Himalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn
The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.
More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.
This state is one of two in India which have been run by communists for decades.
My team - mostly from Kerala - came to me en masse and told me not to, and this was long before Nokku Kooli became a well known thing.
Don't know or care whether it was during UDF/LDF or whatever rule.
A couple of years ago a major clothes manufacturer, founded in that state, packed up and left.
A parallel from WB: Tata's moved their automobile factory to Gujarat, which has since then shipped over a million cars.
I don't disagree that Kerala was known for being rather unfriendly to big industries, but things are changing. The Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry ranked Kerala at the top in 2024 for "Ease of Doing Business Reforms".
https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2024/Sep/06/e...
As for the clothes manufacturer, I believe you are talking about Kitex. They didn't go anywhere and their factories are still there in Kerala. They did set up a new factory recently in Telengana though, which, along with the rest of the company, is going through a rough phase now because of Trump's tariffs.
but it has a ton of heart and forward thinking people (which is why industrialists are scared of it).
You can check the name of the party in power to check what industrialists are scared of.
Current administration is investing in renewable energy. You are making them seem climate change deniers.
Keep your politics to reddit.
Your current administation stopped large offshore wind projects and uses the slogan "drill baby drill".
But also, would it actually make a difference at this point? That is, can it be stopped, or have we passed the point of no return? I believe the latter.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/17/nx-s1-5500318/iranian-officia...
But the problems are on different time scales and spheres of influence.
Iran can’t do anything on their own against climate change. But they can decide to fund water projects instead of bombs.
It’s a bit like saying: I went to the beach for a day and got sunburned. It’s climate change!
Yes the sun got more intense because of climate change (maybe) but why didn’t you buy an umbrella or sun screen?
They pump over 4 Million barrels per day (https://ycharts.com/indicators/iran_crude_oil_production).
This equals about 1.7 Million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per day, which is an increase of 120% since year 2000 and corresponds to about 2% of the global CO2 emissions.
No nation on earth like Iran, save perhaps for China and Norway, is in such a unique position of power, both economically, socially, and with the engineering knowhow) and political ability to actually do something to prevent climate damage. Instead they are making the situation more difficult.
One will help in the mid-term and the other in the long-term.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/warming-...
But they can decide to fund water projects instead of bombs.
And become again a client state of the West, you forgot that part.
* Highly educated population.
* Remnant of an ancient non-Arab Islamic empire.
* Almost precisely the same population count.
And people don't starve in Turkey. Why would they starve in a Western-aligned Iran? The main problem in the richer half of the world is already obesity.
Just pick a random African country where the West helps.
I forgot that it’s much better to let your people starve
It's actually the US making the Iranian people starve on account of their (US's) economic war against Iran, and the same goes for Cuba and the Cubans living in Cuba. Saying that the Iranians should embrace with full arms the same Westerners that are making them starve right at this moment has to be a bit.
In many cases governments are cutting back on spending on dealing with these sorts of problems because they can avoid blame by saying it is a result of climate change and few people ask why they did not act to mitigate the effects.
So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.
Second mismanagement is a super broad term showing failure on all levels of the state.
It’s definitely not monocausal but the effect many years of utter betrayal of their own people.
As climate change gets worse in the future, the margin for error will keep shrinking. More countries will start to experience similar problems. Only the most competent will survive, but eventually regional instability will attack the foundations of that state capacity as a contagion byproduct, making it harder to be the competent outlier.
This all becomes a push driver for migration towards the colder north, as the equator becomes progressively destabilized and uninhabitable. Not only water shortages in dry climates but wet-bulb temperatures in temperate climates that make existing outdoors dangerous for periods of the year.
This is what will happen in the future btw - climate change will apply pressure via famine and droughts, but the fallout will always be attributed to the failure of local governments to correctly "manage the change".
We'll go from "climate change is a hoax" to "climate change is just a given and it's your duty to manage it".
