Himalayan Research and Cultural Foundation

The forests of the central Bhutan mountains consist of Eastern Himalayan subalpine conifer forests in higher elevations and Eastern Himalayan broadleaf forests in lower elevations.

Communities in the Himalayan region have historically been closely integrated.

Approximately 2.4 billion people live in the drainage basin of the Himalayan rivers.

The river is prone to catastrophic flooding in spring when the Himalayan snows melt.

By contrast, vast tracts of disputed land are at stake in the resource rich Himalayan region.

Moreover, the Himalayan glaciers that feed Pakistan s rivers may melt by 2050, owing to global warming.

China and India have signed an agreement aimed at rapidly increasing trade across their shared Himalayan border.

Indian defense officials have reported a rising number of Chinese military incursions across the 4,057 kilometer Himalayan border.

Meanwhile, the People s Republic continues to nibble furtively at territory across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India.

Nowhere are consequences of this struggle clearer than in the Himalayan foothills of the southwestern province of Yunnan.

Millions have been displaced and or are shelterless, even as the cruel Himalayan winter descends over the region.

NEW YORK I have just returned from Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom of unmatched natural beauty, cultural richness, and inspiring self reflection.

Indian defense officials have reported a sharp increase in Chinese military incursions across the disputed 4,057 kilometer Himalayan frontier and in aggressive patrolling.

But, with Tibet locked behind an iron curtain since the 1951 Chinese annexation, the economies and cultures of the entire Himalayan region have weakened.

On 9 November 2000, this 27th state of the Republic of India was created from the Himalayan and adjoining northwestern districts of Uttar Pradesh.

Its 2007 report represents the best possible risk assessment available, notwithstanding an error or, more precisely, a typographical error in its statement of Himalayan glacial melt rates.

So, just yesterday, I flew in here from Singapore, and before that, I was spending two weeks in Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom nestled between Tibet and India.

Yet, aside from a grudging admission that its predictions about Himalayan glaciers were poorly substantiated, the IPCC has yet to acknowledge much less apologize for any of the lapses.

NAIROBI The science of climate change has been on the defensive in recent weeks, owing to an error that dramatically overstated the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers could disappear.

With both the Karmapas in India, the Indian government has sought to maintain peace by barring the contenders from the sacred Rumtek monastery in the Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim.

The northern region of the country consists of an arc of Eastern Himalayan alpine shrub and meadows reaching up to glaciated mountain peaks with an extremely cold climate at the highest elevations.

When the Indian government suggested last year that the Himalayan glaciers were in better shape than the IPCC claimed, the IPCC s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed India s objections as being based on voodoo science.

Complicating matters further are geographical and climactic disparities among constituencies. The Himalayan highlands, for example, will remain snowbound until May, by which time monsoon rains will have begun to sweep southern and northeastern India.

PRINCETON The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is known internationally for two things high visa fees, which reduce the influx of tourists, and its policy of promoting gross national happiness instead of economic growth.

The personal charm of the Dalai Lama, combined with the Himalayan air of superior spiritual wisdom, has promoted a caricature of a mystical, wise, and peace loving people being crushed by a brutal empire.

Instead of an expansionist Russian empire confronting Imperial Britain, it is now a China hungry for land, water, and raw materials that is flexing its muscles, encroaching on Himalayan redoubts and directly challenging India.

Now, when we do studies we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds who enjoy their work.

Closer to home, a Himalayan railway project to link Tibet to Khasa, at the border with Nepal, is currently under construction, with plans to extend the line all the way to Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital.

Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the section of the IPCC report that contained the Himalayan error, admitted that he and his colleagues knew that the dramatic glacier prediction was not based on any peer reviewed science.

Although established as a unitary Hindu kingdom, with politics directed from the Himalayan foothills, today around half the population live in the fertile southern plains and more than one third are from over 50 indigenous, largely non Hindu communities.

NEW DELHI Stoking tensions with Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines over islands in the South and East China Seas has not prevented an increasingly assertive China from opening yet another front by staging a military incursion across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier.

Indigenous plant life is affected by introduced animals such as red deer (Cervus elaphus), chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra), and Himalayan tahr (Hemitragus jemlahicus) all of which have at times been targeted for culling, while the birds and reptiles are vulnerable to introduced predators.

I captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done as a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology.

You know, there's a small country nestled in the Himalayan Mountains, far from these beautiful mountains, where the people of the Kingdom of Bhutan have decided to do something different, which is to measure their gross national happiness rather than their gross national product.

The US has chartered a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh issue to the delight of China, which aims to leave an international question mark hanging over the legitimacy of India s control of the Himalayan territory, which is almost three times as large as Taiwan.

India s water supply is stretched to the limit, even as global warming is fast melting the Himalayan glaciers on which millions depend for water. Moreover, climate change threatens to reduce agricultural output by up to 40 by 2080, when India will have another 450 million people.

In fact, the Chinese appointed Karmapa Lama has a doppelgänger Karmapa, who has set up shop in New Delhi. With both the Karmapas in India, the Indian government has sought to maintain peace by barring the contenders from the sacred Rumtek monastery in the Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim.

What makes the Himalayan incursion a powerful symbol of China s aggressive new stance in Asia is that its intruding troops have set up camp in an area that extends beyond the line of actual control (LAC) that China itself unilaterally drew when it defeated India in the 1962 Chinese initiated border war.

And I lived in a Himalayan monastery, and I studied with a very wise teacher, who kicked me out of the monastery one day and told me that it was my destiny it felt like Yoda it is your destiny to go to work for WHO and to help eradicate smallpox, at a time when there was no smallpox program.

The biggest headlines about IPCC errors concern a claim about melting Himalayan glaciers that it made in its 2007 report on the likely impacts of climate change. Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world, the report noted, adding that if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.