In Cold Blood

The receding Viedma Glacier and the loosening of a 415 square km (160 sq mi) iceberg from Antarctica have reactivated worldwide alarm on climate change effects and brought to the table the issue of man’s moral responsibility for this process. Countries' energetic and industrial needs cause a huge environmental damage, which is becoming increasingly evident in such climate phenomena as floods, tornados, droughts, heat waves, and the spread of infectious diseases.

A Shadow You Soon Will Be

As Osvaldo Soriano’s famous title states, the Earth’s glacier heritage carries in its womb the promise of its own vanishing. Glacier melting serves as a thermometer to measure the effects of global warming. This – as stated by Al Gore in the hypothesis of his film An Inconvenient Truth – is the result of man’s action. The recession of the Viedma Glacier, in the Province of Santa Cruz, is the most immediate example, which renovates the environmental concern.

Unless this trend is reverted, this glacier might disappear in the next few decades, as warned by the environmental organization Greenpeace, based on a study in which it was determined -through photographic evidence- that the ice mass had lost 50 m (164 ft) of its height and one kilometer (0.6 mi) of depth in relation to 1930.

The Viedma Glacier, located 30 km (18.5 mi) away from the Mount Fitz Roy, is a 575 square km (222 sq mi) ice mass belonging to the South Patagonic Continental Ice cap, which covers 350 km (217 mi) along the southern mountain range shared by Argentina and Chile. Thirteen large glaciers and 190 minor ones make up this field; the latter ones are inserious danger of extinction,according to Ricardo Villalba, Directorof the Instituto Argentino deNieves, Glaciares y Ciencias Ambientales de Mendoza (IANIGLIA) and researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). In the scientist’s opinion, “many of the smaller glaciers in Patagonia might disappear in the next 20 or 30 years”.

Villalba, who participated in the Greenpeace expedition in which the Viedma Glacier’s ice mass loss was documented, believes that “in the last 20 years, the glacier extension along Patagonia has been reduced by 10 or 20 per cent”.

Another event indicating the high speed of ice melting is the loosening of a 415 square km (160 sq ft) iceberg from the Antarctic mass in the western end of the Wilkins ice shelf. The disintegration, which began last February 28, was detected by satellite images taken by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), an institute that carries out scientific research on the “White Continent”.

According to BAS, six ice layers have already disappeared on the same spot of the continent, but Wilkins’ is the largest one threatened so far. It had remained stable throughout last century, but it began to recede in 1990. Scientists do not believe that it will be able to survive for much longer. According to BAS expert David Vaughan, “the ice cap is now hanging by a thread”.

“Melting is faster than expected”, said the scientist, who ascribed the phenomenon to global warming worsening.

In the last 50 years, the region has registered the world’s highest temperature rise, with an average of half a degree by decade.

What is global climate change and what are its consequences?

Climate change is the potentiation of weather phenomena. The most famous one is global warming, which consists in the steady rise of the Earth’s atmosphere and ocean temperatures, as a result of the greenhouse effect. This is generated as certain gases in the atmosphere lower layers (carbon dioxide, methane, etc.) capture part of the solar radiation released by the Earth in the form of heat, thus creating a true “global greenhouse” that alters the natural climate balance. This change is caused by the release of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide), generated by fossil fuel burning, deforestation, and other human actions.

At the end of last year, the World Meteorological Organization asserted that the decade of 1998-2007 was the warmest one registered so far and, according to the data published by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA), the year 2007 surpassed 1998 as the second warmest year registered until now, with a global mean temperature of 14.57° C (58.22° F). The global mean temperature of 2007 exceeds by 0.8 ° C (33.44° F) the average between 1881 and 1910 (pre-industrial era). At this pace, mean temperature rises expected for the future could easily reach 2 or 3 degrees by mid-century.

All this seems to be outlining a merely abstract and statistical map of the problem, but the consequences are clear: recurrence of tornados and hurricanes, suffocating heat waves, droughts, glacier recession and floods, increase of infectious diseases, food shortage, among others. In addition, these changes could lead to the extinction of some species that will not be able to survive the variations of the ecosystem in which they live.

Of course, the effects are even worse in poorer countries, which lack adequate infrastructure and resources to control the impact, and which suffer the consequences of the damages caused by more industrialized countries. However, the effects of climate change have been felt in the developed world as well. In 2003, in Europe, over 40,000 people suffered the heat waves.

Many scientists claim that climate change was responsible for such natural cataclysms as the “Tsunami” in Indonesia and Katrina Hurricane in the south of the United States. The so-called “climate refugees”, who must abandon their homes due to the action of these phenomena, make up a new social category as victims of environmental catastrophes.

All the undesirable consequences mentioned in this paper suggest that the technical imagination of modern man follows a single and unlimited path: progress. We would be obliged to simply watch the results as outside, passive spectators.  But this ever-forward march entails the risk of mortgaging the future of upcoming generations due to the irreparable damage caused to the environment. Thereis no ethical neutrality in technology; it is not something that can be used for better or worse according to man’s will. Negative (as well as positive) consequences are inevitable. We are now talking about how much man is willing to sacrifice of their natural heritage, since it is evident that a given level of environmental pollution is tolerated for the sake of technological progress.