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A leading Slovak mountain climber has died while descending a 7,234m (23,730ft) peak in Nepal, after completing the rare feat of scaling the mountain's perilous eastern face. Ondrej Huserka fell into a crevasse on Thursday, after he and his climbing partner ascended the Langtang Lirung mountain in the Himalayas – the 99th-highest peak in the world. The 34-year-old mountaineer had previously climbed in the Alps, Patagonia and the Pamir Mountains. His Czech climbing partner Marek Holecek said the pair were returning to base after becoming the first mountaineers to ascend Langtang Lirung via a “terrifying” eastern route. While rappelling a...

Variant Bio has spent the last several years scouring the world for genetic outliers in human beings. It found a small group of “outlier humans” with special variations in their DNA that could affect disease risk and eventually be used to develop medicines to improve human life. Founded in New York, the 10-person startup’s lead geneticist Stephane Castel is focusing on the DNA of Sherpa people living at high altitudes in Nepal and Himalayas. Their unique genetic characteristics allow them to live healthy lives with blood oxygen levels far below what most humans need. Most people in high altitudes suffer...

Excerpt only website: Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century. Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking. The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover. It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that...

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will be on a trade-focused charm offensive when he touches down in New Delhi Wednesday for a two-day visit. The past year has seen a worsening in relations, with clashes over shared Himalayan borders and China’s close relationship with Pakistan. Defense ties were suspended this summer after China refused a visa to a top Indian general. Beijing is seeking instead to turn the spotlight during Mr. Wen’s trip, his first here in five years, on the burgeoning trade relationship between India and China. Some 400 business leaders will accompany the premier, twice the initial expected number,...

NEW YORK (AFP) – When British climbing legend George Mallory took his iconic 1921 photo of Mount Everest's north face, the mighty, river-shaped glacier snaking under his feet seemed eternal. Decades of pollution and global warming later, modern mountaineer David Breashears has reshot the picture at the same spot -- and proved an alarming reality. Instead of the powerful, white, S-shaped sweep of ice witnessed by Mallory before he died on his conquest of Everest, the Main Rongbuk Glacier today is shrunken and withered. The frozen waves of ice pinnacles -- many .. the size of office buildings -- are...

Climate Fraud: Al Gore resurfaces in an op-ed to say that nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes and climate change is still real. And he has some oceanfront property in the Himalayas to sell you. If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore's op-ed in Sunday's New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face "an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it." Perhaps he's trying to protect...

Climate Fraud: A senator wants an investigation of the false climate testimony before Congress and wants Al Gore to reappear. The illegalities may involve more than just lying to Congress. At a hearing Tuesday by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, ranking Republican James Inhofe told EPA head Lisa Jackson that man-induced climate change was a "hoax" concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who "cooked the science." More than that, Inhofe, in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast...

A lot has happened since Newsweek's Nov. 9 cover story -- mostrecently the retraction of Al Gore's rising-seas scenario. Climate Fraud: The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels — this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up. We've not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses. Perhaps he's off reading how scientists were forced to withdraw a study on a projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding two...

The screw-up over the Himalayan glaciers has triggered an outcry all across the thinking world. Some are already using the word "Glaciergate" in reference to the scandal over the bogus claim in the fourth IPCC assessment report, which the UN climate body publishes every five years. The prediction that glaciers in the Himalayas would all disappear by 2035 was wrong, they were off by around 300 years. A main reason for the mistake, I kid you not, was the numbers were transposed, instead of 2035 it was 2305. But don't worry the Global warming moonbats say they are sorry and...

Global Warming: If we're serious about restoring science to its rightful place, the head of the U.N.'s panel on climate change should step down. Evidence shows he quarterbacked a deliberate and premeditated fraud. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been forced to back off its now-discredited claim that the Himalayan glaciers would soon disappear. But it's not true, the panel's vice chairman, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, told the BBC, that it was simply a "human mistake." The panel's chairman, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, who was forced to admit the claim had no basis in observable scientific fact, said its...

Hoaxes: Climate researchers and the Weather Channel's founder accuse NASA of the same data manipulation as Britain's Climate Research Unit. Were weather stations cherry-picked to hide the temperature drop? We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures. In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA. As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's...

Swaminathan Aiyar, a noted Indian journalist, writes about ClimateGate I and ClimateGate II today and what it all means for the future of the man-made global warming swindle: (h/t small dead animals) Climategate-I was the revelation that climate scientists crusading over global warming at East Anglia University had tried to censor inconvenient data and shut dissenters out of academic journals. Climategate-II is the revelation that the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, saying Himalayan glaciers might disappear by 2035, was not science at all but idle, unsubstantiated speculation.It speaks volumes for the huge biases within IPCC that...

> Some recent findings seem to contradict claims that the glaciers are retreating rapidly. Some glaciers are even said to be advancing. > In the western Himalayas, some scientists have also reported findings that conflict with the long-held view that glaciers are retreating. The Indian government has issued a discussion paper based on these findings. It says: "Himalayan glaciers, although shrinking in volume and constantly showing a retreating front, have not in any way exhibited... an abnormal annual retreat, of the order that some glaciers in Alaska and Greenland are reported to have done. "It is premature to make a...

May 5, 2009 -- Perched on the soaring Karakoram mountains in the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend. They're growing. Throughout much of the Tibetan Plateau, high-altitude glaciers are dwindling in the face of rising temperatures. The situation is potentially dire for the hundreds of millions of people living in China, India and throughout southeast Asia who depend on the glaciers for their water supply. But in the rugged western corner of the plateau, the story is different, according to a new study. Among legendary peaks of Mt. Everest like K2 and...

Some experts have questioned the alarmists theory on global warming leading to shrinkage of Himalayan glaciers. VK Raina, a leading glaciologist and former ADG of GSI is one among them. He feels that the research on Indian glaciers is negligible. Nothing but the remote sensing data forms the basis of these alarmists observations and not on the spot research. Raina told the Hindustan Times that out of 9,575 glaciers in India, till date, research has been conducted only on about 50. Nearly 200 years data has shown that nothing abnormal has occurred in any of these glaciers. It is simple....