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Will Tibet melt? Will India's glaciers turn to water and damage the ecology of the country forever? Is this the near future that global warming is taking us towards?

For a stark warning of what is to come, look at this video of before-and-after photos collected from the US Geological Survey Montana Glacier National Park in the US. There's a frightening decline in the number and extent of glaciers.

Even a century ago, this area was home to more than 150 ice sheets. Now, the number have is down to just 25. In thirty more years, there will be none.

Thousands of kilometers away from Montana, Tibet, home to several Himalayan glaciers, is also much warmer than in the past 2,000 years. The Tibetan plateau, consisting of thousands of glaciers and the major source of fresh water to more than two billion people in Asia, is melting at a rapid pace.

As the Dalai Lama warned recently, two thirds of the glaciers in this mountain homeland may disappear by 2050 because of climate change. It isn't difficult to see why.

The carbon-dioxide level in the atmosphere is increasing at an alarming rate. According to a computer simulation, global temperatures could rise somewhere between 1.4 and 3.0 degree Celsius by 2050.

The outcome? The majority of glaciers around the world will just melt away.