Tag Archives: climate change

The Niños and the financial roller-coaster

By Nicholas Asheshov

Ferocious blizzards in the United States, a warm North Pole, biblical floods in Queensland and drought in northern China are being blamed on La Niña but here in Urubamba in the permanent eye, one supposes, of the Niño+Niña complex, the weather could not be more charming.

The shock pre-Niña rains a year ago which cut away big slices of the railway to Machu Picchu, have been followed this year by the traditional monsoon mixture of warm sunshine and refreshing rainfall. It’s sparkling, green and friendly, our favourite time of the year. We sense some of the mystery of the carefully-sculpted Cloud Kingdom of the Incas where dramatically chiseled rock walls controlled the rivers, the fields and the ciudadelas.

The first El Niño that gave Peru a headline role in the world’s climate drama occurred four decades ago in 1972. Newspapers worldwide published little maps showing Peru with arrows going in all directions. My sister Anna, an international skier, complained that Peru’s desert rainstorms were ruining the snow in the Swiss Alps – globalization avant le mot.

That Niño had been preceded in Peru by a famously remorseless anchoveta hunt by the brash new Peru fishing fleet led by the engaging, brilliant Lucho Banchero. Every single anchoveta from the beach breaks to the whale belt 100 miles offshore was netted. Boats would capsize and sink with too much fish. The catch was 12 million tons, one in every five fish caught worldwide that year.

The Apus struck back instantly and implacably. The dense horizon-to-horizon clouds of seabirds, the world’s greatest, have never returned. In Lima we watched thousands of starving pelicans fight for their last scraps outside the Surquillo market. The price of fishmeal, corn, wheat, sugar, cotton and soya skyrocketed on the New York and Chicago markets.

Serendipitously perhaps, OPEC doubled and tripled the price of oil to $15 the barrel. I myself moved the market. I reported to McGraw-Hill’s commodities wire on the strength of a good-humoured tip from the U.S. Embassy, then literally a stone’s throw away on Av Washington, that Arabs had come to Lima to buy copper. I practically had them mounting their camels in flowing robes at the door of the Hotel Bolivar before riding down La Colmena. The Chicago Board of Trade copper price jumped from 60 to 70 cents the pound but I was too young and poor to take advantage. In any case I had just come from Fleet St where you learn on Day One never to believe your own story.

Thus the first post-WWII price crisis. Nixon had de-pegged the dollar from gold. The oil people had no idea what to do with their billions –before that a million or two was real money– and gave it to Citibank who lent it to obscure states that even Brazilians hadn’t heard of, to Peronist bag-men and soldiers in Buenos Aires and to the Banco Popular in Peru.

Six hyper-crises later here we are again. Hundred-degree heat scorched the wheat crop last year in Russia and the Ukraine, The same economists who six months ago were gasping deflation are now fighting inflation by, of all things, reducing taxes.

So even here in Urubamba we all know that bumbling bankers, confused bureaucrats and a cascade of  Niños and Niñas have packaged themselves into a global roller-coaster, though I bet that in the Andes we’re safer than anywhere else.

Here in any case is where we stand, broad-brush, in the southern Sierra.

Four decades of figures from Senamhi, the weather bureau, show an average increase of between two and three degrees centigrade -the figures themselves are precise but it depends on the location. This is a lot. The glaciers from the Vilcabamba south to the Cordillera Real above La Paz and Lake Titicaca have all but disappeared. All you’re looking at now is a dusting of snow. The remains of old airplanes that crashed into the ice fields 30 and more years ago are being uncovered, frozen bodies of young pilots recovered and buried by their families.

A few hundred miles to the east the Brazilians continue mowing down the Amazon and Sertao, unthinkable even as recently as the 1972 widescreen Niño.

Average rainfall here has lessened, too, though the overall figures aren’t startling. But the rain now tends to come in sharp bursts, meaning there’s a lot less for farmers.

“We’re having to undo the work of decades where European NGOs brought in big, expensive cows and thirsty crops like alfalfa to feed them. Now there’s not enough water,” a Ministry of the Environment official in Cuzco tells me.

“We’re bringing back llamas and alpacas, smaller fields. We’re going back to how it used to be.”

As you might imagine, the Incas had it all clear. Their huge high-altitude polylepis –queuña— forests, now largely cut down for firewood, conserved water. Their great flights of terrace complexes made best use of it.

