By Robert J. Vickers | rvickers@pennlive.com 25 February 2013 WASHINGTON (Penn Live) – Former Gov. Tom Ridge joined 37 prominent political figures at that U.S. Capitol Monday calling for policymakers to figure climate change into national security strategy and budget considerations. “The U.S. national security community, including leaders from the military, homeland security, and intelligence, […]
By Michael Smith12 February 2013 (Bloomberg Markets Magazine) – People streamed into the central square in Celendin, a small city in the Peruvian Andes, the morning of July 3, 2012. They were protesting the government’s support for Newmont Mining Corp.’s plan to take control of four lakes to make way for a new gold and […]
By Jeremy Hance22 January 2013 (mongabay.com) – Glaciers are melting faster than ever in the tropical Andes, warns a new study published in The Cryosphere, which puts the blame for vanishing glaciers squarely on climate change. The study — the most comprehensive to date — found that since the 1970s glacier melt in the region […]
Glaciers on Puncak Jaya, 1989 Glaciers on Puncak Jaya, 2009 Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Michael Prentice, Lonnie Thompson, and Andrew Klein 1 September 2012 Tropical and glacier don’t seem like words that belong in the same sentence. But mountain peaks near the equator in South America, Africa, and tropical Asia have […]
By Roberto Cortijo 4 June 2012 Peru needs a permanent monitoring system to gauge Andean mountain glacier shrinkage caused by global warming and its effect on people who depend on the ice for water, UN experts warned. “We have spoken with Peruvian government institutions, and there is no sufficient monitoring system to tell us the […]
By Stephen Leahy27 December 2011 UXBRIDGE, Canada (Tierramérica) – The water supplied by the glaciers of the Cordillera Blanca, vital to a huge region of northwest Peru, is decreasing 20 years sooner than expected, according to a new study. Water flows from the region’s melting glaciers have already peaked and are in decline, Michel Baraer, […]
By Camila Ruz, www.guardian.co.uk 16 November 2011 If the current rapid extermination of animals, plants and other species really is the “sixth mass extinction”, then it is the amphibian branch of the tree of life that is undergoing the most drastic pruning. In research described as “terrifying” by an independent expert, scientists predict the future […]
By Brian Clark Howard, National Geographic News 11 October 2011 The air in the auditorium smelled faintly of burnt herbs. Josefina Lema Aguilar, a Kichwa elder from the mountains of Ecuador, lit a tiny sacred fire to bless last week’s conference on “Seeking Balance: Indigenous Knowledge, Western Science and Climate Change.” Dressed in traditional garb […]
By John Otis, Global Post22 July 2011 NEVADOS NATIONAL PARK, Colombia — Every year, the magnificent glacier-topped mountains of Nevados National Park attract thousands of tourists. But the snow and ice caps — called “nevados” in Spanish — are melting so fast that officials may have to come up with a new name for the […]
Contact: Morgan Kelly, mekelly@pitt.edu, 412-624-4356, Cell: 412-897-1400 11 May 2011 A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet’s densely populated tropical regions will most likely experience severe water shortages as the crucial summer monsoons become drier. The Pitt […]