The New York Times' most alarmist environmental reporter Justin Gillis offers still more "proof" of global warming in Friday's "In Sign of Global Warming, 1,600 Years of Ice in Peru’s Andes Melted in 25 Years [1]." Meanwhile the Times has ignored [2] in print the disintegration of Gillis's last alarmist global warming report. So how seriously should we take his latest scare-mongering?
Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists reported Thursday, the latest indication that the recent spike in global temperatures has thrown the natural world out of balance.
The evidence comes from a remarkable find at the margins of the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru, the world’s largest tropical ice sheet. Rapid melting there in the modern era is uncovering plants that were locked in a deep freeze when the glacier advanced many thousands of years ago.
Dating of those plants, using a radioactive form of carbon in the plant tissues that decays at a known rate, has given scientists an unusually precise method of determining the history of the ice sheet’s margins.
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In the short run, the melting is producing an increase of water supplies and feeding population growth in major cities of the Andes, the experts said. But as the glaciers continue shrinking, trouble almost certainly looms.
Douglas R. Hardy, a University of Massachusetts researcher who works in the region, said, “How much time do we have before 50 percent of Lima’s or La Paz’s water resources are gone?”
Environmental reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal commented on the melting Andes glaciers in December 2009 by tastelessly comparing their disappearance to the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers [3]:
Glaciers are part of the majestic landscape here, visible from almost everywhere in the neighboring cities of La Paz and El Alto, each with one million people. Their disappearance from certain vistas is as startling to Bolivians as the absence of the twin towers is to New Yorkers.