Warming brings early demise to Bolivian glacier
Harry Hope
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/warming-brings-early-demise-to-bolivian-glacier-1821088.html
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Warming brings early demise to Bolivian glacier
Once home to the highest ski resort in the world and now reduced to a
rocky mountainside, Bolivia's Chacaltaya range bears powerful witness
to the precipitous melting of glaciers.
The rusting remains of a ski lift now dominate what was once the
highest ski-run in the world perched on the Chacaltaya glacier at some
5,300 meters (17,390 feet) high.
Only a snowy ice cap of some 50 square meters (538 square feet)
remains of the magnificent Chacaltaya glacier which spread over 1,600
square meters in the 1950s.
"That's all there's left: a little piece of ice that is disappearing
and will last no more than a year," said Alfredo Martinez, a veteran
guide and founder of the Bolivian Andean Club.
Glancing at old black and white photographs, he recalled better times
for his beloved Andean glacier, when ski competitions saw Argentine
and Chilean athletes make the two-hour trip from the capital La Paz on
a narrow and winding road.
Martinez remembered the very last race, three years ago, on
Chacaltaya's steep incline that delighted extreme sports enthusiasts.
But today, "it's a dead glacier," said Edson Ramirez, glaciologist at
the Institute of Hydraulics and Hydrology in La Paz.
Skiers have now migrated to nearby Cerro Charquini, where they can
still find enough snow.
Ramirez is part of a team of international scientists studying the
Tropical Andes stretch of mountain range on horseback in Bolivia,
Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
The scientists, who have studied Chacaltaya for the past 15-20 years,
had forecast it would completely disappear in 2015.
But with accelerated global warming spurring the ice to melt at the
rate of six meters (20 feet) per year compared to about a meter in the
1940s, its demise has come six years earlier than expected.
Around Chacaltaya, Bolivia's Royal Cordillera region, which boasts
pristine valleys, fields, lakes and waterfalls surrounded by
mountains, has lost 43 percent of its snow-capped peaks in the past 33
years.
The same grim scenario can be found at the neighboring Huayna Potosi
mountain (6,088 meters) or the majestic Illimani, which dominates La
Paz at 6,462 meters.
For Ramirez, there is only one culprit, climate change, blamed on
greenhouse gases that are particularly prevalent in industrialized
countries.
Experts say most tropical glaciers in the Andes are doomed to
disappear in the medium term due to global warming.
In 2000, Bolivia only emitted 0.35 percent of the world's greenhouse
gases, the humanitarian group Oxfam noted in a report published ahead
of key UN-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen next month.
And yet, Oxfam warned Bolivia will be hit disproportionately as
thousands of Andean farmers and La Paz residents depend on melt waters
from the glaciers, which accounts for 15 percent of the capital's
supply.
Nearly half of the country's energy supply - 40 percent - comes from
hydroelectric sources.
The apparent injustice is fueling a government-backed civil lobbying
effort to push for "international climate justice" and pressure
industrialized countries to compensate populations hit by their
"climate crimes."
In the meantime, Chacaltaya with its breathtaking view of the
Altiplano high plain remains a sought-after hiking spot, as the debate
over global warming puts it in the spotlight.
Tourists here come face to face with one of the devastating
consequences of glacier loss - that the area where snow has already
melted heats up even more quickly thus causing the snow around it melt
faster still.
Martinez, a 74-year-old veteran climber, demonstrated the phenomenon,
grasping a handful of snow between his fingers and rubbing it against
a rock.
"Before, the rock was so cold that the snow was preserved," he said.
"Now, it disappears within a few seconds."
_______________________________________________________
Harry
leona...@gmail.com
> http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/warming-brings-early-demise-...
•• So where is the proof that it is caused
by "accelerated global warming"??
Scientists go back to the field and find the cause.
There has not been sufficient global warming in
the past 150 years so the cause must be local.
Find it!! Correct it!!
Capt. Bill
> http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/warming-brings-early-demise-...
>
>
> Warming brings early demise to Bolivian glacier
Sure! That's what the socialist scientists say.
50 years ago they were saying that by 2000 we were going to be chased
from our cities by dinosaurs.
And we all know that it didn't happen.
Scientists just make shit up so they can live high on the hog off of
lucrative government grants.
They'd be a little more credible if they didn't ride around limos all
day, quaffing Dom Perignon and munching on Beluga Caviar with all the
other socialist elite.
Cwatters
<leona...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:9d3258c0-cb1a-4b26...@h2g2000vbd.googlegroups.com...
On Nov 15, 11:12 am, Harry Hope <riv...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/warming-brings-early-demise-...
> There has not been sufficient global warming in
> the past 150 years so the cause must be local.
In real science the burden of proof is always
on the proposer, never on the sceptics.
You find it.
Sam Wormley
Skeptics are big contributors too. Einstein comes to mind.
Androcles
"Cwatters" <colin.wat...@TurnersOakNOSPAM.plus.com> wrote in message
news:LaOdnb1-Csth-J3W...@brightview.co.uk...
>
> <leona...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:9d3258c0-cb1a-4b26...@h2g2000vbd.googlegroups.com...
> On Nov 15, 11:12 am, Harry Hope <riv...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/warming-brings-early-demise-...
>
>> There has not been sufficient global warming in
>> the past 150 years so the cause must be local.
>
> In real science
tj Frazir
No snow no glacier.
YOU will starve to death because your soooo stupid your letting them
put out all forest fires so it wount rain wile you get the sky too clean
to rain.
co2 is not going up 2 % per year at still 0036
The coldest year is what happends when co2 Failed to keep the heat in.