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Himalayan glaciers have lost no ice in the past 10 years, new study reveals.



The U.N. got it wrong on Himalayan glaciers -- and the proof is finally here.
The authors of the U.N.’s climate policy guide were red-faced two years ago when it was revealed that they had inaccurately forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would melt completely in 25 years, vanishing by the year 2035.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, ultimately issued a statement offering regret for what turned out to be a poorly vetted statement.
A new report published Thursday, Feb. 9, in the science journal Nature offers the first comprehensive study of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, and one of its conclusions has shocked scientists. Using GRACE, a pair of orbiting satellites racing around the planet at an altitude of 300 miles, it comes to the eye-popping conclusion that the Himalayas have barely melted at all in the past 10 years.
"The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise," said University of Colorado at Boulder physics John Wahr, who led the study.
Some previous estimates of ice loss in the high Asia mountains had predicted up to 50 billion tons of melting ice annually, said Wahr, who is also a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Instead, results from GRACE pin the estimated ice loss from those peaks -- including ranges like the Himalayas and the nearby Pamir and Tien Shan -- at only about 4 billion tons of ice annually.
Bristol University glaciologist Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, told the Guardian that such a level of melting was practically insignificant.
"The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero," he told the Guardian.


Read more: Himalayan glaciers have lost no ice in the past 10 years, new study reveals | Fox News

saintfan

You mean we're not all going to die after all?