That’s a big shift from four years ago. Here’s what the Republican presidential candidate John McCain was saying about climate change.

“It’s real. It’s a danger to our planet, it’s a danger to the future of these young people who are in front of me and their children. And it’s got to be stopped.”

You won’t hear talk like that from any of the Republican presidential candidates this go-round. There’s a reason for that, said David King at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“In a time of real economic distress, who is paying attention to global climate change? And especially if the costs of solving the reality of global climate change are so high they’re going to come directly in conflict with the economy, with jobs, and who wants to face that reality?”

But the Republican presidential candidates are more than just ignoring the issue, they’re running away from it. Take the case of Newt Gingrich. He appeared in a commercial in 2008 sitting on a couch next to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The two politicians introduce themselves, then Pelosi says, “We don’t always see eye to eye, do we Newt?”

Gingrich responds, “No, but we do agree our country must take action to address climate change.”

Gingrich has had to answer repeatedly for that commercial during this campaign season. Here’s what he told Fox News.

“It’s probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”

Gingrich also said he’s scrapping a chapter about climate change in his new book.

William Moomaw with the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the Republican candidates are distancing themselves from the issue for ideological reasons. “They believe that addressing climate change will require government action, or even worse, intergovernmental action.”

Moomaw said to understand just how far the Republican Party has shifted on environmental issues, consider the case of the incandescent light bulb. President George W. Bush signed a law in 2007 that requires new bulbs to be 30 percent more efficient. Moomaw said many Republicans now see that law as a source of government intrusion.

“Candidates like Michele Bachmann were jumping up and down and shouting how they were going to repeal this – to be denied their right to put any lightbulb in any socket in America is just too much control, a loss of freedom.”

But it’s not just the Republican Party that’s not addressing climate change. President Obama has fallen virtually silent on the issue. If you visit his 2012 presidential Web site, you’d be hard pressed to find any mention of climate change and global warming. That’s a political calculation, said David King at Harvard.

“If there’s no benefit politically to talking about global climate change, then you just keep your mouth shut.”

Perhaps the president and the Republican candidates are simply following our lead. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, Americans ranked global warming as the least important of 22 priorities, just behind campaign finance reform.

Silkworm farmer H. B. Manjunath talks with a solar technician about the solar panel installed on his rooftop. (Photo: Sonia Narang)

Sonia Narang reports from southern India on the growth of solar power in rural parts of the country. Small loans have made solar panels available to homes and businesses that otherwise suffer from India’s severe electricity shortage.

In Chemangala village in southern India, silk farmer H.B. Manjunath walks into a back room of a dark thatched roof cabin, flips on a light switch and watches as the cool light from the lamp illuminates hundreds of milky white silkworms crawling in a wooden box full of mulberry leaves. The worms need the crispy leaves to survive and spin their silk cocoons, but they’ll only do it when there’s continuous light. And Manjunath says that used to be very hard to come by.

“We had four or five hours of unscheduled power cuts everyday,” Manjunath says. “Sometimes, we would not have it at all.”

But that changed when Manjunath took out a small loan from his local bank to pay for a single solar panel and batteries to store the electricity. The 120 watt system generates enough power to illuminate the silkworms for three hours a day.

Now, Manjunath says, he’s not worried even if he doesn’t have grid power for 24 hours. “The solar works for us,” he says.

Manjunath’s bank loan was part of an effort in the southern state of Karnataka to promote affordable solar lighting in rural areas, an effort that’s in turn part of a national trend. India’s central government hopes to boost renewable sources of energy and install 20,000 megawatts of solar generating capacity over the next decade, to help fill a huge power gap in the country.

Five hundred million people today do not have electricity in the country. That’s nearly half the population. And even places that are hooked up to the grid can face daily blackouts.

Dr. Harish Hande, founder of the Bangalore-based solar company SELCO, says the need for energy is urgent, and not just so people can run their businesses or light their homes.

“It’s very important from a governance point of view, India’s social stability point of view, that we need to provide basic needs,” Hande says.

