Footnote to the preceding

Glaciers all over the world - from China to Alaska to Africa, from Greenland to Europe to South America to Antarctica, are shrinking at alarming rates, not only threatening inundation of coastal cities by rising sea levels in the longer term, but threatening the water supplies of hundreds of millions of people in just the next few decades.

Glaciers serve as water reservoirs: They store snow in the winter and release it in warmer weather, providing water to what would otherwise be dry, even arid areas.

That glacier store-release cycle provides, for example, at least 10% of the fresh water for 300 million people living in oases in arid western China. Two-thirds of those glaciers may be gone by mid-century.

In India alone, some 500 million people, including those in New Delhi and Calcutta, depend on glacier meltwater that feeds into the Ganges River system. ...

The Antizana Glacier, which provides Quito, Ecuador, with almost half its water, has retreated more than 90 meters over the last eight years.

And what is drought for some could be flood for others.

The Himalayas contain the world's third largest ice mass after Antarctica and Greenland. Most Himalayan glaciers have been thinning and retreating over the past 30 years, with losses accelerating to alarming levels in the past decade. ...

As the glaciers melt they are rapidly filling glacial lakes, creating a flood risk. An international team of scientists has warned that with current melt rates, at least 44 glacial lakes in the Himalayas could burst their banks in as little as five years.

The effects will not only be environmental but political as well. One very small hint of what could be coming is buried in an article about the future water supply of Calgary, Alberta:

The Rocky Mountain glaciers that feed Calgary's water system are shrinking so quickly they won't be able to meet the city's demand for water in 30 years, warns Alberta's environment minister[, Lorne Taylor]. ...

The province is currently studying the recession rate of the five major glaciers that feed the Bow River from which Calgary draws its water. ...

But Taylor said the province can't afford to let spring run-off flow through to Saskatchewan without catching its 50 per cent allotment.

Alberta typically allows 75 per cent of the water flow to pass into Saskatchewan - far more than the agreed 50 per cent, he explained.

And what happens when Saskatchewan suddenly finds its water supply coming out of Alberta cut by a full third? Now, Alberta and Saskatchewan may well be able to work something out - but what if the river crossed a boundary between two nations instead of two Canadian provinces? What then?

Footnote to the Footnote, Ironic Justice Div.: I found this tonight while looking for something else. It's from the Cox News Service, July 23, 2003.

Global warming, which most climate experts blame mainly on large-scale burning of oil and other fossil fuels, is interfering with efforts in Alaska to discover yet more oil. ...

A state of Alaska rule says heavy exploration equipment can be used on fragile tundra only when the ground is frozen to 12 inches deep and covered by at least 6 inches of snow.

However, because winters in the Arctic are becoming shorter, the number of days the tundra meets those conditions has shrunk from more than 200 in 1970 to only 103 last year, a state document notes. ...

In a June 3 news release, the Energy Department did not refer to global warming. ...

But according to the state's description of the research, the shorter period for frozen tundra "appears consistent with findings of general warming in the Alaska Arctic associated with global climate change."

Something about petards comes to mind - but in a state whose rapidly rising temperatures (about four times the global average) and resulting thawing of the permafrost are leading to

sagging roads, crumbling villages, sinking pipelines, a proliferation of insects that are destroying spruce forests and the possible disruption of marine wildlife,

it's hard to really see the humor.