Venezuela is first Andean country to lose all of its glaciers | Hacker News Reader

Venezuela is first Andean country to lose all of its glaciers

nbcnews.com

116 pointsBrajeshwar40 comments

Venezuelan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, who grew up around these glaciers, wrote a poignant lament[1] in anticipation of this day. The gist is that at this point the only thing to do is to grieve for the world we have already lost. I don't think there's anything else to say.

Y cuando el momento llegue, honremos nuestras heridas / Celebremos la belleza que se aleja hacia otras vidas / Y aunque la pena nos hiera, que no nos desampare / Y que encontremos la manera de despedir a los glaciares

(When the moment comes, let us honor our wounds / celebrate the beauty that goes off to other lives / and although the sorrow stings, I hope it will remain / and that we find a way to say goodbye to the glaciers)

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNsFF_eaXBU

Jorge is one hard-hitting poet. Dang.

Not to take away the poetry, but Jorge Drexler is from Uruguay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Drexler

In a way, I'm happy its not Venezuela. Although still sad that this is happening

Hi! Jorge Drexler is not Venezuelan but from Uruguay [1].

I should know, I'm from there as well and he is one of our few cultural exports aside from Football.

[1] - https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Drexler

You're right of course - I realized my mistake several hours later, but much too late to edit...

→ Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, who grew up around some other glaciers

> the only thing to do is to grieve for the world we have already lost

Tears won't put a glacier back.

> Between 1952 and 2019 alone, Venezuela’s glacier surface went from 2,317 square kilometers to just 0.046 square kilometers, according to a 2020 study.

Checked the study because those numbers seemed suspect. That's 2.3 square kilometers, not 2300.

Could that be from confusion between the use of comma as decimal symbol and periods to denote thousands? (German practice)

I'm familiar with the practice, but it must be quite the confusion to mix both in the same sentence.

Many countries use comma as the decimal separator, in fact, using comma is more common than using a dot if you go by the number of countries. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator

Any countries that use both?

Because they also wrote "0.046".

They usually do not mix decimal seperators in the same sentence however, and as leading zeros are generally avoided on integers, "0.046" is pretty clearly using a period as the decimal seperator.

This may be the study:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15230430.2020.1...

Quote from the abstract:

> In Venezuela, glacial area has decreased 98 percent between 1952 and 2019 (from 2.317 km2 to 0.046 km2).

So it appears you are correct. I looked it up because I was skeptical of your skepticism - Washington state is at a very different latitude, but at 1/5 the area of Venezuela has ~450 sq km of glaciers. Mt Rainier alone has 90 sq km.

https://glaciers.us/glaciers.research.pdx.edu/Glaciers-Washi...

There’s no arguing against extreme glacial retreat (I started this by fact-checking your downplay), but this article does feel pretty sensational about a place that didn’t really have glaciers to begin with.

I did not mean to downplay severity. I live in an area with a few dozen glaciers, and I've spent the last decade watching them become smaller and smaller with each passing year.

The article being off by three orders of magnitude annoyed me because the loss of that quantity of ice in one location in just 70 years would be catastrophic; if we assume 40 meter thickness, that's 58 cubic kilometers of water added into the local watershed.

As it stands, the statistic is "just" depressing.

Apologies for misreading your intent, I hear you and am in full agreement.

A related article from NASA Earth Observatory has a slider to compare satellite images of the glacier.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152893/humboldt-gla...

I don’t really have words for this. It’s hard to contemplate why have done this to our home.

We’re like a group of vandals just breaking things for the hell of it.

Such beauty and the home to many species, wiped out…

Coincidentally, Venezuela is producing about 800,000 barrels of oil per day (on the heavy dirty side) and has a goal of increasing production to a million barrels per day. The USA (including Alaska) by comparison is currently producing 13.2 million barrels a day, a steep increase from 2008 when only 5 million bpd were being produced. A remarkable number of politicians who campaign on 'slowing climate change' have in reality (and hypocritically) directly facilitated this growth in oil production by blocking efforts to limit pipeline expansion, enforce environmental laws already on the books, and so on.

As far as Venezuela glaciers, consensus appears to be that they probably had melted completely around the time of the Holocene warm period c. 9000 years ago, and their reforming was evidence of the beginning of a long slow slide into another glacial era (which would have taken 70,000 years or so to reach the next glacial maximum, on the 100 ky cycle). That's now been put aside as we head full tilt back towards Pliocene conditions.

So, we’re all onboard for nuclear, right? And we’re all going to vote for anyone who will fast track building nuclear plants and cut through some regulatory crap?

If this is an emergency, and it looks like it is, let’s start treating it that way. Clean energy is a solved problem.

If only your post were from 2001 instead of a time when solar + batteries is so much faster to deploy and cheaper to build than nuclear. Tho, of course, there is a good amount of funding for nuclear in Biden's climate change law. It kept us in California from moth-balling a nuclear plant, but the new money seems to be for industrial sized battery plants.

https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?lo... a nice summary of the current math.

At the risk of sounding completely ignorant, haven't the glaciers been disappearing since the ice age? Didn't some sort of glacial period last end about 10,000 years ago?

I follow a tour guide in Colombia who takes people up the glaciers there. It’s really sad to see them all melting away year after year.

Kilimanjaro will soon lose its glacier too.

"Scientists believe its disappearance makes Venezuela the first country in the Americas — and the first country in modern history — to lose all its glaciers [emphasis added]."

Title inaccurate. This goes well beyond only 'Andean countries.'

EDIT: To the 4+ dol—I mean, people who have now downvoted this comment: 'the Americas' is commonly geographically understood to mean the land masses of both North and South America. There are glaciers present in both 'Americas.' The Andean mountains are only present in South America. Jesus, this place is stupid today.

Can it be reversed?

dont worry theyll grow back

And yet, in the US, CO2 emissions are about where they were in 1990 (which is better than 2005, but very far from where it should be) https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/

What are the emissions when we account for goods manufactured overseas? In 1990, much more of our manufactured goods were included in US emissions. Now most of our manufactured goods have their emissions in other countries.

Really good point; that's why we have to look at global emissions; I just pointed to US ones as I couldn't find global ones more recent than 2021 (which are here: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/greenhous...

The picture is bleak; globally we are rapidly approaching 2x 1990 levels

Ya notice how energy has gone down, but industry based co2 production has doubled lol

The term for this is "consumption based emissions." You can find charts for it at Our World In Data. Here's the chart for the US along with an explanation of the methodology:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

The US is improving even after accounting for imports. Consumption-based emissions were 20.3 tons per capita in 1990 and peaked in 2005 at 22.7 tons per capita, declining to 14.9 tons per capita as of 2022. Of course present emissions per capita are not as low as if imports had no CO2 footprint.

So, China and India are pretty nuts.

Yeah. I believe the reason is rapid industrialization. As far as I’m aware that tends to be associated with high emissions. There is some hope that as African nations industrialize, they can use greener technology so we don’t see the same pattern repeat there. The population in Africa is nearly that of India and it’s growing rapidly.

Isn't this just "ENERGY" related emissions... it doesn't account for CO2 as a whole emissions just those in relation to production of energy, farming etc, aren't accounted for nor all the CO2 sources we technically just shipped overseas as we reduced local production but increased imports.

Climate change is real but its effects are overblown. Weeping for a glacier that would of melted a few years later regardless of public opinion seems insufficient

Agreed. I'm much more concerned about deforestation in the Amazon.

I’m open to listening to Climate Scientist that considers Astrophysics as a factor. The rest can keep their pseudoscience to themselves as far as I’m concerned.

Sorry, best we can do are celebrities wagging their fingers at you.

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