India’s economy is booming, but conventional sources of electricity just haven’t been able to keep up with the growth in demand in India. That’s one reason Hande spent years trying to convince local banks in Karnataka to offer small loans to rural families for renewable energy systems. In recognition of his efforts, Hande recently was awarded the prestigious Magsaysay Award, sometimes called the Asian Nobel prize.

Hande says solar lighting can have a profound emotional impact on the poor.

“A day laborer once told me that you would not understand what it actually means after a hard day’s work coming back to a house which is dimly lit,” Hande says. “The mood which is already down goes down deeper. Once you see bright light, it’s a different feeling. It’s a different way of life where you look forward to tomorrow. He says ‘I’m willing to pay for that.’”

Hande says many rural Indians are willing and able to pay for solar and other renewable sources of energy, if the cost can be spread out over time. That’s where the bank loans come in. Silk farmer Manjunath’s solar system cost $400 to install. That’s more than he would have been able to afford at once, but with the loan, he pays less than $7 a month.

Dr. Ashok Gadgil, an Indian physicist who’s now director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, says India’s critical shortage of conventional electricity has created a big niche for solar power.

“Acute electricity shortage means blackouts, and blackouts mean lost income and lost business,” Gadgil says. “So there are many, many opportunities where photovoltaic electricity for economically productive uses is viable in India even at the current prices.”

And the technology is starting to catch on in Karnataka. Silk farmer Manjunath says he was one of the first in his neighborhood to install the panels, but that word travels fast here, and more than 100 households have followed suit.

And the electricity isn’t just benefiting local businesses.

On a recent afternoon a group of energetic teenage boys gathered around the solar panel on Manjunath’s roof after school. The boys say they stick around Manjunath’s house during the evening hours to finish up their homework under the lamps.

“With solar power,” says one of the boys, “I can study continuously without stopping. And it doesn’t matter if there’s a power cut at night.”

Emperor Penguins adults with chicks. (Photo: Michael Van Woert, NOAA NESDIS, ORA)

The day after this year’s UN climate summit ends this Friday, a research team is scheduled to fly into a remote corner of Antarctica for a visit to the Pine Island Glacier. It’s the biggest ice shelf in western Antarctica. And it’s moving—fast.

“This is the fastest glacier in Antarctica,” says Robert Bindschadler of NASA, the expedition’s leader. “It’s going 4,000 meters a year, which converts to just over one foot every hour. So this ice is ripping along.”

Bindschadler says the reason the ice is moving so fast is because unusually warm ocean water is seeping in miles under the glacier’s forward edge, melting it from below.

“In the case of Pine Island, we think that it’s melting at over a 100 meters per year right at the upstream end of the ice shelf. And you think the ice shelf by that amount, the glacier speeds up by many tens of a percent.”

Scientists compare what’s happening to the glacier to popping the cork on a champagne bottle. But in this case, what’s being held back is frozen water.

And it’s not just one glacier. There are signs of sudden, rapid melting across Antarctica, where all the corks on all the glaciers and ice sheets are holding back enough water to raise global sea levels more than 200 feet.

The faster that ice melts, the faster the world’s coastlines will be inundated. The problem is, no one saw this coming.

“It’s caught us all very much off guard,” says Bindschadler. “These are not the ice sheets that I was being taught when I was in graduate school. They are changing at magnitudes and at rates that were thought impossible just 15 years ago.”

That rapid melting is challenging assumptions on how much global warming will cause sea levels to rise this century.

The last major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, in 2007, suggested a worst-case scenario of less than two feet of rise by 2100. But Virginia Burkett with the US Geological Survey, a lead author on the report, says there was a big caveat.

“The last IPCC report included sea level projections that were based primarily on thermal expansion,” of the water as it warms up, Burkett says. “And of course sea level is rising because of the combination of thermal expansion of sea water and ice sheet decline.”

The problem was that the science on ice sheet decline, or melting polar ice, just wasn’t good enough at the time, so the IPCC decided to leave it out of their final projections.

And even though the report’s fine print clearly stated that ice loss could accelerate substantially, that number of less than two feet has become a kind of default prediction for sea level rise.