I don't believe a single thing they say.
The case here is very simple: invest in infrastructure for your people or invest in bombs to attack foreign states.
And you’re saying it’s climate change? I’d like to live in your world.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanat...
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
So it's not really delusion, but irresponsibility and selfishness.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
The closest natural resource–society interaction to predict conflict risk according to our models was food production within its economic and demographic context, e.g., with GDP per capita, unemployment, infant mortality and youth bulge.
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6574 Revisiting the Contested Role of Natural Resources in Violent Conflict Risk through Machine Learning (Open Access)
This kind of reasoning: "California wildfires and tornadoes have always been part of the US weather patterns"
Whilst ignoring the increasing frequency and magnitude / intensity.
Climate changes took decades to manifest effects.
*centuries, it was first predicted in the 19th century when Britain was burning increasingly massive amounts of coal.
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
even the repeated blatant lies
It is difficult to have a reasonable discourse when starting with such overkill positions. The topic is way too nuanced. The civil war in Syria had many reasons, political, economic, religious, but also environmental.
Climate change massively increases the risk on water supply and harvesting yields, and if that risk manifests in a situation where people are already unhappy due to other reasons, it can be the trigger for large-scale reactions.
With all that having many factors, you'll rarely be able to point to one thing as "the" cause. That does not make it less relevant, though.
But when the AMOC stops and western Europe's winters get longer there will be huge changes too. If I recall correctly, the AMOC stopping is a trigger for an ice age, that is, ice sheets / the north pole going down way south. This would make anything above France uninhabitable, if not wiped off the map entirely.
But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters, so likely in our lifetime it'd mainly mean we change how we build houses and buildings. But long term, people would move.
Temperatures are generally above 0°C in summer, -50 approximately in winter.
Will an Ice Age actually be worse than that?
I would expect somewhat better, although maybe not much. I might expect Denmark and Southern Parts of Sweden and England to reach 10 degrees in Summer, and -20 in Winter. But that is of course just a guess on my part so I am certainly willing to hear that I have guessed wrong.
Of course I'm thinking survivable with the magic of "technology" and maybe I'm adding wishful thinking into this science fiction scenario here, but I'm not sure if the result of the new Ice Age will be the same as the last one.
But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters
I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.
Not all ‘ice ages’ are the same.
A true ice age as you discuss is due to the distance we are from the sun. Unfortunately, we are in the opposite and the compounding effects of human induced greenhouse effect will doom us. It’s a bit like nature/nuture.
There is stuff we can control. How we handle our species and our home, the earth.
An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.
The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.
Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.
Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
Where you go wrong is in misrepresenting the argument as “more plants and food”. That’s a straw man. Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food, but that doesn’t mean that existing patterns of food production will exist unchanged, or that adaptation won’t be required. But we’re also talking about a 100+ year change timeline. People who tell you that this year’s weather are indicative of urgent, rapid change are exaggerating.
You seem to be willing to accept wild extrapolations of doom without evidence, while rejecting scientifically well-founded statements of fact, so I’d challenge you to examine your priors.
The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
However it's important to remember that world isn't a high school physics experiment, and you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2:
| Climate change can prolong the plant growing season and expand the areas suitable for crop planting, as well as promote crop photosynthesis thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, an excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to unbalanced nutrient absorption in crops and hinder photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration, thus affecting crop yields. Irregular precipitation patterns and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods can lead to hypoxia and nutrient loss in the plant roots. An increase in the frequency of extreme weather events directly damages plants and expands the range of diseases and pests. In addition, climate change will also affect soil moisture content, temperature, microbial activity, nutrient cycling, and quality, thus affecting plant growth.
