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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.'"
This melt off should be an interesting opportunity for archaeology and paleontology. Will such treasures reach back 1000, 5000, 40,000 years?
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
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.
I'm reminded of the kid who won the Ontario science fair by figuring out how to biodegrade plastic bags. Everyone always told him that it would take thousands of years for bacteria to break down those bags, so he instantly saw that if they break down in thousands of years, something's doing it, and that something can be cultured.
The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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
The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.
More realistic version: The environment changes, the organisms die, or at least the ones unsuitable for the new environment die. Evolution is a process of death, either death as an early termination of an organism, or death as a failure to pass on genes. If you step back and look at the grand process of life, it has a beauty to it. The great Permian Triassic extinction brought the rise of the dinosaurs, and the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed a whole new set of species to appear, including our own.
But when you bring it down to your own life, a moral person cannot possibly take pleasure in the thought of the extinction of his children, of his grandchildren, let alone the extinction of his entire species. And that is really at the heart of the issue of global warming. The geological record gives good evidence that (a) the climate can get a great deal warmer than it is today and (b) that those periods of warming are associated with large scale extinctions. There is strong evidence that a warming world will have a profoundly different distribution of precipitation. Given that our current agricultural systems are dependent on our current precipitation patterns, it seems likely that changing precipitation patterns will result in a reduction in agricultural production. If there is less food in the world, then famine is likely to result. The systems we have developed where most of us can live in cities while others far away grow our food will be put under stress. A survey of history will clearly show what happens then. The disinterested intellectual systems of reason decay. Fear grows with material shortages, and with it grows superstition. Humans start to lose track of objective reality, they start to make decisions based on illusion and superstition. As they lose track of reality, humans become increasingly unable to implement the necessary changes to survive in a changing world.
If you want to get an idea of what I am talking about, read about the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages, especially in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read about the major mass extinctions, and then ponder the question whether humans would have been able to rise above the environmental pressures that destroyed more than 90% of species in the time of the dinosaurs. And even if we weren't to go extinct, consider what it would look like of 90% of us were to die. Not just 90% of those in some far away desert, but 90% of the people in your own country. Consider what such a world would look like. It won't happen tomorrow. It won't happen next year, nor even in a decade. If you live another 30 years, you will see enough to see the shape of things to come. But you will still be able to consume comfortably for some time to come. It is your children who will have to deal with the consequences of your selfish consumption.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
How can you know what kind of weather occurred in Peru over the last 150 years? Did someone find Mayan engravings? Or there is this very old guy that can swear that this never happened since he was born? Or maybe it was a Union soldier that got lost and decided to start a weather journal?
Ok, I have some homework for you. Go home and read your textbook on Sedimentology, focussing specifically on lake sediments caused by runoff. Read about how the flows of rivers can be read by drilling sediment cores out of lake beds. Then find your textbook on Glaciology, and read about how cores of ice drilled from long term ice deposits can be used to track snowfall. While you are at it, you can read about how rainfall events leave specific signatures in sand and dirt, including rivulets and specific patterns in the distribution of different sizes of sedimentary particles. I suspect snowfall events could also be inferred with similar observations.
You would be amazed at what geologists and geographers can find out simply by using observation and logic.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
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!
avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run. And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run.
I'm interested in your source for this. The only reason I'm asking is because of an article I read early this year in one of the Business Review Weekly magazines. The economist was arguing the exact opposite, that the global effort to change the lifestyle and energy sources of half the population of the world would be orders of magnitude more expensive than to simply adapt as a species and relocate or provide resources in some other means to people dispersed by global warming.
Of course this ignores any emotional attachment which people have to their homes, but I can see where he may be making a valid point. For example the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years. That's a lot of money for a 0.0005% reduction in carbon output in the world.
I think we as a species need to come up with a smarter way of tackling this problem because if the numbers are right we'd basically be bankrupting the world to get humans carbon neutral.
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.
How can you know what kind of weather occurred in Peru over the last 150 years?
The fact that this Peruvian desert had no precipitation left it as one of the few places on earth with sodium nitrate prior to WWI. Europeans imported it for fertilizer and explosives. Germany had to devise a way to synthesize nitrate for their war efforts.
So yes, many people historically were aware of the lack of precipitation in that Peruvian desert and what the recorded precipitation was by the locals due to it being an extremely rare event.
The economist was arguing the exact opposite, that the global effort to change the lifestyle and energy sources of half the population of the world would be orders of magnitude more expensive than to simply adapt as a species and relocate or provide resources in some other means to people dispersed by global warming.
But I will have to go with "nonsense" on that diagnosis.
Haven't read the article, can't comment on the said economists motives but I am fairly sure that he/she IS making his/her arguments from an ignorant position and a with a highly specialized and limited outlook of the world.
First off, saying "half the population" indicates that he lives in some past age when the developed nations (ones who are responsible for the greater part of the human influence on the climate) were approximately one half of the world population.
Which is no longer the case. "Traditionally poor" continents of Asia and Africa amount to ~5 billion of the ~7 billion humans currently on this planet.
Second, rest assured that the poor nations would be the ones who would feel the effects of global warming the most.
Millions would likely die from hunger, wars caused by said hunger and health issues (disease and lack of medicine) caused by both.
Calculating the "cost" of change in developed nations energy policy merely in dollars, when it is clear to anyone who would take 5 minutes to meditate on the subject that the current policies would cost in lives, lost generations and even in those utterly immeasurable categories such as loss of culture and civilization indicates that the proponent of the "just send aid" has traded his/her moral compass for something more... quantifiable.
Then, there is the problem of "WTF?" in such a solution.
We can't adapt energy policy of developed nations with their (comparably) functioning economies and bureaucracies but at the same time it is a perfectly acceptable idea that we should be able "to simply adapt as a species"?
I'm guessing this will be accomplished through spontaneous mutation of chlorophyll cells in our bodies so that we can harvest the energy of the Sun, dispensing with that pesky habit of eating altogether?
Or perhaps by growing gills and webbed hands and feet so that we can live under water?
Then there is the utter lack of foresight. Which does not surprise me since the said economist is working with numbers from decades ago.
I.e. Is stuck in the past.
We don't need a solution for a world of 5, 6 or 7 billion people, with maybe half of them living in the developed nations.
We need an adaptable, scalable solution for at least 9 billion humans, with at least 7 billion of them living in the developing nations.
Which is where we will be 40 or so years down the road, just as the world's supply of oil nears the end of its economical use.
And saying to those 7 billion "Ah, just move somewhere else" basically means "Come, take my already strained resources - you're gonna take them by force anyway since you and yours outnumber me and mine by 4 to 1. And you've grown up in the society where human life is very cheap.".
So, unless we come up with cold fusion in the next decade or so we MUST start relying on renewable energy resources.
Cause "poor" of the world sure as hell will not. Can not.
At the same time they will be faced with increased population and dwindling resources - perfect conditions for declaring war.
On their cousins, on their neighbors, on the "wealthy", on those of a different color...
So, developed nations either come up with a solution for both energy and the climate crisis and give it to the developing nations OR be faced with the possibility of being on a losing side of a global war couple of decades down the road.
Not that there can be a winning side in a war whose goal is to manage couple of billion humans through reduction of their numbers.
It's just that some people have a lot less to lose.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Look at the glaciers as a key reserve of water for the dry season. A glacier in equilibrium will replenish itself during wet season, and act as a source of water during dry season. A melting glacier means it doesn't replenish itself during wet season, and thus a diminishing source during dry season. At some point it means a lost source of water during dry season.