From The Sunday Times:
A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. More:
Swept away by avalanches, left dangling at the ends of their ropes and crushed by falling ice – these were the fates of 11 mountaineers who perished on K2 earlier this month. In Pakistan, Andrew Buncombe talks to the survivors, and pieces together a horrifying chain of events that led to one of the worst climbing accidents in history. From The Independent:
Gerard McDonnell died in an avalanche on the Himalayan peak while attempting, fellow climbers believe, to free a trapped member of the expedition. PA / The Independent
Somewhere above 8,000m things are going very badly wrong for Wilco van Rooijen. All but blinded by altitude sickness, his brain and body slowed by lack of oxygen, he staggers and stumbles helplessly down the precipitous slope of the mountain. The searing elation that the 40-year-old had experienced just hours before on reaching the peak of K2, perhaps the world’s most dangerous mountain, is long extinguished. He has already seen two other climbers fall to their deaths and he knows that all around him others are battling for their lives, struggling to get off the slope.
Stranded in the so-called Dead Zone, he forces himself to block out all other thoughts from his numbed mind – his wife and nine-month child at home in the Netherlands, the safety of base camp – and focus simply on surviving. Somehow he has to get off the mountain. “All you are thinking is that you have to survive,” he recalls later, sitting with bandaged, frostbitten feet in a hotel in Pakistan. “You have to get out.”
Van Rooijen was lucky: 11 other climbers were not.
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A California professor recreates Asia’s most magnificent mountains via computer. From Asia Sentinel:
Seemingly real enough for digital Tomb Raider Lara Croft to scamper around in, this is the Himalaya Atlas of Aerial Panoramas, a unique digital collection of more than 700 images, depicting the world’s most spectacular mountain range, from Arunachal Pradesh in the east to Uttar Pradesh in the west .
Dr William Bowen, a California State University, Northridge geographer and the project’s creator, said he initially began making digital photo maps to give his students a visual of the material they covered in class.
More here and here:
A British artist has produced what she calls a “photo-fit” of the Yeti based on “potentially explosive” new evidence of the elusive creature’s existence. From The Telegraph:
Wildlife painter Polyanna Pickering was shown what is believed to be a 100-year-old yeti scalp at a remote monastery in the Himalayas.
At least one expert believe it could be the most important proof yet that the giant apelike beast is more than mere folklore.
Ms Pickering was gathering material for a new exhibition in the remote Bhutan region of the Himalayas when she made her chance discovery – with a little help from David Beckham.
She said: “I was told this was from a Migoi – their name for the yeti. All I know is, it was bigger than any human or ape scalp I have ever seen.”
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