Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

“It has become warmer, especially these last two years. That glacier used to come all the way down to the road, but now it stops halfway up the slope,” he said, pointing to the wall of ice several hundred meters away.

Warmer climes meant less hardship. Life had improved in other ways. The family had recently acquired a solar panel that gave them enough electricity for a lightbulb and a radio. Bahebieke had switched from a horse to a motorbike. The China mobile signal was so good in the mountains that he could keep in touch with family members working in the city by phone. Their livestock was growing. Looking over to some animals grazing by a meltwater stream, Bahebieke said his family now tended 400 sheep. 24But bigger herds did not necessarily equate to greater wealth.

He was worried about the mountains he roamed. “As the glaciers melt and the temperature rises, there is less snow and rain. That means less grass. The sheep are not able to get fat. This is the problem we face. For a herdsman, that is a great loss.”

Other nomads had found a new way of making money. For the final ascent to the glacier, I stopped by a couple of yurts to hire a padded jacket and pay for a motorbike ride up the final few hundred meters to the ice field. Fifty years earlier, Zhao and his expeditionary team would have taken hours climbing this rutted, winding track. We juddered up in ten minutes. At the top, overlooking Urumqi Number One, I felt a guilty exhilaration. I was privileged to be in this breathtakingly beautiful place, yet I had come to look for signs of decline. It seemed disrespectful. And difficult. I suddenly realized my inability to grasp the scale of the changes taking place. I knew the history of the glacier’s retreat, that the two lakes of ice had been one giant sea until they split in 1993. I had read that it was thinning at a rate of six meters a year. And I had been told that the water dripping from the glacier could have been locked in place for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. I knew this ancient natural legacy was being wasted and degraded. But, standing in front of the glacier, it still looked utterly huge and magnificent. As at the Three Gorges, perhaps I could not appreciate what had been lost because I had never seen the former glory.

Locals, though, had watched the diminishment of the ice with growing alarm. Ashengbieke, my Kazakh motorbike taxi driver, was only eighteen, but he said the glacier had split in half and changed color since his childhood. “While I was growing up, it used to be very cold here. It used to snow in summer, but now it rains instead. Because of the air pollution, the glacier turned black. It used to be pure white and the two snowfields were joined as one.”

I clambered down a slope to get within touching distance. Up close, the glacier had a cold sensuality. Gnarled, twisted, and crevassed, its deepest, darkest cave concealed a fragile moistening stalactite. The sounds from within rose in intensity from a simple, steady drip, drip, drip near the top to a roaring torrent below. Thirty meters from the main wall, the flood of meltwater cut a tunnel under the dirty gray ice, leaving only a blotchy, wafer-thin crust on the surface. Near my feet, a chunk of ice the size of a piano had fallen from above. Farther down the slope, a lake-sized slab had been isolated from the main glacier. Cut off like a weak animal from a herd, it was being slowly worn down by the heat.

But was this the impact of climate change or just the normal seasonal melt? I belatedly wondered if I was on a fool’s errand. What could a layman conclude in a few hours about a phenomenon that had to be put in the context of millennia? In the Arctic, global warming was strikingly evident as ice fields collapsed into the ocean and polar bears were stranded on floes. In the mountains, the changes were, well, glacial.

But the incremental movement of the ice had been meticulously tracked since Zhao’s expedition in the 1950s. At a monitoring station a short way down the valley, I met his modern counterpart, Zhang Enzi, a bespectacled glaciologist who had spent the past five years measuring the thickness and length of the five glaciers in the area, as well as the temperature of the air and the ice. Every day, he and his colleagues took readings at 7:45 a.m., 1:45 p.m., and 7:45 p.m. Their results suggested that “glacial” was no longer quite such an appropriate adjective for “slow.”

Zhang was a friendly, worried young man and a believer in anthropomorphic climate change. He told me the ice had been retreating by between eight and ten meters each year. Warmer weather had changed patterns of precipitation. For the first time since records began, rain rather than snow had recently fallen on the peak. There were lakes of melted water at the top of the glacier and more frequent avalanches. The ice was discolored from clouds of soot, also known as black carbon, that billowed across the world from wood fires, diesel engines, and smokestacks in developing nations. 25The effect was just as it had been with the coal dust in the 1950s. Even the Number Five Glacier, which was less vulnerable because it sat in the shadow of the mountain most of the day, had started to shrink for the first time. At the current pace of thinning, the entire glacier field would be gone within 100 years.

That would be a calamity for Urumqi. The glaciers served as solid water reservoirs. Mountains captured snow, rain, and atmospheric moisture during the summer rainy season and slowly released it during dry winter months. This regulating function was particularly important to Xinjiang’s provincial capital, which was flanked by vast deserts. Once the mountains started warming and the glaciers melted, rivers downstream were first at risk of flooding and then, years later, of drying up.

“It’s very frightening,” Zhang said. “This will create huge problems for Urumqi’s drinking water supply.”

But the danger was not widely understood, he told me. For at least twenty years, the extra meltwater would seem a bonus. People would get used to having more to drink and irrigate with than usual. Many doubted climate change was a problem. 26Others saw it as a boon.

A similar range of views is evident at a national level. Talking to scientists and policymakers in China over the years, I have found the debate about global warming to be less urgent than in developed nations. Nobody doubts change is occurring, but the degree of human—particularly Chinese—responsibility is often questioned, as are the likely consequences and the need to take action. Many expressed a feeling of injustice because China was often blamed for being the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gas. This was understandable. As a latecomer to industrialization, China can claim a lower historical responsibility than developed nations. 27Relative to the size of its population, its carbon footprint is also just a third or a quarter of that of the U.S. and Europe. A major chunk of its emissions is also used in the manufacture of exports, as we saw in Guangdong.

But there is a growing awareness of the need to take action as the impact of climate change becomes clearer. The 1990s was China’s hottest decade in 100 years. I heard from Xiao Ziniu, director general of the Beijing climate monitoring center, that storms were growing fiercer and more frequent in the south, droughts were lasting longer in the north, and typhoons were intensifying near the coast. Rising temperatures were affecting crop production, rainfall patterns, and the pace of glacier melt.

Yet Xiao was not convinced that mankind faced calamity: “There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous. Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects. In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today.”