The Himalayas, called the Third Pole because they’re the third largest store of frozen water after the Arctic and Antarctic poles, are in trouble. I’ve posted about this before.

The Himalayas supply fresh water to Asia’s most important rivers, including the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Yellow, and Yangtze, as well as many smaller rivers. This fresh water flows into the largest concentration of people on the planet – over a billion people get their water from these rivers.

The third pole waters are melting quickly and their multi-year ice is receding. The Himalayas are warming nearly twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Their preservation is basically essential to the lives of everyone.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Chinese Academy of Science have been studying this phenomenon closely. They assumed there was a local effect increasing the warming in the mountains, and have come to the conclusion that they are correct. Black carbon, the soot that belches from unfiltered coal and diesel combustion (your first thought may be coal plant smoke stacks, but open cook stoves are another culprit) is apparently pulled from India and China into the Himalayas by air currents.

Last year, the UN brought the world’s attention to brown clouds of soot and pollution blowing around Asia. “The brown clouds have darkened 13 cities in Asia, including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Cairo, Mumbai, New Delhi and Tehran, “dimming” sunlight in some places by as much as 25 per cent”, said one news report.

The clouds aren’t gone, although quickly vanishing from the news, and they aren’t unique to Asia. They’ve been seen on every continent, and scientists estimate they can drift across a continent or an ocean in less than a week. A brown cloud over Beijing on Monday could be in San Francisco by the weekend.

Unfortunately, the clouds aren’t drifting across the pacific so much as they’re settling in the high mountains of the Tibetan Plateau. Their black carbon and other sun-absorbing gases warm the air in the foothills and push it up further and further toward the glacial peaks, melting the snow.

If black carbon is indeed the driving force behind the rapid warming in the Himalayas, then smokestack scrubbers, filters, cleaner diesel engine technology, and the dissemination of cleaner stove technology to poor rural populations could slow the receding glaciers. Black carbon has a shorter lifespan than CO2, and could therefore be dealt with before catastrophe strikes. During the industrial revolution, cities were said to be successful if thick black smoke hung over them – we changed, and Asia can too.