The first symptom of excess heat is of course extreme cold. Bring your parka to Death Valley next summer.
Climate change campaigners and development NGOs say that the failure of Copenhagen has signed the death warrant for hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest and that a quarter of a million children will die before world leaders meet again to try to thrash out another deal at the United Nations next climate change conference in Mexico in December. Among them may be these children of the high mountains.
Enduring prolonged sub-zero temperatures is a matter of course for Peru’s indigenous mountain people, many of whom live at more than 3,000m above sea level. Scores die every year from the cold, but in recent years the number of people succumbing to the freezing temperatures has triggered talk of a national crisis.
This year the neighbouring district of Puno saw a severe spike in child mortality as the winter brought months of high winds and relentless ice storms. Government figures record that more than 300 children died in Puno in May last year from the cold; NGOs say that the figure was probably much higher.
Local government officers in Huancavelica could not provide figures for how many children died here last year, but admit that child mortality is rising in the region.
“There have been many dead children. I don’t know how many, but there are more and more and mainly the deaths have been from pneumonia,” says Rafael Rojas Huanqui, regional director for the Defensa Civil, the national disaster protection agency. “They have no resilience of any kind to deal with the weather getting colder.”
More documentation of the dreaded warmcold phenomena, which now has the NOAA stamp of approval and thus must be real.
Warmcold indeed, Mr Weiss. That evil carbon can undo the basic laws of physics! Amazing how evil that substance is… especially when its combined with those two traitorous oxygen molecules.
I mean atoms… but you know what I mean.