I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas.

Let's go up and take a look at the Himalayas.

This is the Himalayas. Up in the north, very cold.

This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India.

This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas.

And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation.

So I would like to invite you, also, for a while, to the Himalayas themselves.

Well, mad dogs and Englishmen, eh? With Lawrence in Arabia, with Sherpa Tenzing up the Himalayas.

Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau.

As I spent my week up in the Himalayas, I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation.

Nearly two billion people so one in three people on this earth rely on the water from the Himalayas.

The government of India met in a railroad coach, while millions streamed for the imagined safety of the Himalayas.

So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studying meditation.

And I firmly believe that what we're seeing in the Himalayas is the next great, big battleground on this earth.

This effort is aimed at questioning the conventional wisdom that recurrent floods are a consequence of erosion and deforestation in the Himalayas.

Anyway, last year, I heard about the Himalayas and the melting of the and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change.

A minimum of 20 to 40 inches of increase in seas, coupled with increasing flows from the Himalayas. And take a look at this.

The government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi million dollar project to bring water from the Himalayas.

The Himalayas. The flat horizon that we've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste.

And in fact, these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City, in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia.

And as you come from the north, it is all masonry growing out of the sand cliffs as you come from the Himalayas and evoking the tradition of the fortress.

And when I met her, she had just taken a walk over the Himalayas from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, into Nepal, across to India 30 days to meet her leader, the Dalai Lama.

Experts attending the event warned that little was being done to monitor the state of glaciers in the Himalayas, which were melting due to global warming and thereby increasing the risk of major floods.

Just over a decade later, China surprised India s ill prepared army by launching a multi pronged attack across the Himalayas on October 20, 1962. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai publicly said that the war was intended to teach India a lesson.

Fifty years later, tensions between India and China are rising again amid an intense geopolitical rivalry. Their entire 4,057 kilometer border one of the longest in the world remains in dispute, without a clearly defined line of control in the Himalayas.

In response, India has been beefing up its military deployments along the border to prevent any Chinese land grab. It has also launched a crash program to improve its logistical capabilities by constructing new roads, airstrips, and advanced landing stations along the Himalayas.

But the IPCC also attracted controversy when it admitted in 2010 that a volume on the consequences of climate change erroneously suggested that, at current rates of melting, all of the glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035, rather than within a few centuries.

Then I started to think about the people in the Himalayas whose cataracts would be helped, and I realized that I went from this kind of narcissistic self focus to altruistic joy, to feeling good for the people that were being helped. I think that's a motivator.

The public had the opportunity to learn about these landscape conservation efforts at the event, which provided a forum for invited experts to exchange lessons and compare experiences in mountain conservation from regions as diverse as the Yukon region, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Himalayas, Central and South America and Africa.

Stretching from the strategic Karakoram Pass, near Pakistan in the north, the LAC runs south, along the ridges of the eastern Himalayas to the ancient Buddhist monastery town of Tawang. After that, it traces the old McMahon Line drawn in 1914 and rejected by China as an imperial dictate to demarcate British India from what was then Tibet.

It is also why there exists an organic connection of India to Central Asia, the key to that link lying in the Himalayas, which is where the India China rivalry is currently focused. Fortunately, at least for the present, this rivalry is far less emotional than India Pakistan relations, having not been born of historical grievances.

On October 24, people in nearly every country will be taking action to raise awareness of the need for an international treaty to bring our atmosphere back to 350 ppm of CO2. There will be climbers hanging banners high in the Himalayas, where the glaciers are melting, and scuba divers at Australia s Great Barrier Reef, which is threatened by climate change.

Burma s strategic importance reflects, first and foremost, its geographic location between India, China, Thailand, and Southeast Asia. Ringed in the north by the southern ridges of the Himalayas, to the east by foothills of dense teak forests, and to the west and south by the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, Burma s geography has always shaped the country s history and politics.

After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold water dip. Then he heard of Lake Imja in the Himalayas, created by recent glacial melting, and Lake Pumori, a body of water at an altitude of 5300 m on Everest and so began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach swimming and think about climate change.

NEW DELHI China is subverting the status quo in the South and East China Seas, on its border with India, and even concerning international riparian flows all without firing a single shot. Just as it grabbed land across the Himalayas in the 1950 s by launching furtive encroachments, China is waging stealth wars against its Asian neighbors that threaten to destabilize the entire region.

A border dispute between China and India led to a brief military conflict in 1962 and the occupation by Chinese forces of areas in the Himalayas claimed by both countries. Dietrich Schindler reported to the Institut de droit international with regard to this conflict that since diplomatic relations between the two countries were not broken off there was probably no rupture of treaty relations either.

But how justified are these attacks, particularly the attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that has set the gold standard for analyzing global climate change? One tell tale sign is the climate skeptics contempt for the actual data in the Indian government s study, which is being used to undermine the IPCC report and the impeccable credentials of the scientist Syed Iqbal Hasnain, the source of the IPCC s alarming quote on the Himalayas.