While attention is currently focused on Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s pick for a Supreme Court justice, neither Congress nor the press appears to have time to notice that the world’s glaciers, including every last glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park, are melting, and most will be gone by the end of the century. Switzerland’s glaciers are also withdrawing, baring the rock-and-boulder moraine. Last year, a SwissInfo science report bore the headline “Most glaciers in central Switzerland to disappear by 2090.”

And then there are the Himalayan glaciers, the source of the region’s great rivers, which provide around 8.6 million cubic meters of water every year. According to a NASA report, the Himalayan glaciers “have been in a status of retreat at an increasing rate, which will eventually result in a water shortage for all Himalayan countries (e.g., China, India, Nepal and Bhutan).”

In the troubled, largely Muslim Chinese province of Xinjiang, the great Tianshan No. 1 glacier – the source of the Urumqi River on which more than 4 million people depend – will in all likelihood disappear within the next 50 years. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 30 percent of the melting is caused by local pollution and the other 70 percent by global carbon emissions.

Within this context, it is interesting to note that the League of Conservation Voters, having reviewed Brett Kavanaugh’s record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, “found votes and opinions that sided with polluters over people on a regular basis,” and concluded that “a Senate confirmation of Kavanaugh will almost certainly put our rights to clean air, clean water and equitable participation in our democracy at risk.”

Perhaps Sen. Susan Collins will take this into account in making up her mind on Kavanaugh.

Jon Swan

Yarmouth