David Breashears har besteget Mount Everest fem ganger og er kjent som en av USAs fremste klatrere. I 1966 ledet ha ekspedisjonen som gjorde opptak til en IMAX-film om verdens tak. Han reiser stadig til Himalaya for å fotografere, men det er for å dokumentere isbreenes tilbaketrekning og krymping. Breashers fikk se noen eldre bilder og ble slått av hvor forandret landskapet er. Han har lokalisert hvor bildene er tatt fra og har tatt nye bilder på eksakt samme sted.

Resultatene er sjokkerende. Isbreene forsvinner. Breashers har snakket med Nicholas Kristof i Nytimes.

«I was just incredulous,» he told me. «We took measurements with laser rangefinders to measure the loss of height of the glaciers. The drop was often the equivalent of a 35- or 40-story building.»

Mr. Breashears led me through a display of these paired photographs at the Asia Society in New York. One 1921 photo by George Mallory, the famous mountaineer who died near the summit of Everest three years later, shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier. Mr. Breashears located the very spot from which Mallory had snapped that photo and took another — only it is a different scene, because the glacier has lost 330 feet of vertical ice.

Some research in social psychology suggests that our brains are not well adapted to protect ourselves from gradually encroaching harms. We evolved to be wary of saber-toothed tigers and blizzards, but not of climate change — and maybe that’s also why we in the news media tend to cover weather but not climate. The upshot is that we’re horrifyingly nonchalant at the prospect that rising carbon emissions may devastate our favorite planet.

Our Beaker Is Starting to Boil

Se en slideserie på http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/archive-22/?ref=opinion

Bildet: Lake Imja Tsho, south of Mount Everest in Nepal