Receding glacier causes Canadian river to vanish in four days

I don't have a problem with them saying for example - "We believe that the river changed due to warming over the industrial era"

I don't really have a problem with anything they conclude to be honest, I was just answering another guy's question. Shitty of HN users to give me negative points over it. I feel like I'm on Reddit again.

The method of Roe et al. is summarized as follows. Let 1L be the change in glacier length over the past 130 years (∼1.9 km), and let σL be the standard deviation of glacier length due to stochastic fluctuations in mass balance, b, from natural, interannual climate variability. The signal-to-noise ratio is defined by sL =1L/σL . Likewise, sb =1b/σb . Ref. 12 demonstrates that the two are related via sL =γ sb , where γ is an amplification factor that depends only on the duration of the trend and the glacier response time, τ . The probability density function (PDF) for sb is generated by combining the signal-to-noise ratios of the observed melt-season temperature and annual-mean precipitation trends, normalized by the summer (bs) and winter (bw ) mass-balance variability (Supplementary Fig. 1a,b,c), respectively. We take σbw = 0.3 myr−1 and σbs =0.5 myr−1 , based on the observed mass-balance variability at Gulkana Glacier and the analysis of the global datasets of glacier mass balance33. The glacier response time is given by τ =−H/bt , where H is a characteristic glacier thickness, and bt is the (negative) net mass balance at the terminus. We set H=590 m, based on the scaling relationship for glacier geometry suggested by Haeberli and Hoelzle34 and measured cross-sections35; and we set bt =−7 myr−1 , estimated by extrapolating the vertical mass-balance profiles calculated by Flowers et al.8 , thus giving a central estimate for τ of ∼80 years. A PDF is estimated assuming τ follows a gamma distribution incorporating a broad uncertainty of στ =τ /4 (Supplementary Fig. 1d). The PDFs for γ and sb are combined to give a PDF for σL from the relation σL =γ 1L| obssb . This, in turn, is used to evaluate the null hypothesis that 1L| obs occurred due to natural variability. Supplementary Fig. 1e shows our estimate that there is only a 0.5% chance that the observed retreat of Kaskawulsh Glacier happened in the absence of a climate trend.

Cooooooooooool. Thanks!

I also agree with the farmer who said "what about our children, they can't eat trees!!". There's an opportunity for climate change solutions need to be communicated at human timescales (days, months, years). Decades are too hard to imagine.

Thanks for the video!

One challenge with plant-based sequestration is that the carbon is released when the tree dies/decomposes. I wonder how planting more trees will balance out at the decade-century scale.