Chomolungma, "Mother Goddess of the World," in trouble

from Reuters JOHANNESBURG, July 11:

First man up Everest says UN must act to save it

Global warming is melting glaciers around Mount Everest, threatening the environment and local people, the first man to climb the world's tallest peak said on Monday as he called on the United Nations to act.

Sir Edmund Hillary, who reached Everest's summit with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, said he was backing calls by pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth for the U.N. cultural body UNESCO to place the mountain on its endangered list.

I have been to Nepal and seen the abject poverty of its people, and also their beauty, and the imposing grandeur of Mt. Everest. I guess we could say that global warming has reached new heights: and that is a sad, sad joke. I'm reminded of a Simpson's episode where Bart & Lisa go on a school field trip to see, I think, the Springfield Glacier, only to be shown a lake on top of a mountain. The reaction of the (cartoon) park guide, utter denial, was frighteningly similar to a story that I had just come across about anti-science publications that were quietly being slipped onto the shelves of tourist shops at the Grand Canyon. That propaganda tried to deny everything that we know about geology and earth sciences, instead claiming that God had created the Grand Canyon simply to appear as if it had been formed over millions of years. I'll have to see if I can find a link to that story. The base of it, though, comes back to Everest in this way: it is sad how a particularly slanted religious world-view (in this case, the denial of scientific findings based on a poor understanding of the Bible) dumbs people down to the present dangers we face and makes them easily manipulated by corporate hacks (see my comments on Exxon from a few weeks ago). Very sad.