Name: 【TED】Tshering Tobgay: An urgent call to protect the world's "Third Pole" (An urgent call to protect the world's "Third Pole" | Tshering Tobgay)
Uploaded: 2019-09-05T13:57:37.000Z
Duration: 14 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives did something unusual.

He literally took his ministers scuba diving, as it were,

to warn the world that his country could drown

Now I don't know whether he got his message across to the world or not,

the Maldives are distant from where I come from --

so I didn't lose any sleep over their impending fate.

Barely two months later, I saw another political stunt.

he held his cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

He took all his ministers all the way up to the base camp of Everest

that the Himalayan glaciers were melting.

But did I lose any sleep over his message?

I wasn't ready to let a political stunt interfere with my beauty sleep.

that one-third of the ice on the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountains

to 1.5 degrees centigrade over preindustrial levels.

1.5 degrees Celsius. "No way," I thought.

Even the Paris Agreement's ambitious targets

aimed to limit global warming to two degrees centigrade.

1.5 degrees centigrade is what they call the best-case scenario.

is the world's third-largest repository of ice,

That's why we are also called the "Third Pole."

I've seen them, and yes, they are melting.

"But they can't be that vulnerable," I remember thinking.

What if our glaciers melt much more quickly than I anticipate?

What if our glaciers are much more vulnerable than previously thought?

And what if, as a result, the glacial lakes --

now these are lakes that form when glaciers melt --

what if those lakes burst under the weight of additional water?

And what if those floods cascade into other glacial lakes,

That would create unprecedented flash floods in my country.

That would have the potential to literally destroy our land,

by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, or ICIMOD,

Scientists and experts have studied our glaciers for decades,

and their report kept me awake at night, agonizing about the bad news

I found a team of highly competent and dedicated scientists there,

the Hindu Kush Himalaya glaciers have been melting for some time now.

As you can see, this once massive glacier has already lost much of its ice.

the glaciers are now melting much more quickly --

so quickly, in fact, that at just 1.5 degrees centigrade of global warming,

At two degrees centigrade of global warming,

a full two-thirds of our glaciers would vanish.

global warming means that our mountains receive more rain and less snow ...

which just hurts the health of our glaciers.

pollution in the region has increased the amount of black carbon

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【TED】Tshering Tobgay: An urgent call to protect the world's "Third Pole" (An urgent call to protect the world's "Third Pole" | Tshering Tobgay)

literally

vulnerable

entire

potential