Melting tropical glaciers: “canaries in the coal mine” for global climate

Developing countries worldwide rely on a consistent flow of glacial meltwater to sustain them during dry seasons, a supply now threatened by a warming climate. Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier has lost 80 percent of its surface area since 1982, and the melting will likely accelerate within the next 20 years, threatening water supplies of 77 million people.

“The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia,” Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, wrote last year. Full story: Yale 360