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Date Published: 22/10/00
Author: Mark Lynas The Alps are melting. As Mark Lynas reports, there’s far more at stake than just pretty landscapes. |
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‘The valley lay far below bathed in the morning sun. In front of her rose a broad snow-field, high against the dark-blue sky... Heidi had never felt so happy in her life before.’
If she returned now to her beloved Alps, Heidi would probably burst into tears. Since this classic children’s book was first published in 1881, glaciers in the Alps have changed almost beyond recognition. Due to the impact of climate change, minimum temperatures have shot up two degrees in just a hundred years. And as a direct result, many of Heidi’s pristine snowfields have been reduced to bare rock and gravel.
As the Alps are the most exhaustively studied mountain range in the world, scientific evidence of warming there is not hard to find. In total over half the entire glacier mass in Western Europe’s highest mountain chain has gone since records began in about 1850. At least 100 Alpine glaciers have disappeared completely. And if current warming trends continue, in another few short decades the once mighty Alpine glaciers will be reduced to icy rumps – clinging only to the highest peaks.
At the end of the 19th century, when Heidi’s creator Johanna Spyri was alive, Switzerland was becoming a popular tourist destination. The mountains were already criss-crossed with steam railways – purpose-built to shuttle top-hatted 19th century visitors (many of them British) up to the high valleys. Trains would stop along the way at small stations, for the ladies and gentlemen on board to disembark and take tea.
Morteratsch station, close to St Moritz in the south-east of the country, was one such stopping-point. But it also had a particular attraction. Only a couple of hundred yards from the building lay the tongue of a huge glacier, which swept majestically down from the soaring 4,000-metre ice peaks of the Bernina range. Strolling up to the glacier edge, Victorian visitors could peer in amazement into deep-blue caves, or paddle in the freezing meltwater which surged from under the ice.
Morteratsch is well worth visiting today. The little station building is still there, and tourist trains still trundle by almost hourly. In fact, there’s just one thing missing – the glacier. To reach the Morteratsch glacier now, you have to walk for over a mile up the valley. This is Switzerland’s climate trail -– a half-hour walk through over a century of global warming. And every half-kilometre or so, a green signpost reminds you how long the glacier’s been gone from that spot.
The Alps are not unique. From the Andes to the Himalayas the story is the same – glaciers are not only melting, but at an accelerating rate. What’s special about the Alps is how far back the records go, and how minutely studied the changes have been. As a result, academics at Swiss universities are among the world’s best-qualified to assess long-term trends in mountain climatology.
One of these is Professor Martin Beniston, Director of Geography at the University of Fribourg. He tells a story of a small glacier near Mont Blanc – a favourite field trip destination. In the last decade he’s visited the site with each year’s students – and watched it gradually disappear in front of his eyes. Now, he says, ‘it’s almost like a mini-desert – because no vegetation has caught up’. According to Beniston, the two-degree rise in minimum temperatures in the Alpine region is enough to cause a 300-metre rise in freezing levels. And that means certain death for lower-elevation glaciers.
The melting of mountain ice is more than just an aesthetic concern. Glaciers and snowfields are essential stores of water – which keep rivers running and fields irrigated through the long, dry summer. With a near-Mediterranean climate exacerbated by the rain-shadow of the highest peaks, southern Swiss cantons like Valais are some of the driest areas in Western Europe. Without the summer-long trickle of meltwater, agriculture would become nearly impossible. That spells the end of centuries of tinkling cowbells, haymaking and fine cheeses – and ruin for many Alpine communities.
Like ripples on a lake, the effects will also be felt much further afield. The Alps feed Europe’s major rivers, and with less snow and ice at their source the ‘flow of the Rhine and the Rhone would be very different from what we have today’, says Professor Beniston. If river levels sink too low, barges could be grounded and agriculture thrown into chaos.
Even so, the shock felt by Europe will be small compared to the catastrophe which is set to engulf tropical regions. In the Indian subcontinent the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers provide water for a tenth of all humanity. And unlike temperate European rivers, which can rely on year-round rainfall, up to 70 per cent of their dry-season flow is supplied by Himalayan ice fields.
But these glaciers are already receding by roughly 20 metres per year. One study suggests that they could be four-fifths gone by 2035. That would mean an initial increase in river flow to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – followed by a massive drop. Once these rivers become seasonal, the ecological basis for a thousand years of civilisation in the subcontinent will collapse.
Back in the Alps, scientists have also begun to pinpoint other issues of concern. An expert in plant ecology, Dr Felix Kienast at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Zurich reports that one study on the Italian side of the Alps has shown that ‘warmth-demanding species are moving in – quite drastically’. Treelines are moving up the slopes as temperature zones rise – an upwards migration of 150 metres ‘is expected and observed in certain places’, says Kienast.
