Tibetan plateau turning to desert
May 8th, 2006 by Jim JustThe Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s top scientific body, has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade. Environmental changes brought about by the process will lead to an ecological catastrophe. Many of Asia’s greatest rivers—including the Yangtze, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yellow River—rise on the plateau. In China alone, 300 million people depend on water from the glaciers for their survival. Yet the plateau is drying up, disrupting water supplies over much of Asia. In China alone, 400 cities are already running short of water; in 100 of them—including Beijing—the shortages are becoming critical. Rising temperatures are thawing out the tundra of the plateau, turning it into desert. The melting glaciers will ultimately trigger more droughts, expand desertification and increase sand storms over the rest of the country. A leaked draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows that the scientific debate has moved on from whether man-made climate change is real to what the effects could be.