Fast forward five years and scientists like Bindschadler and Burkett are now projecting a high-end scenario of about six feet of rising sea levels by the end of the century. Three times the 2007 projection.

That’s enough to make crowded coastal cities like Mumbai unlivable, and displace more than a 100 million people worldwide.
But some scientists say even a prediction of six feet may be too conservative.

Harold Wanless, chair of the Geology Department at the University of Miami, says all the projections by the IPCC and other scientific organizations are based on a gradual rise of sea level. But, Wanless says, “that’s not how it worked in the past.”

Scientists like Wanless are studying sediments from past warming periods to find clues as to how quickly sea levels changed. And what they’ve found is the stuff of Hollywood movies—rapid pulses in the 20-foot range, and on a time scale that could be not centuries, but decades.

“That’s in the line of possibility,” Wanless says.

And he warns that it’s time to start thinking about relocating things that countries don’t want to lose.

“Everything from national archives and our world seed banks, some of which are at much too low elevation. Military bases, things we wouldn’t want disrupted. And our nuclear power plants. Why are we even looking at the coast for those?”

Wanless believes the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland have already passed their tipping point for runaway melting. The only question for him is how fast it will happen.

Most climate scientists don’t go that far. They say they still don’t understand the complex dynamics of ice melt enough to predict with confidence a 20-foot rise by the end of the century. But few are ruling it out.

Penn State Climatologist and IPCC co-author Richard Alley says a good analogy of the risk is driving a car.

The best scenario, Alley says, is that there’s no traffic. On the other hand, you might get a lot of traffic, or “you might get run over by a drunk driver.”

The drunk driver represents that rapid pulse of sea level rise.

Alley says even though the chances of him being hit are slim, he still bought a car with all the added safety features, just in case.

“If society dealt with risks of climate change the way I deal with drunk drivers,” Alley says, “it’s possible that we would be trying to slow down a little bit so that we could learn more before we get hit by something.”

What’s happening instead is more like stepping on the accelerator. As climate negotiators from the US, China and nearly every other country on earth met this week to again try to find elusive common ground on emissions cuts, new reports confirmed that global emissions of the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide reached record levels last year.

Alley says the higher we crank up the planet’s thermostat, the higher the risk becomes that we’ll get hit by something nasty.

The UN climate change conference is in Durban, South Africa, from 28 November to 9 December 2011. (Photo: Cien)

International climate change negotiators are back at it his week in Durban, South Africa. Negotiators are scrambling to make significant progress in a process that seems to have fallen far behind the urgency of the the problem.

Anchor Marco Werman gets an update from the BBC’s environment correspondent, Richard Black.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. International climate change negotiators are back at it this week in Durban, South Africa. Negotiators are scrambling to make significant progress in a process that seems to have fallen far behind the urgency of the problem. Just this week there’s a new report out confirming that global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped by the largest amount ever last year. Scientists warn that the rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions is putting the earth on track to dangerous warming in the next few decades. But a global agreement to cut those emissions still seems a dim hope. The BBC’s environment correspondent, Richard Black, joins us from the UN climate change conference in Durban. It’s not news to the delegates there, Richard, that the earth’s surface continues to warm up and that greenhouse gas pollution is likely the biggest culprit. I’m wondering though how much of a jolt this new analysis gives the proceedings there in Durban to actually break the gridlock and reach an agreement on cutting emissions.

Richard Black: Well, you’re absolutely right, it certainly isn’t news and it’s worth remembering that virtually all of the governments here are also fully signed up to the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is something that’s been sounding the alarm on this since 1997. So basically, we had the car crash in Copenhagen a couple of years ago when all those massive expectations of a big global deal just fell off the table with a resounding crash. So part of what this is about is trying to implement some of the much smaller bits that were agreed in principle last year at the summit in Mexico, and then look at what’s possible in the years ahead.

Werman: So what are the key sticking points right now? Does it still come down to the same kind of place we’ve been for the last few years, the inability of the US and China, which are by far the largest greenhouse polluters, to commit to substantial cuts in their emissions?

