A leading climate scientist and a leading glaciologist set the record straight on how global warming is affecting the world’s glaciers and the impact of melting glaciers on our environment in a teleconference. Scientists Dr. Ben Santer and Dr. Lonnie Thompson addressed media reports questioning a reference to Himalayan glaciers included in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and confirmed that the IPCC’s conclusions on glacier loss and reduced water availability is robust and consistent with the underlying science of climate change outlined in the broader IPCC document.
 
As Dr. Santer, a research scientist in the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said, “The climate system is telling us a consistent story of human influence. We can read that story in many different aspects of climate change—in records of temperature, rainfall, ice, snow, sea level, and even in the behavior of extreme events. The message in this story is that natural causes alone simply cannot explain these changes.”
 
"Over the last 30 years I've watched many glaciers shrink in South America. But it's not just isolated to that continent—it's happening globally in Europe, North America, China, and the Himalayas. More than 90% of the world's glaciers are receding,” said Dr. Thompson, a professor in the School of Earth Sciences and a research scientist and glaciologist in the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. “Glaciers have no political agenda."
 
An accurate understanding of the relationship between global warming and glaciers is critical as the melting of the world’s glaciers threatens future waters supplies and could lead to destabilization and water shortages around the globe. Glaciers around the world are melting more rapidly than the IPCC projected. A 2005 global survey of 442 glaciers from the World Glacier Monitoring Service found that only 26 were advancing, 18 were stationary, and 398 were retreating. In other words, 90% of the world's glaciers are shrinking as the planet warms.
 
Melting glaciers are also the leading contributor to rising sea levels, threatening coastal communities around the world. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program's 2009 review of climate impacts in the United States, sea-level rise puts U.S. coastal areas in the Atlantic, Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska at increased risk of erosion and flooding.

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