[https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/14/6/1236]
In global models of climate change the overall impact on plant growth is significant, but not positive:
| Global above ground biomass is projected to decline by 4 to 16% under a 2 °C increase in climate warming
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420379122]
Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food
That does not seem to be what agricultural researchers believe:
| In wheat a mean daily temperature of 35°C caused total failure of the plant, while exposure to short episodes (2–5 days) of HS (>24°C) at the reproductive stage (start of flowering) resulted in substantial damage to floret fertility leading to an estimated 6.0 ± 2.9% loss in global yield with each degree-Celsius (°C) increase in temperature
| Although it might be argued that the ‘fertilization effect’ of increasing CO2 concentration may benefit crop biomass thus raising the possibility of an increased food production, emerging evidence has demonstrated a reduction in crop yield if increased CO2 is combined with high temperature and/or water scarcity, making a net increase in crop productivity unlikely
| When the combination of drought and heatwave is considered, production losses considering cereals including wheat (−11.3%), barley (−12.1%) and maize (−12.5%), and for non-cereals: oil crops (−8.4%), olives (−6.2%), vegetables (−3.5%), roots and tubers (−4.5%), sugar beet (−8.8%), among others
There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.
No, they don't. Not due to CO2, anyway (maybe temperature, or changes in precipitation for particular plants).
Even if you want to (inaccurately) argue that specific plants will grow smaller, abundant CO2 will lead to more plants.
There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
Again, no. Plants are limited by their genetics, and the availability of inputs, one of the most important of which is carbon. CO2 does not limit a plant's growth. That's just silly.
The net effect is the same. We're not going to see Northern Canada turn into a lush farmland. It's much more complicated than that.
Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall[0]. The net effect is the same.
The net effect is not the same. The net effect is that the earth has been getting greener, in multiple measurable ways, since at least the 1980s.
See my sibling comments containing the IPCC AR6 report citations, where they state that this global greening is happening, and has been happening for decades, with high confidence.
I don’t think these two things are strongly related.
More leaf surface area and biomass is increasing in tandem with climate models. But there have also been observations that the size and quality of individuals has been affected.
Polar and Continental regions will get greener at the expense of the tropical and equatorial regions.
Mass migration is the inevitable conclusion of uneven impacts of climate change. Ie. In 2026, Political climate and physical climate are moving in mutually incompatible directions.
allthe people
who say
the world will be
greener
and therefore there will be
more plants
and food
Look at a chart and you will see just how quickly the climate is changing and how we've done almost nothing to improve the situation, then why do you think it's "ok" because its "natural"? Are you nor alarmed about the mysterious force making the earth hotter? Isn't that alarming to you that we're just going along with a hotter and hotter planet? At what stage does this natural cycle stop?
Clearly, thanks to science, we know it's because of human activity, and I guess you could argue that is "natural", like our behavior is part of nature, but to pretend it's just some unknown warming force that's making the climate change seems much more disturbing to me than actually know why it's happening and addressing the issue?
certain confidence that because the changing climate is "just part of a natural cycle" it's going to be fine
What nonsense.
That’s rarely the opinion of those who hold that view.
If climate change has any non-human causes, then to what extent are we humans able to have an affect on those non-human causes?
Question is, is this human-caused change or the usual natural climate shift that Earth goes through every few thousand centuries or millennia? And is there anything humans should do about it, other than adapting to it?
From the parent post who he was talking about...it does say "natural climate shift" and mention adaption. I think the point is that some people are way too sure sure that we can just adapt to a rapidly shifting climate even if we don't understand the mechanism behind the warming.
Most natural shifts are explainable by science, so why is the trend of the last 75 years, unexplainable yet people are fine with it and just make assumptions we can adapt if we don't understand what's driving the warming?
I do see this view a lot on podcasts like Joe Rogan (which has one of the largest audiences in the world) and it does seem to maintain the idea that climate change is a natural thing and because of that it will be fine. It's not really a fringe idea even though it's a completely baseless idea IMO.
Let's talk about per capita energy usage and garbage dumping. Your businesses are cramming you homes, offices and roads with the stuff that you don't need. Basically, businesses are like high pressure pumps that circulate garbage through homes.