Black: Yeah, it’s interesting. You’ve got lots of these big countries that have subtly different positions, so there’s no doubt, for example, that the US is now being joined by Canada. Canada sees itself, it wants to parallel the US as closely as it can, so both of them are unwilling to do anything looking up to 2020. China has got its own system, a five year plan. And then we have India, which over the last couple of years has been rather conciliatory, but this year has a new environment minister who’s being very hard line in saying that as a major developing country they shouldn’t really have to do very much. You’ve got the small island states and some of the least developed countries that are very worried about climate impacts, and they’re pushing for a lot of progress as soon as possible. And they’re largely backed by the European Union, which also wants to get cracking on talks for a new deal as soon as possible. And as you can see, Marco, there are very different visions of what the future ought to hold.

Werman: Now, the goal ultimately is an agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, but you’re saying the conference participants are kind of going to focus on smaller goals. Give us an example or two of those smaller goals and how that might lead the conference ultimately to a big agreement.

Black: Okay, so sure, so the one in which there’s probably most likelihood of actually finalizing something here is what’s called technology transfer. In the United Nations climate convention it’s acknowledged that developed countries should help poorer countries to develop cleanly. So one of the ways of doing this obviously is to transfer clean technology from rich countries where [inaudible 3:15] has been developed into the poorer countries. But there are issues there for example, over intellectual property. So how do you get an agreement there which satisfies everyone and you can actually start doing something on the ground? So that’s the kind of smaller agreement that may well be finalized here.

Werman: But you know, the real thing is to kind of get back to the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol, and that protocol expires next year. It’s the only truly global treaty right now on greenhouse gases. What happens then?

Black: Well, that’s a very good question and this is one of the things that’s brought urgency to the talks in the last couple of years. The protocol itself doesn’t expire. What expires are the commitments that a number of developed countries have made under it to reduce the greenhouse gas emission. So there’s a little concern around, particularly in developing countries, that if the EU and the other countries inside the Kyoto Protocol don’t make new pledges inside that protocol which kick in pretty soon, is the protocol a shell with no meaningful content even though it continues to exist? That’s the concern.

Werman: So if the Kyoto Protocol does become a shell as you say, and there is no agreement coming out of Durban, I mean it looks like the results in Durban could potentially be pretty dismal. I mean what is the bare minimum you expect to come out of this round of talks?

Black: Anything is possible and when you analyze what negotiators have been putting into the public domain, obviously they don’t give away everything at this stage. They probably don’t give away everything until the final night. But it could be a complete car crash. Equally, you could emerge with all these technical things from last year being tied up and you could end up with agreement of how to go forward, another try if you like, in reaching a global treaty. Anything across that spectrum is possible at the moment.

Werman: We’ll be checking back in through the week at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban. The BBC’s Richard Black speaking with us from Durban, thanks so much.

Black: My pleasure.

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Thousands of protesters march outside the White House, urging US President Barack Obama to stop the planned pipeline between Canada and the US.

Some geographers say the phrase refers to the seven largest bodies of water: The Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans.

Then there’s the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

But forget about seven seas. The International Hydrographic Organization says there are more than 100 of them.

For now, we’ll settle for the name of the sea you’d be facing if you were standing on the Maldive Islands, looking east.

The answer is the Laccadive Sea which separates the Maldive Islands from southern India and Sri Lanka.

The Maldives are only about five feet above sea level, so there’s big concern the islands’ days ware will become inundated as sea levels rise in the coming century.

Marco Werman talks with documentary filmmaker John Bowermaster in the Maldives.

China, US and India are the top three coal producers in the world and the answers to the Geo Quiz. China accounts for nearly half of global coal production and is also the world’s largest user of coal. Its coal use has helped it become the biggest annual emitter of greenhouse gas pollution, but a new study published this week shows that the coal smoke is also helping to cool the atmosphere.

Mount Hualcan, about 20,000 feet above sea level.

I’m traveling the world in search of the human face of the impacts of climate change. I encountered a sobering example yesterday, in Carhuaz, Peru. There, I met Juana, a middle-aged woman dressed in a white embroidered shirt, orange skirt and a grey felt hat.