According to one painstaking study, carried out at 26 summits over 3,000 metres in 1992, some species are migrating upwards by 4 metres per decade. The conclusion reached by the scientists – principally Professor Georg Grabherr of the University of Vienna – was that ‘global warming is already having a significant effect on Alpine plant ecology’ and that in future the warming ‘may cause disastrous extinctions in these environments’.
But – worrying as these trends might be – they are likely to be many times worse in the lowlands. For whilst mountain species have to migrate at most a couple of hundred metres over many years to keep pace with their preferred temperature zone, lowland species must cope with a latitudinal shift in temperature. In the northern hemisphere, for example, plants may have to migrate hundreds of miles to the north as temperatures rise. Those that fail – either because they can’t adapt fast enough, or because humans have destroyed the habitat they need to move through – will face extinction.
And once again these effects are hitting hardest precisely where people are least able to cope. Dr Kienast points to marginal areas like the Sahelian zone of North Africa, where rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall are turning vast areas into desert. ‘I think we should worry most about ecosystems in parts of the world like Africa – not here in Europe,’ says Kienast. ‘This is a North-South issue, and ironically we’re the lucky ones.’
This unfortunate conclusion is a recurring theme in most of the studies of climatological impacts in Switzerland. One very detailed examination has been carried out. Commissioned by the Swiss government and obscurely titled ‘NRP 31’, it is based on meticulous research. Some of its conclusions were indeed worrying. For example, the authors found that the recent lack of winter snow in the lowlands was ‘unique over long periods of time’, as was ‘the complete absence of cold anomalies [extreme cold events] in all seasons over the past 60 or 70 years’.
But according to Dr Kienast, the publication of NRP 31 actually reduced the political pressure for action on climate change. ‘The whole exercise of NRP 31 clearly showed that in this part of the world there are not such drastic changes to be expected,’ he says. One of NRP 31’s two lead authors, Dr Stephan Bader of the Swiss Meteorological Office, supports this view.
‘In the past there were periods when they had real problems with floods and things like that,’ he says. ‘As for right now, we still can’t see anything – we can’t measure any real impacts and say for certain that it’s climate change.’ He flicks through pages of graphs – one shows that precipitation patterns have altered little through the century. Another shows that average wind speeds in storms have actually declined in recent decades. Although 1999 was one of the warmest years ever – confirming the global trend – a rare July cold snap had just dumped a metre of snow in some parts of the mountains.
But changes are happening, and in some parts of the country efforts are already being made to adapt. The town of Pontresina, back near Morteratsch in the country’s south-east Engadine region, is embarking on a project to construct a giant 15-metre-high wall to protect against falling rocks and mud from the slopes above – expected to be loosened as permafrost thaws out. In Valais, the village of Saas Baalen has been forced to drain a glacial lake high above it – following fears that meltwater could eventually burst out and surge down the valley in a deadly mudflow. Some cable-car stations will have to be resited as the mountainsides they are fixed to begin to crumble. And plans are even being made to move some of the lower-level ski stations uphill.
But Switzerland is a rich country. Some small adjustments may be needed – even to the lucrative tourist industry – but it can cope. When NRP 31 was concluded in March 1998, policy-makers across Europe must have breathed a sigh of relief. Business could go on pretty much as usual, and Switzerland’s Kyoto target of only an 8 per cent reduction of CO2 emissions would seem less miserly.
So Europe’s in the clear. Scientists may disagree on the specifics, but – barring a major event like the stopping of the Gulf Stream – the lives of some of the world’s richest and most privileged citizens can continue without major disruption for up to another five decades. What happens after then is anyone’s guess – but 50 years is a long time in politics.
But hang on a minute. Haven’t we forgotten something? Ten million people now need food aid because of drought in the Horn of Africa. This is the same drought which is now affecting a broad swathe of the Earth stretching from North Africa via the Middle East to much of central Asia. For four-fifths of humanity, the ‘wait and see’ approach has already run its course.
However, with oil and car corporations, as well as rich-world politicians all joining forces to oppose action on climate change, the outlook is grim. As the rich mobilise to protect their privileges, the poor face starvation and chaos.
It may be getting warmer in the North, but the South – as they say in Texas – ‘sure as hell is gonna fry’.
Mark Lynas is based at Corporate Watch. For more information contact Corporate Watch at 16b Cherwell St, Oxford OX4 1BG, UK or visit their website at www.corporatewatch.org
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