If I, like many of my friends, were running for President –Election Day is April 10– my Government Plan would be just four words and here they are:

Back to the Incas. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Feb. 17, 2011

The Incas and global warming – Opportunity knocks, again, in the Andes

By Nicholas Asheshov

The last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire.

A team of English and U.S. scientists has analysed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of a small lake not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that “the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than four centuries”.

The four centuries coincided directly with the rise of this startling, hyper-productive culture that at its zenith was bigger than the Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire – the two most powerful contemporaries of the Inca.

“This period of increased temperatures,” the scientists say, “allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from AD 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains to build a massive system of terraces fed frequently by glacial water, as well as planting trees to reduce erosion and increase soil fertility.

“They re-created the landscape and produced the huge surpluses of maize, potatoes, quinua and other crops that freed a rapidly growing population to build roads, scores of palaces like Machu Picchu and in particular the development of a large standing army.”

No World Bank, no NGOs.

The new study is called “Putting the Rise of the Inca within a Climatic and Land Management Context” and was prepared by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, an English paleo-biologist working for the French Institute of Andean Studies, in Lima. Alex led a team that includes Brian Bauer, of the University of Illinois, one of today’s top Inca-ologists. The study is being published in Climate of the Past, an online academic journal.

Alex spends a lot of time in Cuzco and he told me the other day that the report “raises the question of whether today’s global warming may be for the Andes another opportunity”.

The core samples from the sediment of the little lake, Marcacocha, in the Patakancha valley above Ollantaytambo, show that there was a major cold drought in the southern Andes beginning in 880 AD lasting for a devastating century-plus through into 1000AD. This cold snap finished off both the Wari and the Tiahuanaco cultures which had between them dominated the southern Andes for more than a millennium.

It was at this same time that the Classic Maya disappeared in Yucatan. It was also a time, on the other side of the Pacific when major migrations from East Asia took place into Polynesia, an indication of a major Niño event; a Niño sees western Pacific currents switch to flow from West to East.

Core samples from glaciers and from the mud beneath lakes in the Andes, the Amazon and elsewhere have built up a history of the world’s climate and the message is crystal clear. It is that changes have taken place in the past, during the six or seven thousand years of our agriculture-based civilizations, that are just as big as the ones we are facing from today’s CO2 warming.

The message may be, too, that climate change is especially forceful in the Andes. Here we are, sandwiched thinly between the world’s biggest ocean and the world’s biggest jungle. The peaks are so high that they have had until just a few years ago deep ice on or near the Equator.

The valleys and surrounding hills have formed the roof of the human world for at least three millennia, according to Alex Chepstow-Lusty’s core samples. Nowhere else do millions of people live at or even near 4,000ms above sea level where it is cold, but getting warmer.

Today’s warming is also following on a colder spell that started, the core samples say, not long after the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century.

For instance, the pollen in the cores says that there was maize being grown under the Incas around the lake at 3,300m above sea level. Until recently the upper level for maize around the Urubamba valley was 3,000-3,100ms. In the past few years the maize level has moved up and today there is maize being grown again above Marcacocha.

Alex’s records show that hundreds of terraces were being built around the lake between 1100 and 1150 AD -“lots of mud followed by the heavy pollen of maize”.

Enrique Mayer, at Yale, tells me that “the question of the expansion of maize together with the Inca state is now a proven archeological fact, notably in the Mantaro Valley (Tim Earle).

“The question of why terraces are not worked now as intensively as they could has been worked on (Bill Devevan) in the Colca Valley where the terraces are actually in franco retroceso.

“Also, you have John Treacy’s book on Coporaque which is probably the most technically accessible to the argument that terraces are, like flower pots, expensive to maintain.”

There is also, of course, the work of John Earls on the terracing at Moray.

Today there are thousands upon thousands of fine flights of Inca terraces all over the upper ends of the valleys of Central and Southern Peru but few of them are used on a regular basis.

Efforts have been made, among them by Ann Kendall, the English archaeologist, to resuscitate the old irrigation channels and the use of the terraces in the valleys above Machu Picchu. But most have been re-abandoned.

In the same vein the great forests of polylepis, the world’s highest tree, which capture and conserve moisture, have mostly been cut down for firewood.

As they say, you only have to look in the mirror to see where the problem is. FIN

Published June 25 in Caretas Magazine