One Sunday morning in April 2010 Juana puttered around the rustic house she rented by a stream on the outskirts of Carhuaz, at the base of Peru’s Cordillera Blanca range. The day, like every Sunday in Carhuaz [pronounced car-WHAS], a bustling town of 60,000, was market day.

Juana lot all of her possessions to a flood in April, 2010.

At around 8:00, the house began to shake. Juana rushed out the rough-hewn wooden door and climbed to higher ground. Her adobe hut had been built within a few yards of the stream where, normally, a gentle current had swirled around rounded boulders. On this day the creek had become a wild torrent, not just of water, but of tree trunks and boulders – huge boulders, some taller than her daughter.

As Juana told me her story in her native Quechua, through an interpreter, tears poured from her eyes. She said that as she watched from above, the flood took all her possessions, including her prized farm animals. Now she lives in a former stable. She makes a meager living washing clothes. Sometimes neighbors offer her gifts of a few potatoes or other crops they grow.

César Portocarrero told me the flood should never have happened, but that it could happen again. Portocarrero, a glaciologist and civil engineer, works for Peru’s National Water Agency, which, among other things, oversees public works to prevent floods.

About two decades ago ago Portocarrero himself oversaw construction of a drainage tunnel that was designed to protect Carhuaz from such floods. He blasted the drain in stone just below the summit of Mount Haulcan [pronounced waal-KAHN], a 20,000-foot-high peak that glistens above Carhuaz.

César Portocarrero, of Peru's National Water Agency, standing in front of one of his drainage tunnels.

In 1970, the entire town of nearby Yunguay, including 80,000 inhabitants, had been buried by just such a flood. The drain that Portocarrero built was designed to keep Laguna 513 at a constant level, about 60 feet below its banks. Thus, the basin became like a huge bathtub large enough so even the most ample bather couldn’t splash the floor.

Portocarrero says when he built the Laguna 513 drain he calculated that it’s basin would keep almost any imaginable icefall contained. But as Peru’s glaciers have retreated, the frequency and size of ice avalanches has increased. The April 2010 flood was caused when a 15 million cubic foot chunk of ice broke off the summit, tearing additional ice and rock as it tumbled. By the time it had reached Laguna 513 the volume had doubled.

The basin was big enough to fit the debris without overflowing; still the force of the fast-moving icefall created a splash so big that a wave washed completely over lake’s 60-foot containment banks. The water that escaped raced down the course of the normally quiescent outflow stream, ripping up boulders and trees and everything else it overtook.

Portocarrero estimates that due to global warming his drainage tunnel now only protects Carhuaz against about 80 percent of Hualcan’s icefalls. Fortunately, the 2010 flood stayed contained in the banks of the stream, taking no lives and causing little economic damage other than to Juana. Of Janua he says, sadly, she probably broke the law by living too close to the stream.

On the other hand a more powerful flood could happen any time, with much more severe results. A larger icefall could create a flood that would leap over the river’s banks, and cause much more damage or even loss of life. . His agency has produced a feasibility study with several proposals for how to defend the town better. But so far, says Portocarrero, there is no budget to build anything.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

Benjamin Morales (photo: Daniel Grossman)

On May 31st 41 years ago Morales lunched near his home in the town of Yunguay. Despite protestations of friends who had joined him for the meal, he left just before 3 p.m. He had promised to drive his mother to another town. At 3:23, a powerful earthquake struck the region.

A massive piece of the Huascaran glacier that towered above Yunguay, broke loose and cascaded down a valley. The avalanche carried millions of tons of ice, dirt and rock, moving at nearly 200 miles per hour. Scientists later calculated that the debris flow contained about two billion cubic feet of material.

Where the valley channeling the flow took a turn, some of the debris leapt the banks and fell directly on top of Yunguay. Apart from a few lucky survivors who ran to high ground, the entire town of 18,000 was buried within seconds.

Morales told me no; that’s not why he’s so optimistic. He said that his long, successful career (he’s 76) has filled him with optimism that will power can overcome difficult challenges. To illustrate, he described a massive public works project he oversaw in the late 1970s. He directed construction of a humongous retaining wall to protect Peru’s largest hydroelectric power plant from the threat of a landslide.

