Global warming typically takes the rap for melting glaciers, but in the case of the Himalayan mountain range’s dwindling ice, it could have a co-conspirator: soot. Today, at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, scientists said that the black carbon spewed out as industrial pollution from the heavily populated areas nearby could be a much larger contributor to glacier melt than previously thought.

First, NASA’s William Lau says, atmospheric circulation leaves a layer of soot at the base of the Himalayas, and that soot then combines with dust and forms an opaque cloud that absorbs energy. As this layer heats up in the Himalayan foothills, it rises and enhances the seasonal northward flow of humid monsoon winds, forcing moisture and hot air up the slopes of the majestic mountain range. As these particles rise on the warm, overturning air masses, they produce more rain over northern India, which further warms the atmosphere and fuels this “heat pump” that draws even more warm air to the region [LiveScience].

Half of Tibetan glaciers were shrinking between 1950 and 1980, Chinese scientists say, but the total has shot up to 95 percent in this century. NASA’s James Hansen was a member of one of the two study teams that tackled this problem, and said black carbon could account for as much as half of the glacial retreat, with climate change representing the remainder. “The science suggests that we’ve got to better monitor the flue on our ‘rooftop to the world,’” Lau said. [LiveScience].

Beyond the cultural loss and climate change worries, the Himalayas bind the two most populous countries in the world and provide water for a huge chunk of the world’s people. One of the persistent worries in Asia remains a deepening water crisis as high mountain glaciers shrink. Three northern states in India have lost 17.7 cubic kilometers a year for the past decade [GreenTech Media].

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Image: Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Photo: Australian Science Media Center

Man. The stories out of here about how hard it is to get into the Bella Center–home to the COP15 meetings–are enough to convince anybody not to try it. That includes me–even though media credentials are waiting for me inside the building.

But listen to Catherine Brahic of New Scientist describe her experience of the lines outside:

Five hours, zero degrees centigrade, no food, no water. Snow flurries. Dozens of large (very large) Danish police manhandling the crowds, arms linked to form human walls and cordon off the hundreds of waiting people, who teetered between hilarity and fury.

The scene was repeated at the various gates to the Copenhagen climate conference, from 7 am this morning to when the doors closed at 6 pm. I waited five hours in the blistering cold to get in, and I was among the lucky ones. My colleague, Fred Pearce, waited nine before the gates were shut before his nose. Above him a digital sign fastidiously counted the growing number of climate refugees around the world. He’ll have to do it all again tomorrow.

Brahic continues, hilariously:

What was behind the monumental screw-up? A staggering inability to do maths.

The conference centre has a maximum capacity of 15,000, yet NGOs alone were allowed to register 20,000 delegates. That’s not counting the 5000 members of the media, nor the 7000 staffers who are running the place, totalling 32,000 before you even get to the people who are meant to be doing the real work here: the negotiators. There were ministers hopelessly waving their diplomatic passes in the queues outside. They weren’t let in any faster than anyone else.

Amanda Little of Grist adds to the depictions of utter misery:

On my first day in Copenhagen, after a sleepless red eye, I and thousands of others—including delegates, business leaders, and other accredited journalists—were prevented from entering the conference center because the event has been way overbooked. Word is that more than 45,000 people have registered to attend, but only 15,000 can actually fit into the event location. You do the math. Many of us had paid thousands of dollars and traveled thousands of miles to get here. Despite the miserable weather, lack of food and toilets, and obvious mismanagement of the proceedings, U.N. officials seemed unable or unwilling to deal with the problem.

My co-sufferers had some choice words to describe the situation: “Profoundly miserable.” “The day of the living dead.” “The slowest torture imaginable.” I arrived at 1:30 p.m. and left at 5:30; there were plenty of people who had come at 8:00 a.m. and were still there at 5:00 p.m., blue lips angrily curled.

So, here I am in a cozy coffeehouse, a short walk from Tivoli Gardens, about to go out to dinner in Christiana, and I’m wondering: Is this insanity really worth it? Just so I can add to the genre of griping-waiting-in-line articles? Just to penetrate the inner sanctum?

I don’t think so. My reporting from Copenhagen will simply have to take a different angle–as did my geoengineering piece yesterday for Mother Jones. Because with just a few days in this beautiful town, I am not at all sure I want to spend one of them freezing in a nightmarish line…..

Twitter: Bane of employers … but friend of science?

At a scientific meet-up in California this week, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey proposed that the 140-character micro-blogging site could help to speed up responses to earthquakes. “Why would such a system work?” asked Paul Earle, a geologist at the USGS, at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting Monday. “Because people like to tweet after an earthquake” [Wired.com].

While it can take scientists up to 20 minutes to process the wave of information that hits their instruments after an earthquake, Earle says, people start tweeting immediately, often with tags like “#earthquake.” A prototype system aggregates tweets based on key words such as “earthquake” or the equivalent in different languages. It can then send an e-mail listing the cities where the tweets came from and what the tweets said [AP].

Earle’s project isn’t the first to suggest that Twitter’s method of spreading info around the world within seconds could be invaluable during an emergency. But his team’s system runs into the same problems as others, especially sorting through the clutter of tweets. “Because there is a lot of noise in this data and we don’t believe this system could ever be used to initiate a critical response such as shutting down a nuclear power plant, but what it may do is give us an initial heads-up in a region which doesn’t have a dense seismic network that further scientific evaluation is needed,” said Dr Earle [BBC News].

Just as long as the spike in earthquake-related tweets doesn’t bring a visit from the fail whale.

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Image: flickr / Michperu

Razib Khan is always up to something creative and Sunday night was no exception. Check out the google trend for “depression” he spotted unintentionally while searching for the economic meaning of the word:

This graph shows a clear seasonal trend and brings to mind the study on birth season that came out earlier this year from the University of Notre Dame. So perhaps we have yet another factor to consider in the equation of why winter babies seem to fall behind their peers… Might a parent’s emotional state at birth influence the child’s health and achievement later in life?