Climate change is hitting the Alps hard with major melting that is proceeding faster than expected, an environmental report warned on Monday.
The report, presented to a conference here on the impact of climate change on glaciers, said that the Alps' glacial area had shrunk 20% over the past 20 years.
It said some 800 glaciers on the Italian side of the Alps were not only melting but that the area was warming up at a faster rate than the rest of the country.
Climate experts told the conference that the latest research showed Alpine temperatures increasing at double the pace seen in low-lying and coastal regions.
"Over the past century, air temperatures in the Alps have risen an average 1.5-2 degrees whereas in the rest of Europe, they have increased less than one degree," one expert said.
Conference members were also told that the number of days per year in which Alpine temperatures dropped below freezing were diminishing.
Over the period 1961-2004, there was a 20% reduction in the number of freezing days in the Alps.
The great mountain range's icy crust of permafrost is also disappearing, the experts said.
Mountain Wilderness Italia, a group dedicated to the preservation of Italy's mountainous areas, has also sounded the alarm, saying that ice is falling off peaks across the Italian Alps and Dolomites.
"All you have to do is take a climbing guide from 15 years ago. A spot that is described in the book as a snow-covered ridge is now gravel," it said.
RUBBIA SAYS LITTLE TIME LEFT TO ACT.
In May, the world's top climate experts issued a bleak report on the impact of global warming, predicting effects ranging from widespread hunger in Africa to a fast thaw in the Himalayas.
The report by the UN's climate panel, which includes experts from 100 countries, increased pressure on governments to act quickly.
It said warming, widely blamed on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, would cause desertification, droughts and rising seas.
Italy's Nobel-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia said recently that if humanity failed to change its ways, it would pay the price within a decade or so.
The physicist, who headed the Italian Institute for New Technologies, Energy and Environment until 2005, said reports claiming that all ice would disappear from the Alps and that Venice could soon be under water were no exaggeration.
"We are facing an emergency. We have ten to 15 years to change the world, otherwise the world will change us. And it will change us in terrible ways," he said.
Rubbia urged the world's governments to plough funds into scientific and technological research which would help drastically reduce pollution and hopefully halt global warming.
He argued that economic or political measures, such as incentives to use less oil derivatives, would never produce results fast enough.
"The only solution is technology. The only way forward is research, research and more research," he said.
Rubbia has won international acclaim not only for his work in the field of particle physics but also in driving forward the development of renewable energy resources.
He is currently professor at the University of Pavia, Italy and has recently worked at a project on solar thermal energy plants in Spain.