The occasion of my chat with Morales was a visit to the Pastoriri glacier, about two-hours in a 4-wheel drive from the mountain city of Hauraz. Pastoriri was once a popular ski slope: Peru’s only.

Morales says more than 1,000 people visited Pastoriri some days. It attracted tourists from Peru and throughout the world. But about 10 years ago Peru’s Park Service decided that recession of the glacier it had noticed was caused by skiers.

The edge of the shrunken Postoriri glacier. (Photo: Daniel Grossman

Today the few visitors who drive the windy road to Pastoriri slog across about a mile of mud and gravel between where skiers used to hop onto the ice and where the glacier now begins. Although the exact amount of melting differs from place to place, virtually all of Peru’s glaciers are shrinking fast.

Morales conducted surveys of Peru’s glaciers in 1960s and 1990s. In the approximately 25-year interval, the country lost 22 percent of its ice. Morales says a new survey is urgently needed. A much smaller study he performed not long ago showed that glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca range had shrunk by 27 percent in 33 years.

Still, Morales believes that Pastoriri will attract crowds once again. He’s drafted a plan for a sort of climate-change theme park that he says could lure the tourists back. The focus of the development will be what he calls the Climate Change Route, a scenic and educational path winding past the glacier.

Morales says the area around Pastoriri could make a natural museum for teaching visitors about the many epochs of natural climate change of the past. For instance past ice ages plowed finely ground rock and gravel into linear piles known as moraines, clearly visible below the glacier today. Visitors could learn about climate changes deep in Earth’s past.

The recession of Pastoriri has revealed dinosaur footprints dating back to a glacier-free epoch much warmer than today. Most importantly though visitors who follow Morales’ Climate Change Route will learn about man-made climate change and the Pastoriri glacier that once was. Morales says all the plans for the exhibit are in place. “All we need now is the dough.”

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

Martín Mendieta has waited nearly 40 years to have running water.

Today I learned that the slogan is neither; for hundreds of thousands, if not millions (the numbers are in dispute), of Lima’s poorest inhabitants have either no running water at all or supplies that flow only a fraction of the day.

My day began early, in the San Martín district, a shantytown at Lima’s northern edge. There I met Martín Mendieta, a long-time inhabitant of the Cerro Candelario neighborhood. Like many Peruvians descended from the Quechua people who were ruled by Incas before Spain conquered Peru, Mendieta is small in stature but muscular in build. He paused from a construction chore breaking rocks to chat.

When Mendieta arrived from the countryside in the mid-1970s he built a home on the stony hill where he still lives. Whether he looked to the west toward the sea or the east toward the Andes, he saw hardly anyone on the flats below his perch. The land there was either completely unused or sparsely farmed. He excavated a shallow well alongside his modest house. But the water table fell in time, and its contents became inaccessible.

Meanwhile farmers and shepherds from the highlands, some fleeing communist guerillas, others drawn to the allure of city life, populated the flats with what Peruvians call “human invasions.” They built sturdy brick homes at the foot of Mendieta’s rampart-like hill. Now about 150,000 people live in four contiguous neighborhoods there, none of which has running water.

Mendieta says that he and his neighbors gained the stature of a community worthy of receiving city water around 1988, and they petitioned the government to hook them up. After years of petitions and protest marches, the utility Sedepal finally built a cistern for the community that looks like a giant aspirin on top of a nearby hill. But that was in 2008 and the tank is still dry.

In the meantime, anyone in the area who wants water has to buy it from a truck. This morning I watched as a squadron of blue Sedepal tanker trucks careened through San Martin’s uneven dirt roads, tooting horns and ringing bells to alert customers. Put one or two Soles (about 50 cents) into the outstretched hand of a truck driver’s assistant and he’ll fill your barrel from the end of wide hose suitable for a fire truck. Activists I consulted complained that the water is about 20 times more expensive, and far less clean, than the same thing when piped.

