-Glaciers are disappearing in the Andes-

Many thanks to this man, and his documentary "The inconvenient truth” .

Ex Vice President of USA, Mr Al Gore
"Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced."

Here in Peru

Jacabamba Glacier, Peru.

On the left, a photograph taken in 1980. On the right, the same view in 2002.

At 17,000 feet in the northern Andes, the glacier which covers famed Pastoruri has shrunk at a rate of 62 feet every year since 1980. Today it covers a surface area of 0.7 square miles, about 25 percent less than a quarter of a century ago.
Pastoruri is one of 18 glacier-capped mountains in Peru suffering the effects of climate change, according Peru's National Environment Council, CONAM.
Peru has the most tropical glaciers in Latin America and has already lost 20 percent of the 1,615 miles of glaciers running through its central and southern Andes in the past 30 years, according to CONAM.
Climate change, caused by greenhouses gases such as carbon dioxide, is considered one of the biggest longer term threats to mankind and could bring higher sea levels, devastating floods and droughts.
In southern Peru the rate of melting of the Qori Kalis glacier during the 8 year period 1983 to 1991 was 3 times the pace of the previous 20 years, 1963 to 1983. "By the time we probably know what they are doing, it will be far too late to worry about it because they are going to be like galloping glaciers," says Ellen Mosley Thompson, climate expert at Ohio State University. The Qori Kalis is receding at about two feet per day. Sitting beside the glacier, one could witness the melting hour by hour.

Marco Zapata, head of the Institute of Natural Resources glaciology unit, told local media last week that Peru has lost 22 per cent of its glaciers since the 1970s.
"Peru is one of the most affected countries in the world due to global warming," he said, adding that tropical mountain ranges — which endure longer hours of sunshine and hence higher temperatures — are especially vulnerable to global warming.
Zapata said that glaciers above 5,500 metres — which account for almost all of Peru's glaciers — will be gone by 2015.