Himalayan meltdown?

Are the Himalayan glaciers really melting away at a dangerous pace or are environmentalists panicking over it needlessly?
Environment minister Jairam Ramesh recently released a report by V.K. Raina, a former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India which said the Himalayan glaciers are in no danger.
But Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, believes there is clear evidence of the glacier melt. What’s the truth? And, why is it important?
The Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau have more than 45,000 individual glaciers which feed all the major river systems of the region — the Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, the Yellow, the Mekong and the Salween. The South Asian Himalayas is where these great rivers originate, and their waters irrigate and feed 1.3 billion people who live in the immediate plains. Global warming is said to be causing these glaciers to melt faster than projected and climate change believers say if this trend continues, there will be an increase in the incidence of floods and rock avalanches. Worse still, the very source of water for these great rivers could dry up in the next three decades.
In October, a group of environmental journalists visited Kathmandu where Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a leading Indian glaciologist and a senior fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) told us about his field research on small glaciers called Kolahoi and the Chhota Shigri. The ice was drilled to a depth of 9-10 metres to check the mass balance and tests were carried out on how the ice was being affected. We were also shown footage of larger glaciers like the Gangotri, where there is a sharp retreat and melting, by about 17.19 metres per year. We were also shown video clips of rushing melt waters and enormous glacial lake formations that had not been there before. Shailee Basnet, a young woman journalist who climbed Mount Everest in 2008, said she had seen the glaciers melting during her climb.
There are, of course, the doubters. Prof. Richard Armstrong of the University of Colorado has said the Himalayan glaciers were not threatened and reports to that effect were based on misconceptions.
But he drew a sharp response from Lucky Sherpa, a Nepali politician who believes the glaciers are indeed melting too fast. “We live here and speak as witnesses. He lives in Washington, and relies on secondary data”, Sherpa said. Nepal’s environment minister Thakur Sharma warns that if the melting continues, the great rivers of the region will dry up by 2035. That will mean disaster for India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and China.
Two weeks from now, world leaders and delegations will meet at Copenhagen, Denmark to strike a new bargain to deal with climate change and global warming. Can we hope for a comprehensive, ambitious and fair deal that will save the planet, and the Himalayan glaciers, too? Or, will the bickering continue into 2010 and beyond?

The writer is a fellow with the UNFCCC