As I wandered through Ex Fondo Naranjal, one of the four waterless communities I visited, backhoes scraped up buckets of dirt from the roads, digging square holes for sewer connections. The activists I talked to said that water pipes had already been installed. They said the utility promises it will pressurize the pipes later this year.
Mendieta, whose house sits on an imposing rock mound, says he hasn’t gotten such pipes yet. Digging trenches there are difficult, he says, giving Sedepal, his adversary for so many years, the benefit of the doubt. He’s optimistic that Sedapal will fill the community’s cistern soon, and after nearly 40 years even he will have running water in his home.

Next week I’ll speak with glaciologists who question whether, regardless of how many people have taps, Lima will be able to keep its promise of water for all. As global warming shrinks the country’s glaciers, the country might simply not have enough water on its dry western coast to match the increasing demand.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

A cliff of crumbly soil impregnated with small stones towered above us, rising straight up about 200 feet to the neighborhood of Chorillos. Chorillos means “trickle,” a name derived from springs that once spurted from the ground and dribbled down the cliff. So impressed were inhabitants of this desert city with the lush vegetation watered from the steady spurts of natural irrigation, bearding the cliffs, that they named the area the Costa Verde or, green coast. Today, though, the cliff face is mostly bare, green only in artificially irrigated patches.

In Chorillos I interviewed the civil engineer Marcos Alegre Chang, director of the Center for Eco-efficiency and Social Responsibility. Chang oversees several programs to encourage water conservation. He explained that Lima is facing serious water shortages, which will only get worse.

Using a white board with black and red markers he showed me the simple math that proves his point. The entire city of Lima gets about 21 cubic meters of water per second from two sources, the Rimac River, which supplies 15 cubic meters per second and deep wells from which the balance is pumped.

This amount of water is pitifully small to meet the needs of 9 million people. The only desert city comparable to Lima is Cairo, which draws water from the Nile, a river with a flow 100 times greater. Lima is growing rapidly. Yet sources of water are becoming scarcer. Chang said the water table in Lima is plummeting about 5 feet a year. It was this over-harvesting of ground water that turned the Green Coast brown, he said. It will also soon make some drinking-water wells fallow.

The Rimac’s paltry contribution to Lima is also in danger of declining. An official at the city’s water utility explained to me that during the dry season, when little rain falls in the western slopes of the Andes, the Rimac relies on water held in reservoirs high in the Andes to provide sufficient flow. But melting glaciers and changes in precipitation could staunch flow into these man-made lakes.

The utility has proposed a variety of public works projects to make up the difference, such as an enormous tunnel under the Andes to divert water from the Amazon Basin to Lima. Marcos Alegre Chang says he thinks the city should improve water efficiency first, with low-flow toilets and the like, before blasting tunnel and building dams.

I’ll be interviewing more officials in Lima in the coming days to judge for myself which if any of these solutions could avert a water crisis in Lima’s future. First, tomorrow, I’ll fly over the Huaytapallana Glacier, one of the fastest retreating glaciers in Peru. I’ll report back here what I see.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

About three quarters of these glaciers top Peruvian peaks providing the South American country with a natural resource of immense value and justifiable pride. But Peru’s glaciers, like most glaciers in the world, are melting at an alarming rate. The Peruvian Meteorology and Hydrology Service say that the country’s glaciers have lost about 20 percent of their volume since 1970.

The American glaciologist Lonnie Thompson once told me that he thinks he’ll live to stand on the bedrock that today holds up the world’s largest tropical glacier – the Quelccaya Ice Cap near Cuzco, Peru. He gave me this disheartening forecast in 2006 as we stood together atop Quelccaya, with several hundred feet of ice separating us from that rock foundation.

Today I visited another Peruvian glacier, topping a mountain known as Huaytapallana, and famous not for its size but the rate at which it has shrunk. A Peruvian government official reported earlier this year that studies of old photographs show that the surface area of the Huaytapallana glacier shrunk by 50 percent between 1986 and 2006. This visit was much briefer than my earlier trip to the Quelccaya, which involved a daylong jeep ride and two days trekking on foot, but grueling in its own way.

The visit began in the city of Pisco on the runway of a military base, which also hosts a small commercial airport. I met my pilot, Cesar Pareja Lopez, at the side of his two-engine Cessna. Normally Lopez flies a special photographic camera for Horizon Air, a firm that produces topographic maps. I was anxious to examine the hatch in the plane’s belly where Horizon mounts its optical gear, because I relished getting clear pictures of the glacier through the same hole.

