The Guardian’s header
Peru’s mountain people face fight for survival in a bitter winter
Climate change is bringing freezing temperatures to poor villages where families have long existed on the margins of survival. Now some must choose whether to save the animals that give them a living, or their children
Seriously?
For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru‘s Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.
The few hundred people who live here are hardened to poverty and months of sub-zero temperatures during the long winter. But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early. First their animals and now their children are dying and in such escalating numbers that many fear that life in the village may be rapidly approaching an end.
Fourth year, eh?
In a world growing ever hotter, Huancavelica is an anomaly. These communities, living at the edge of what is possible, face extinction because of increasingly cold conditions in their own microclimate, which may have been altered by the rapid melting of the glaciers.
A consequence is that Quechua-speaking farmers and their families, who have managed to subsist for centuries at high altitude, believe they may not make it through the next southern winter.
Except, the world has not been growing hotter as of late, late being the last 10+ years. But, hey, it fits the climate alarmists narrative that, somehow, beyond all belief, the release of greenhouse gasses is causing it to get colder.
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.
Perhaps they should be discussing how to increase the greenhouse gasses, as the climate turns cooler.
‘For the fourth year running.”
Hmmmm… the SUN took a down-tick in activity in 2005. You’d think the climate ‘scientists’ would notice a corellation….
Bush?
But, you forget, Otter, it is mother nature covering up what mankind is doing ;)
I’m sure he has some large part in it, Trish!