This story looks bad, if you are a believer in the notion that global warming si a man0made phenomenon and not part of a natural cysle.

At nearly 13,000 feet above sea level, in the shadow of a sharp Himalayan peak, a wall of black ice oozes in the sunshine. A tumbling stone breaks the silence of the mountains, or water gurgles under the ground, a sign that the glacier is melting from inside. Where it empties out — scientists call it the snout — a noisy, frothy stream rushes down to meet the river Ganges.

D.P. Dobhal, a glaciologist who has spent the last three years climbing and poking the Chorabari glacier, stands at the edge of the snout and points ahead. Three years ago, the snout was roughly 90 feet farther away. On a map drawn in 1962, it was plotted 860 feet from here. Mr. Dobhal marked the spot with a Stonehenge-like pile of rocks.

Mr. Dobhal’s steep and solitary quest — to measure the changes in the glacier’s size and volume — points to a looming worldwide concern, with particularly serious repercussions for India and its neighbors. The thousands of glaciers studded across 1,500 miles of the Himalayas make up the savings account of South Asia’s water supply, feeding more than a dozen major rivers and sustaining a billion people downstream. Their apparent retreat threatens to bear heavily on everything from the region’s drinking water supply to agricultural production to disease and floods.

Indian glaciers are among the least studied in the world, lacking the decades of data that scientists need to deduce trends. Nevertheless, the nascent research offers a snapshot of the consequences of global warming for this country and raises vital questions about how India will respond to them.

Sounds alarming -- and certainly presents some challenges. But since we know that glaciation is a part of a cyclical process ranging over thousands of years (tens of thousands, in fact), exactly what point in the glacier's history constitutes the norm? What was the optimal reach of the glacier? Does its location in 1962, for example, constitute "where it should be"? Or does today's location? And since there is no clear evidence that humanity is responsible for the changes, is it proper that we make economic decision based upon that unproven (and dare I say it, unprovable) theory?