I’ve taken many pictures from airplanes before but poor quality glass and plastic windows have always robbed the photos of their soul. However, Lopez hadn’t been informed that I wanted to shoot through the floor; he thought I was just wanted a tour, seated and belted safely in a seat. He said that if he opened the hatch, the plane would be cold and that we’d have to wear oxygen masks.

When these arguments didn’t dissuade, he said that I might fall out. Reluctantly, and with persuasion from my translator Dado, Mr. Lopez agreed to unscrew the metal lid covering the hole when it’s not in use. He gave me a form in triplicate absolving Horizon Air of responsibility if anything bad happened, and had me sign and ink a fingerprint on each page. I crawled into the Cessna’s hold and donned a rubber mask and noise-canceling headset.

At first I was afraid of the opening into empty space about the size of a basketball hoop. But soon I had convinced myself that it was smaller and no more scary than the trap door of my childhood tree house; except that this perch was more than two miles above the ground.

I started taking pictures sitting on my rear end, straddling the hole between my legs. But my back got sore and my lens was too far inside the plane. I lost my fear (or, some might say, my mind) quickly. By the time I reached Huaytapallana, near the city of Huancayo, I was lying on my tummy sticking my head nearly into empty space.

Clouds enshrouded the glacier when we arrived, after a cruise of an hour. I had pulled on my winter fleece as the cabin cooled. Mr. Lopez made several passes over the summit, chasing rents in the clouds through which I might snap a clear shot.

Each time he banked the plane and turned the aircraft on its side, he hooted loudly with excitement. My stomach grew queasy and I wondered if I’d get limp enough to slip out of the plane if I passed out.

In the end, my best shot was not straight down through the opening after all, but through a window from the side, as Mr. Lopez paralleled Hyallatapalla’s spine. The mountain’s white mantle of ice impressed me. But I could also see many black patches of rock like holes in a tattered tablecloth. Had these spots been white last year? Five years ago? I don’t know. I hope to find out, though, when I meet one of Peru’s leading glaciologists later this month.

One more thing: If you find a black Nikon lens cap in the desert somewhere between Huaynaco and Pisco, Peru, it’s mine.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll explore a question that is easy to state but hard to answer: how will the Peruvian capital respond to decline of its chief source of water as its population grows and the demand for the resource grows. I’ll talk to officials at many government agencies and visit shantytowns that have waited decades just to gain running water. I’ll circle low in a prop plane over Huaytapallana, a glacier that has suffered some of the most startling losses of ice.

There are no simple solutions to Peru’s challenge, and no guarantees of success. I will explore several ideas, some hopeful, others fanciful. I’ll join glaciologist Benjamin Morales on a research expedition to study how glaciers might be insulated against melting with a coating of sawdust. Entrepreneur Eduardo Gold will show me his work trying to cool mountaintops and regrow glaciers by painting summits white. And I’ll see billboard-size fog catchers springing up on sand dunes on Lima’s outskirts. Although it almost never rains there, heavy fog blankets the region for about half the year and these simple devices are already capturing precious trickles and easing the city’s problems slightly.

Please join me on my travels. I’ll post entries daily about who I’ve met, what I’ve seen and what I’m thinking. I’ll post a photo or two as well.

Bransfield Strait, Antarctica (Photo: Lyubomir Ivanov)

Antarctica, of course, is generally the coldest continent but the scientific term we’re looking for includes all of the frozen parts of the Earth. That includes the Arctic ice cap and Greenland’s ice sheet, along with all the planet’s snow, glaciers, and even icebergs.

So, what’s the scientific name for all of our planet’s frozen parts?

It is in fact the cryosphere. A new report out this week documents how fast the Arctic and Greenland are changing as the planet warms up. That could mean much higher sea levels than previously anticipated. Lisa Mullins talks with Walt Meier, one of the study’s authors.

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Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program

Cryosphere (Hugo Ahlenius, UNEP/GRID-Arendal)