http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20031127/sc_nm/environment_glaciers_dc_2
Thu, Nov 27, 2003
Billions Face Water Shortages as Glaciers
Melt-WWF
MILAN, Italy (Reuters)
- The world's glaciers could melt within
a century if global warming accelerates, leaving billions of
people short of water and some islanders without a home,
environmentalists said Thursday.
"Unless governments
take urgent action to prevent global warming,
billions of people worldwide may face severe water shortages as
a
result of the alarming melting rate of glaciers, the WWF group
said in a report.
It said human impact
on the climate was melting glaciers from
the Andes to the Himalayas, bringing longer-term threats of
higher sea levels that could swamp island states.
Officials from 180
nations will meet in Milan on December 1-12
to discuss international efforts to rein in a rise in global
temperatures, blamed by scientists on emissions of gases from
factories and cars that are blanketing the planet.
"Simulations project
that a 4.0 Celsius (8.0 F) rise in
temperature would eliminate nearly all of the world's glaciers"
by the end of the century, WWF said.
Himalayan glaciers
feed seven great rivers of Asia that run
through China and India, the world's most populous nations,
ensuring a year-round water supply to two billion people.
WWF said that nations
most at risk also included Ecuador,
Peru and Bolivia, where melt water from Andean glaciers
supplies millions during dry seasons.
Island states like
Tuvalu in the Pacific, meanwhile,
could be submerged by rising sea levels triggered
by melting glaciers.
Sea levels could rise
even further if two of the world's
largest ice caps, in Antarctica and Greenland, melt
substantially, though the report left them out of its
reckoning because of their unpredictability.
Glaciers are ancient
rivers of packed snow that creep
through the landscape, shaping the planet's surface.
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