme, M. (2009). Why we disagree about climate change. Cambridge University Press.

NASA (2014) (website accessed 16.2.14) http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence 

Wisner, B., Blaikie, P. Cannon, T. and Davis I. (2004) At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters. 2^nd Ed. London, Routledge

Xu, J., Grumbine, R. E., Shrestha, A., Eriksson, M., Yang, X., Wang, Y. U. N., & Wilkes, A. (2009). The melting Himalayas: cascading effects of climate change on water, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Conservation Biology, 23(3), 520-530.