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Melting Glaciers Cutting Peru Water Supply
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a story that may repeat itself in all mountainous areas dependent on glaciers for their water supply, the glaciers in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly (PDF) that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected. Of the time needed for the region to adapt to the coming water shortages, previously thought to be decades, researchers now believe, 'those years don't exist.'"
Easy to say if you were raised in a more habitable place or if you're financially sound enough to move. Otherwise, I guess you're stupid for being born poor or in a poor place.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Oddly enough, there is a pretty sizable intersection between people who don't care about global warming, or have no interest in mitigating it, and those people who are staunchly against open borders.
So basically the projections were wrong, but the culprit is the evil consumer who does not recycle his soup can, not the guy who made the projections in the first place.
Unless God himself gave the schedule for those glaciers to melt, the notion of having them melting "earlier than expected" is a joke.
I don't find this to be a joke. This just emphasizes how little we know about how the earth's systems will react to global warming. My fear is we won't listen to scientists until it is too late and we have killed off the majority of the organisms that help us counter the CO2 we are pumping into the air or the other effects, e.g. ocean acidification.
These are people who lived in places with water. And that water is going to go away, suddenly, as could happen to literally any source of water other than desalinated ocean.
The history of the human race has involved a great deal of migration. Unfortunately, the earth is now full, and there is no place to migrate to anymore which is not already oversubscribed. Migration from now on means war.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Climate change denial is an act of treason against life on Earth.
Now let's not get hasty. Life on Earth will do just fine, it'll be just another mass extinction from which new life will spring forth, as it always has.
Now act of treason against humanity, that might fit...
So basically the projections were wrong, but the culprit is the evil consumer who does not recycle his soup can, not the guy who made the projections in the first place.
Unless God himself gave the schedule for those glaciers to melt, the notion of having them melting "earlier than expected" is a joke.
We have consistently discovered that the IPCC's reports on GW are too conservative. Everything is happening faster than the "alarmists" have been predicting.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The real question is this: are the estimated figures (which the scientists initially used to base their predictions) wrong due to accelerated climate change - things like mean and maximum temperatures? Or were the scientists wrong simply because they didn't understand the model well enough, or had a bad model on which they based their predictions?
Understanding why the estimation was off by decades might be important information to know, and all that. I am personally highly skeptical that an average temperature change in the region of a tenth of a degree or whatever it has been over the past decade could be responsible for this.
It's also possible that the size of the glaciers was initially wrong, too. Or maybe the rate or amount of melt was improperly estimated.
Is it possible this is just more reactionary knee-jerk fear-mongering bullshit due to a larger-than-normal rainfall in Peru this past year? That couldn't possibly be it, could it? I happen to know there are other places in the world which have had lower than average rainfalls this past year. (A more likely explanation may be that Peru has been stealing all of the clouds...)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why is the parent marked Troll? Closed borders are exactly why people can't move en-mass from one area of the planet to another... And countries that are upset by such serious issues and cannot sustain broad migration are not suitable for internal migration.
In fact, it seems a perfectly logical response to the post it was referencing...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
slashdotters are by far the stupidest people I've ever conversed with on the topic of climate change and global warming.
Really? I've never found any other place (other than, say, a climatologist convention) where a reasonable number of people have even read the IPCC report. Here there are a lot of people who actually do understand the science, at least large parts of it. Seriously, even on climatologist blogs it just breaks down into blogger-worshipers and angry people who came from another blog. Here you can post something that you've been reading about climatology and get some reasonable (if at times rude) responses, that give you things to think about.
it's all fuzzy, intuited 'science' from physicists and programmers with zero understanding of ecology
Maybe you just say this because people disagree with you? I've seen LOTS of people give sources for their statements, not everyone, but vastly more than on any other site. Especially if you ask them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wrong in that they *underestimated* how bad the problem is. And for you, this is reason to further ignore them? Now just to prove to us that you can't even maintain internal logical coherence across 2 simple sentences, we have:
Exactly the point: we need to stop fucking with it.
You misunderstand evolution. Any adaptation that allows for survival in a given environmental condition is *already* there when that given environmental condition appears. It just so happens that everyone that *doesn't* have that adaptation dies off. Natural *selection* picks for traits that have already existed. An organism doesn't observe the environment and suddenly tries to "evolve".
Unfortunately, and as always, wattsupwiththat does nothing to deal with the basic claims, but instead has a lot of snark about whitewashing and how history shows that the projections are completely wrong. And as always, Watt's will not publish his own studies demonstrating his claims, or if he does, he will be laughed out of the science room.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Cosmic irony would be that wealth is used to save the lost rather than gain the stars.
I love space opera as much as the next gnerd, but unless Einstein was seriously wrong we're never going to gain the stars.
A life-long one-way trip to the nearest neighbors may be feasible, but it's not likely that anyone will every want to pay for it, and even less likely that there will be anywhere to live once we got there.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Must stop using electricity and save the planet before man made global warming frees us from this ice age we're in.
By some accounts, GW is in fact counteracting the onset of an ice age. Unfortunately, according to these analyses, GW's forcing is much stronger the IA's forcing, so it's not keeping us in a stable state. (Hence the melting glaciers, shifting habitats, etc.)
If we could cut our GW's forcing back to a small fraction of what it is, we might be able to apply it as some practical terraforming, to extend the duration of the paradise that our species grew up in.
But most people just invoke "ice age" as an excuse to avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run.
And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run. Politicians like to fall down and kick their feet over the public debt that our descendants will inherit, but those same clowns don't care a fig if we leave them a foobar planet to live in.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There's flame wars and there's truth - climate is changing, and unexpectedly fast. Much faster than we expected. And at this point I actually don't care anymore it is fault of capitalists, libertarians, commies, or what else. How we could expect to get our shit together if we even can't agree that change is happening? How we gonna *survive*?
This is fault of uneducated crowd making political decisions, t.i. electing populist leaders who won't say anything unpleasant to them. You can be pro-business and pro-capital and still capable to deliver harsh news *and* a plan how to deal with a problem. Unfortunately, there is serious shortage of such people (I don't even talk about politicians).
In nutshell, people don't like bad news and they do anything in their power to avoid them (also group thinking in our capitalist society pushing them to avoid take a blame) - that's human nature. Be that flame wars, denials, demolition of the messenger - whatever. Also your whining is part of the "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert and I don't wanna hear that we have screwed up everything" crowd.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I give an outline of a scientific argument. You give sneering insults. It is only technobabble to someone with no background in geology. My outline of topics is basic sedimentology. Smaller sedimentary particles take longer to settle than larger particles. Faster water picks up more and larger particles than slower water. Seasonal patterns in sediment deposition give delineation of years. In this way, past precipitation patterns may be inferred. As to rivulets, you should read about how we infer the past existence of liquid water on Mars. Your agressive and content free reply betrays the insecurity of ignorance.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
If your premise is that you need less people I think statistics indicate that helping people in need would be your best bet (in addition to sounding, as you put it, less bad). As I understand the general mechanism, people tend to compensate for uncertainty regarding the survival of their offspring by having more children. With access to for example better medication, the argument goes, parents can afford to have fewer babies.