In the Andes, Extreme Cold Extracts Bitter Toll

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Dozenist

EL HIGUERON, Peru ? Carlos Cruz Chanta lives just off a rutted dirt road, almost lost in the mist, outside this village on a steep ridge of jungle-covered mountains. Like his neighbors, he makes his living raising livestock and growing corn, fruit, beans, and coffee.

But the bean harvests have failed recently, and cattle have come down with strange illnesses. Ice has ruined the oranges and avocados. Most worryingly, the cold has taken its toll on his children.

"The children get pneumonia," said Chanta. "This cold is so much for our children."

Over the past three years, bitter cold spells and frosts have made life in El Higueron ? and throughout most of the Peruvian Andes ? increasingly difficult. As paradoxical as it seems, scientists suspect global warming is to blame.

In 2008 and 2009, frigid temperatures descended on Peru in March and April, almost three months before the start of the Southern Hemisphere winter. The unseasonable cold not only killed livestock but contributed to the deaths of almost 250 children across the country, according to news reports at the time.

The winter of 2010 proved even worse. After temperatures plunged to 46-year lows, the government declared a state of emergency in 16 of the county's 24 regions. In some areas, temperatures reached 24 degrees Celsius below zero, or 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. More than 400 people died, most of them children.

Cold, damp weather lowers resistance to respiratory infections like pneumonia and bronchitis. In places like El Higueron, where many children are already under-nourished and health care is difficult to obtain, such sicknesses can be deadly.

"There are health posts, but there's a lack of medicine," Chanta said.

Bone-chilling cold has always been a feature of life in the Andes. But rural residents, government officials, and development workers all say that frosts and cold waves have grown more extreme.

Christopher Hinostroza Qui?onez, the head of disaster management for the town of Yungay in the central Andes, said cold there had intensified, with freezes and hailstorms in the highlands.

"Now, in this season, there are sometimes frosts. It didn't used to be this way," said Raul Ramos Garcia, a farmer from the nearby village of Huachao.

Juser Nunez Peralta, who works in rural development in the southern Cusco region, said frosts had also intensified there.

Gustavo Cajusol works on climate change adaptation for GIZ, the German aid agency, in the northern province of Piura. He said frosts were more common there as well.

"I can't understand it," he said. "The climate is changing."

Climate change can alter atmospheric conditions in complex ways, said Mathias Vuille, a climate scientist at the State University of New York, Albany, who has specialized in the Andes. In some cases, he said, it can lead to greater extremes of both hot and cold.

The Andes are undergoing several potentially contradictory changes as a result of global warming. According to a 2003 study, temperatures have warmed by about 0.34 degrees Celsius per decade since 1974. Glaciers ? a crucial summertime water reservoir ? are melting, with some researchers suspecting parts of the region have already passed "peak water." And then there's the recent cold.

Jose Marengo, a climate scientist with the Brazilian space agency, INPE, who has also studied the Andes extensively, said global warming could make cold waves less frequent but more severe.

Unfortunately, existing weather records do not allow for detailed scientific studies of extreme cold. Weather stations are few and far between, and historical records are often difficult to access. Many include only monthly or weekly averages, not the hour-by-hour measurements necessary to monitor temperature extremes.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=b82b52542a0b4a613dad094d0e70023b

florida primary results black history groundhogs day paula abdul mitt romney blake griffin cinnamon challenge