The celebrated American novelist, adventurer and chauvanist, Ernest Hemingway, fictionalized his 1933 safari with a number of short stories, including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In that story, Hemingway describes the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white.” Because of global warming, those snows will be gone in 14 years.^{1, 2} The loss of an icon might be saddening, but for those that live under Kilimanjaro, the loss is far more than aesthetic: it is the loss of their drinking water, their irrigation water, and their livelihood.³

Within the next 15 years, the glaciers atop Kilimanjaro are expected to disappear completely, and with them, some climate experts and government officials fear, a crucial portion of the region’s water supply. Over 1 million people who inhabit the lower reaches of Kilimanjaro, including Kiwali and his neighbors, depend on this water for their crops, livestock and domestic purposes. Conflicts over water shortages have already broken out between water users on the mountain, and some villages have been nearly cut off by their upstream neighbors.⁴

The principal is fairly simple. Glacial melt water is fresh. In the spring and summer, meltwater pours down into streams and lakes, providing fresh water to communities that leave down the mountain. In the winter, new snow adds to the glacier. In some years it may add more, and in other years less, but in general, a steady-state glacier is added to in winter as much as it melts in spring and summer. If that balance tips, and it melts more than it is added to, the glacier becomes smaller. With global warming, winters have become shorter, with less snow, while summers have become hotter; the result is a global loss of glaciers, including the iconic glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro, and the result of that is the loss of the primary source of fresh water for billions of people. Glacial meltwater provides water from the Andes of Peru, and from the Himalayas, to the two most populous countries on the planet: India and China, both countries that are already finding it difficult to provide enough water for such an enormous population.

Glaciers store an estimated 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Water that falls as snow moves through the slowly churning ice and may emerge from the glacier’s edge thousands of years later as meltwater. Humans have long depended on the gradual and faithful runoff.

The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which feed seven great Asian rivers, will bring “massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India,” a World Wildlife Fund report concluded last year.

“The repercussions of this are very scary,” agreed Tim Barnett, a climate scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “When the glaciers are gone, they are gone. What does a place like Lima do? Or, in northwest China, there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There’s no way to replace it until the next ice age.”⁵

In Peru, Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inka, has resorted to water rationing. Villages in Nepal have been swept away in floods, as lakes of glacial meltwater burst open. Via Real Climate, Raymond Pierrehumbert, a climate dynamicist at the University of Chicago, impresses upon us the incredible time scale relevant to this global phenomenon:

The widespread retreat is all the more notable because tropical mountain glaciers are old. They have survived thousands of years of natural climate fluctuations, only to dwindle at a time when other climate indicators — notably surface temperature — are showing the imprint of human influence on climate. Quelccaya is at least 1500 years old, Dasuopo is 9000 years old, and Huascaran has seen 19000 years. A date for the ultimate demise of these glaciers has not been fixed, but the Northern Ice Field on Kilimanjaro may be gone in as little as twenty years, after having survived the past 11,000 years.⁶

The same trend is even affecting the Himalayas, which provide water to most of the world’s population.

Eventually, the Himalayan glaciers will shrink so much their meltwaters will dry up, say scientists … rivers fed by these melted glaciers—such as the Indus, Yellow River and Mekong—will turn to trickles. Drinking and irrigation water will disappear. Hundreds of millions of people will be affected.⁷

The Yellow River provides 0.6% of all of China’s water. The Indus River is the main source of Pakistan’s potable water, and the foundation of its Punjabi agricultural production. The Mekong River is the primary source of freshwater throughout southwest Asia. The Himalayas provide much of the freshwater to the world’s most populated regions, regions already under terrific stress from insufficient water.

Neither is this solely a problem of the “developing” world. 80% of Calgary’s water supply comes from meltwater.⁸

Most of the water in the rivers of Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan is actually from melting snowpacks, not from glaciers. But here, too, global warming is creating a formidable challenge. With temperatures in the Rockies on the rise, precipitation is falling less as snow, and more in the form of rain, which then flows directly into the ground rather than melting into the rivers in the spring and summer months.⁹

Global warming represents a radical transformation of the world, and part of that is a radical transformation of the earth’s water supplies. Unbelievable suffering will follow from that, suffering that civilization will be powerless to abate. Such a crisis cuts to the core of what any society promises: security, safety, and the provision of the basic needs of existence. When a society cannot provide these, it cannot long endure.¹⁰