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In the last few months a heated international debate has emerged that appears to challenge the reliability of the science of Climate Change. Soon after the embarrassing debacle of Copenhagen, five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world’s most authoritative scientific account on global warming — the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning report by the UN affiliated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC. The mistakes appear in a subsection that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 — hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.

This embarrassing blunder was made in one paragraph of a 3,000 page report. It clearly shows that the IPCC's review processes need to be improved. What it doesn’t do however, is change the strong evidence that many glaciers around the world, including in the Himalayas, are rapidly melting in response to rising temperatures.

It’s worth noting that the ‘2035 mistake’ was exposed by the Canadian glaciologist, Professor Graham Cogley of Ontario's Trent University, who insisted that the report as a whole is still very much valid. He in fact went on to condemn sceptics for “using the incident for their own purposes” to “shoot down the overall evidence on climate change”.

I’ll be the first to admit that the situation is complex and confusing. I’m writing this on an icy February morning in Amsterdam, with the rest of Western Europe and the Mid-Atlantic region of the US firmly in the grip of the coldest winter in 30 years. Little wonder that concern for global warming is waning in these parts. Yet in Greenland this winter, temperatures have been 15°C higher than usual (a balmy –15°C instead of the usual –30°C) and at the Vancouver Olympics, they are having to truck in snow.

The fact is, the overwhelming evidence that Climate Change is occurring remains unchallenged. The Earth is continuing to warm. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) announced two weeks ago that the last decade was the warmest on record. And in the same week the World Glacier Monitoring Service published their annual data showing that the trend over the past 10 years has been towards an “unbroken acceleration in melting” — and melting glaciers are still seen as key indicators of global warming.

Climate Change has often been described as a slow-moving catastrophe. It’s the kind of issue that once you begin to feel any large-scale effects, it’s too late to do anything. Though science has been telling us this for 25 years now, this is what makes it a very difficult problem to communicate to the general public.

Bernice Notenboom’s expedition to Mt Everest, offered a rare opportunity to explore the changes going on in one of the world’s Climate Change hotspots. Going beyond graphs and tables and what is often fairly abstract science, Himalaya Alert searches out the views of local people and records the concrete physical changes actually occurring at high altitude. This combined with the adventure and drama of the expedition itself opens up these issues to a broad general audience.

The Sherpa people are among the first to experience the tangible effects of a warming planet. For them this means living with the uneasy mix of the danger of flooding, from bursting glacial lakes, combined with drought, caused by a continued reduction in rain and snowfall, which is threatening their agricultural base. The likely fate of Himalayan glaciers is hugely important because they are the source for 10 of Asia’s largest rivers. Climate Change is not only causing glaciers to melt, it is also shifting the monsoon. In the short term at least, this looks like having a much bigger effect on river flow than the melting alone.

My hope is that this controversy leads to more and better research on understanding how climate change is affecting the world's highest mountain range and what potential consequences there are for the lives and livelihoods of the hundreds of millions of people who depend on its waters.

Since the controversy over melting glaciers began, the film ‘Himalaya Alert’ has become more relevant than ever. The physical changes recorded in the high Himalayas provide a potent early warning for the rest of the world, showing that climate change is a real and happening phenomenon. I also hope with this film to convey some of the rugged majesty of the place, to remind us how startling our world is and how interconnected and fragile the conditions are that we all live under.

Mark Verkerk