Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The Khumbu Glacier in Nepal
in the Himalayas. Last year, the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ended up with a bit of
mud on its face when it had to retract an alarming claim in its
landmark 2007 assessment: that the probability of Himalayan
glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is
very high.” Climate skeptics pilloried the panel for including
what proved to be an unsubstantiated and, glaciologists said,
unlikely figure. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the head of the panel,
called the inclusion of the statistic a “regrettable error.” In
fact, there is still a paucity of scientific information about
the Himalayan glaciers, whose melt supplies water to hundreds of
millions of mostly poor people in Asia. While historical
photographs clearly indicate that some glaciers are retreating
in a striking pattern, there is no verifiable sense of how fast
this is occurring, which parts of the Himalayas are at greatest
risk and what factors influence th