Turtles on a beach

Contributor

other

HANDOUT on 8/17/23

The Washington Post

handout

September global average temperature compared to normal

Color1008

HANDOUT on 5/20/14

U.S. President Joe Biden travels to Arizona

For The Washington Post

An illustration shows a military jet emitting an orange hued substance into the atmosphere.

Main image for climate geoengineering comic

1.5 promo image

Floating Solar Aims to Gain Ground in China's Coal Country

Stringer

Days with dangerous heat by mid-century

How climate change is impacting the world

Coronavirus Pandemic 2021 - Death Valley National Park

staff

FILES-BRAZIL-AMAZON-DEFORESTATION

Getty

TOPSHOT-GREENLAND-ENVIRONMENT-CLIMATE CHANGE-ICEBERGS

Wildfires Break Out Across Boulder County In Colorado

Map showing summer temperature change in the U.S. comparing 2017-2021 vs. 1971-2000

EXTREMESUMMER PROMO

World Heat thumbnail

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

We reported for months on changes sweeping Russia. Here’s what we found.  

China’s Xi visits France in first post-pandemic trip to Europe

Middle East conflict live updates: Hamas says it approves cease-fire proposal amid Israeli orders for civilians to leave Rafah

There’s still time for Congress to Trump-proof the Insurrection Act 

The Post endorses April McClain Delaney and Tom Royals for Maryland’s 6th District

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Eddie Rosario and Co. lead the Nats to an MLB-best 12th comeback win

CJ Abrams keeps getting better. It’s time to think about an extension.

A frank look at hot dog prices at MLB ballparks

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Election 2024 latest news: After big weekend in Palm Beach, Trump returns to N.Y. courtroom

Improper ‘shadow’ ads thriving on Facebook during India’s election

Bosses mandated them back to the office. They took legal action instead.

Under Putin, a militarized new Russia rises to challenge U.S. and the West 

How did we end up with a Biden-Trump matchup again?

In photos: The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby

Bingo, beaded bracelets and volunteer iPhones power Biden’s organizing effort

Book excerpt: The admiral who had a mental breakdown over Fat Leonard

How TikTok changed fashion

How Pope Francis opened the Vatican to transgender sex workers

Miss Manners: I’m bothered by a fellow guest not touching their dessert

Ask Amy: My estranged wife is telling my son I’m an adulterer

Carolyn Hax: Sisters were close — then one accused the other’s husband of abuse

Kim Godwin steps down suddenly as president of ABC News

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

The ‘Access Hollywood’ video cemented Trump’s air of invincibility

Don’t be a jerk at the airport: A guide for headphones

The new cure-all for vacation excess: the IV drip 

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

The Trump-Biden battle over the 2017 tax cut

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

WAUKESHA, WI - MAY 1st: Former president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on Wednesday May 1st, 2024.  (Photo by Sara Stathas for the Washington Post)

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Gian Ehrenzeller

PARIS — Glaciers in at least one-third of World Heritage sites possessing them, including Yosemite National Park, will disappear by mid-century even if emissions are curbed, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization warned in <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000383551" target=_blank>a new report Thursday</a>.

Even if global warming is limited to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which now seems unlikely, all the glaciers in Yosemite and the ice patches in Yellowstone National Park, as well as the few glaciers left in Africa, will be lost.

Other glaciers can be saved only if greenhouse gas emissions “are drastically cut” and global warming is capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Paris-based UNESCO warned in its report.

“This report is a call to action,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement and linked the report to United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP27, which is set to begin in Egypt next week. “COP27 will have a crucial role to help find solutions to this issue.”

The world’s melting glaciers are yielding up their secrets too quickly

About 50 of the organization’s more than 1,150 World Heritage sites have glaciers, which together constitute almost a tenth of the world’s glaciered area.

The almost 19,000 glaciers located at heritage sites are losing more than 60 billion tons of ice a year, which amounts to the annual water consumption of Spain and France combined, and accounts for about 5 percent of global sea-level rise, UNESCO said.

“Glaciers are retreating at an accelerated rate worldwide,” said Tales Carvalho Resende, a hydrology expert with UNESCO.

The organization described a “cycle of warming” in which the melting of glaciers causes the emergence of darker surfaces, which then absorb even more heat and speed up the retreat of ice.

Besides drastic cuts in emissions, the UNESCO report calls for better monitoring of glaciers and the use of early warning mechanisms to respond to natural disasters, including floods caused by bursting glacial lakes. Such floods have already <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/02/glacial-lakes-threaten-millions-with-floods-as-planet-heats-up" target=_blank>cost thousands of lives</a> and may have partly fueled Pakistan’s catastrophic inundations this year.

While there have been some local attempts to reduce melt rates — for example, by <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/glacier-melting-switzerland-blankets-protection-2654842780.html" target="_blank">covering the ice with blankets</a> — Carvalho Resende cautioned that scaling up those experiments “might be extremely challenging,  because of costs but also because most glaciers are really difficult to access.”

Throughout history, glaciers have grown during very cold periods and shrunk when those stretches ended. The world’s last very cold period ended over 10,000 years ago, and some further natural melting <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/mediterranee/7146">was expected</a> in Europe<b> </b>after the last “Little Ice Age” ended in the<b> </b>19th century.

But as carbon dioxide emissions surged over the past century, human factors began to quicken what had been expected to be a gradual natural retreat. In Switzerland, glaciers lost a record 6 percent of their volume just this year.

While the additional melting has to some extent balanced out other impacts of climate change — for instance, preventing rivers from drying out despite heat waves — it is rapidly reaching a critical threshold, according to UNESCO.

Rick Noack

In its report, the organization writes that the peak in meltwater may already have been passed on many smaller glaciers, where the water is now starting to dwindle.

If the trend continues, the organization warned, “little to no base flow will be available during the dryer periods.”

The changes are expected to have major ramifications for agriculture, biodiversity, and urban life. “Glaciers are crucial sources of life on Earth,” UNESCO wrote.

“They provide water resources to at least half of humanity,” said Carvalho Resende, who cautioned that the cultural losses would also be immense.

Around the world, global warming is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/01/glaciers-melting-climate-archaeology-europe/" target="_blank">exposing ancient artifacts</a> faster than they can be saved by archaeologists.

“Some of these glaciers are sacred places, which are really important for Indigenous peoples and local communities,” he said.

UNESCO cited the example of the centuries-old Snow Star Festival in the Peruvian Andes, which has already been impacted by ice loss. Spiritual leaders once shared blocks of glacier ice with pilgrims, but the practice was stopped when locals noticed the rapid retreat in recent years.

Sign up for the latest news about climate change, energy and the environment, delivered every Thursday

Small glaciers at low or medium altitudes will be the first to disappear. UNESCO said ice-loss rates in small glaciered areas “more than doubled from the early 2000s to the late 2010s.”

This matches observations from researchers who have studied the retreat of glaciers. Matthias Huss, a European glaciologist, said scientists had seen “very strong melting in the last two decades” in Switzerland.

At the same time, there are fewer and fewer places cold enough for glaciers to actually grow. “Nowadays, the limit where glaciers can still form new ice is at about 3,000 meters [about 9,840 feet],” he said, explaining that in recent decades that altitude has risen several hundred meters.

Sciences Po Paris, BA in political science

Johns Hopkins University, Aitchison Public Service Fellowship in Government

King's College London, MA in terrorism, security and society

Rick Noack is The Washington Post's Afghanistan bureau chief. Previously at The Post, he was the Paris correspondent, covering France and Europe, and an international affairs reporter based in Berlin, London and Washington.