No Snow, No Ice, No Water

Imagine a world in which a billion people don't have clean water

Yesterday at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen, Al Gore delivered a stern warning: a billion people may lose their access to clean water with the record-breaking melting of the polar and Himalayan ice due to global warming.

In making his case, the former American vice president cited new research that suggests that the polar ice cap shrunk to record-low level in 2008.

"Some of the models suggest...that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years," Gore said.

"There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water -- many of them all of their drinking water -- from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice."

There are about 1.3 billion people across Pakistan, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan that live downstream from the Himalayas are rely on the fresh water it provides.

But droughts are expected to occur, as "temperatures in the region have increased by between 0.15 and 0.6 degrees Celsius (0.27 and 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit) each decade for the last 30 years, dramatically accelerating the rate at which glaciers are shrinking," according to a recent AFP story.

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image: Himalayas, Manali (credit: little byte of luck)