What nonsense.
What rudeness.
That’s rarely the opinion of those who hold that view.
I've tracked climate science deniers for decades and that simply isn't true.
If climate change has any non-human causes, then to what extent are we humans able to have an affect on those non-human causes?
Of course climate change has some non-human causes, but most of them aren't the ones that we humans are able to have an effect on, so the question is off base. It's the human causes that we humans are able to have an extensive effect on, obviously.
Your question can possibly be read as implying that the causes are either non-human or they are human, rather than there being both types of factors ... if that's the case then it reflects an extraordinary lack of knowledge about the subject.
There is no end to the concrete evidence of the negative effect of humans towards the climate.
Here's something simple. Deforestation is directly caused by humans. (Note that wildfires "deforest" but without human intervention, they grow back and thus reforest.). So then ask yourself, what is the role of forests and jungles within the environment and climate?
Look at this article: https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation. What began 10,000 years ago, 200 years ago, and 100 years ago? This couldn't possibly be major changes in human activity could it?
tl;dr we have extensive historical records of past weather progression through e.g. ice cores and the recent weather and climate changes are unheard of outside of cataclysmic events like meteor strikes or volcano eruptions, with a very close correlation with emissions. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last....
As for whether we can do anything about it, personally I don't think so, we passed the point of no return... probably decades ago, even if emissions suddenly stopped then, the wheels were set in motion, for example through the melting of permafrost causing ???? amounts of sequestered plant matter to start decomposing and releasing methane and the like.
Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels.
That sounds like a very good reason to be talking about it.
Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions.
This is not at all true. And given your original very uninformed question about "natural cycles" vs. human causes (which is quite the false dichotomy), I don't think you're any sort of authority on science.
This is not at all true.
What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature? I resisted myself not to comment on your authority on science.
What else has enabled global trade and business motives that led to everything that caused the climate change?
What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature?
You're changing the subject and attacking a strawman. That's not at all what I said is not true. And you're cherry picking, focusing entirely on negatives and ignoring all positives of science, which is how you come up with "only a force to drive us towards these directions". Science is also giving us wind, solar, and geothermal power, EVs, etc.
I won't respond further.
that (checks notes) has the potential to poison most of North India.
How large is the amount of plutonium in there? I highly doubt that it has the claimed potential.
The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.
I really fail to see a problem with these tiny amounts of non-brittle material embedded into a solid case. It's still very dangerous, but it's locally dangerous (meters away), not at the scale of whole countries.
Anecdotal but this is not dissimilar to how Japan has been lately with snowfall in the northern regions. It was once 30cm a night, almost every night during winter, fairly stable and predictable weather, we're still getting a lot of snow most winters, but it seems to happen in these major storm events now. Not consistent manageable snowfall, but more like a snow bomb goes off once a week, it gets warm, quite a lot of melt occurs and then boom, hit again. It's actually. taking some getting used too and requires adaption. It's a small thing but it makes it quite hard to plan for, and it makes life generally quite stressful. Also due to the rapid warming and cooling ice is a bit more of an issue now, like more injures from people getting hammered on icy / slick roads and paths.
But on the flip side, does this mean it's never been easier to climb the Himalayan mountains?
I can't speak to the Himalayas, but I can speak to southwest Colorado:
climbing a 70 degree snow face is fun, climbing the pile of shit underneath it with crampons is (to me) terrifying.
Above the bergschrund (the head of the glacier), erosion in high mountains is accelerated by freeze-thaw cycles. Temps above freezing obviously contribute to this. But even well below freezing ambient temps, exposed dark rock in sunlight can absorb enough energy to cause local thawing, which results in rockfall.
Bangladesh would be at risk because the Bramhaphtra sees upstream fresh water use by China. But China's use of Bramhaputra water is mostly energy related, not for drinking water or irrigation.
If decreasing population trends continue then this problem will solve itself.