Mark Carey is an assistant professor of environmental history at Washington and Lee University and the author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society. He has a post on the blog of the Oxford University Press: Although some US senators may resist discussion of the new climate and energy bill this week, people around the world continue to live with incessant dangers that disrupt their daily lives and threaten their existence. A recent glacier avalanche in Peru, for example, unleashed a powerful outburst flood that caused significant destruction. It was the same kind of flood that increasingly endangers people living near melting glaciers worldwide, from Switzerland and Norway to Canada and New Zealand, China and Nepal.Beyond underscoring the need to move forward quickly with a new climate bill, the recent outburst flood also reveals that climate change discussions too often focus solely on the causes of climate change. While critical, this emphasis on what drives climate change and who (or what) is to blame, can derail dialogue about climate impacts that are already occurring worldwide, sometimes with deadly consequences.
The April 11th flood from Peru’s Lake 513 on the slope of Mount Hualcán inundated areas near the town of Carhuaz, destroying dozens of homes and washing away roads. Tens of thousands of residents also lost access to potable water when floodwaters damaged a water treatment facility. Nonetheless, the flood could have been much worse. Luckily, engineers had already partially drained Lake 513 — along with dozens of other glacial lakes in the region.
…The recent flood from Lake 513 exposes both the potential and perils of technological fixes. Engineering projects prevented a more catastrophic flood. But damage from the flood might not have occurred at all if additional resources to monitor, maintain, and contain dangerous lakes had been available to the under-staffed and poorly funded government glaciology office….
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