Around World, glaciers soon will be history

That was the headline for a story in the Chicago Sun Times 1-30-05 with the sub heading --
Scientists see proof of global warming, warn of future peril
Here's a summary of the story --

Up and down the icy spine of South America, the glaciers are melting, the white mantle of the Andes Mountains washing away at an ever faster rate.
In east Africa, the storied snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro are vanishing. In the icebound Alps and Himalayas of Europe and Asia, the change has been stunning. From South America to south Asia, new glacial lakes threaten to overflow and drown villages below. Orbiting satellites have helped measure this global trend, though scientists like Rajendra Pachauri have long seen what is happening on the ground.
"Ample" evidence indicates that global warming is causing glaciers to retreat worldwide, reports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored network of climate scientists led by Pachauri. Global temperatures rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century. The Bolivian Andes are warming at a half degree Fahrenheit per decade.
The Kyoto Protocol mandate cutbacks in emissions, but the reductions are small and the U.S., the biggest emitter, is not a party, arguing that the mandates will set back the U.S. economy.
In Peru, endowed with vast Andean ice caps and glaciers, 70 percent of the power comes from hydroelectric damscatching runoff, but officials fear much of it could be gone within a decade.
Ohio State University scientist , Lonnie Thompson one of the world's foremost glaciologists said, "What we see in the Andes is happening in Kilimanjaro and in the Himalayas. We've just been in southeast Alaska, and 1,987 out of 2,000 glaciers are retreating."
"It's a very compelling story." The glaciers -- "water towers of the world" -- are the most visible indicators that we are now in the first phase of global warming.