The Last Glacier of Venezuela | Hacker News Reader

The Last Glacier of Venezuela

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62 pointsfern1221 comments

Slightly unrelated: when juxtaposing pictures in a before-after presentation, but the before picture before (left), and the after picture, after (right).

In the original picture from Wikimedia used in this article (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pico_Bol%C3%ADvar_19...), it was already in left-to-right order, someone took the effort to invert it.

Unless you are writing to an audience that have a right-to-left writing system, in that case invert what I suggested, I suppose.

Kind of makes sense with the F-shaped eye line. [0] Most people are going to see the title of the article click on it and immediately see the little itty bitty glacier on the full color picture of the mountain. This helps cement the idea that this is an article about the current state of the mountain and not a historical piece.

0. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-we...

It depends what you are trying to convey. There are definitely reasons to choose the positioning from present past in left-to-right.

In this example, you see what it is now, and you are SHOCKED when you see it used to have skiers on it.

The shock should actually be less the more time is considered, if you had it from past to present.

I think they wanted to get the skier in the scene

I am definitely a climate change believing liberal whatever, but looking at this phenomena over a long term... haven't we had ice ages in the past where there were a lot more glaciers? I guess my question really is: is this something we should be sad about, or just accept as a part of the cycle of the earth (albeit this time being caused due to man-made causes)?

natural changes like ice ages take thousands of years. What we see now is a rapid in front of your eyes change.

I'm not so much sad about it as scared that it's going to cause a near-extinction of humanity. I'm confident that the biodiversity of the planet will recover in the long term.

I worry that well meaning "scare propaganda" makes some people think near-extinction of humanity is a real possible consequence of global warming.

For one thing, I wonder if any extra suicides are caused by this?

The passing of things is the way of all things, but it's a sad sensation still. I think this is what is called 'mono no aware' in Japanese.

We are still in this ice age, technically speaking, but it is waning. At the peak of this ice age the ice was 2-3 miles high across much of North America. But human population exploded during this interglacial period, which is clearly favorable to us. The population of humans on earth has increased 20x in the last 1000 years, a rate of increase that relies in large part on fossil water. When the ice age ends and the glaciers are gone what are all those people going to drink? Humanity faces a monumental technical challenge in providing for themselves that which nature has heretofore provided, else it faces a significant reduction in population.

Lol, wut. You do know that most people do not get their drinking water from glaciers, right?

Water is fairly cheap, in the modern era. And even if those "cheap" sources of water disappear, all we have to do is look at how current water sparse areas get their water.

Perhaps water prices might double in the next 100 years, but that really isn't a big deal because our economy is growing much quicker than that.

This is also completely missing the point that human consumption of water is a very small proportion of water use. Major city centers are never going to literally run out of water to drink.

Very worse case scenario, we'll have to reduce the amount of meat that we consume a bit, as meat prices go up due to the water price increase. (most water is consumed by farming applications).

Hundreds of millions of people rely on Himalayan glacier melt for their water. These nations also happen to be the least-able to diplomatically handle international river resource disputes.

Another important function is modulation of flows. Even if you're not drinking fossil water, glaciers & permanent snowfields act as reservoirs and even the flow out over the year. Without them, you get spring floods and summer droughts.

It is the change which is probably hurting us, especially its speed, which is causing changes which are going to hurt our society on the scale of decades to a hundred years.

You should "just accept it as a part of the cycle of the earth" if you believe these cycles are supposed to happen on a period on the order of a century.

I have been fascinated with glaciers my entire life. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and it is fortunate that we still have them. It is a shame that my grandchildren might not get to experience their beauty and splendor.

Shame. I biked up to one of the last glaciers in Colombia. Got to see them before they are gone.

... for now

How will this impact the sustainability of Venezuela as an independent country? Will it still be able to feed its people without glacier water?

>Mountain glaciers serve as a crucial buffer as they help to provide water (as melt water) when rainfall is minimal or nonexistent (Vuille et al., 2008), such as during the dry season or during drought conditions. This implies that some melting is necessary to fuel the existing hydrologic processes and fulfil consumption needs.

https://na.unep.net/geas/getUNEPPageWithArticleIDScript.php?...

To be fair, Venezuela hasn't been able to feed its people properly even WITH these glaciers (not to mention the enormous oil wealth.) With a functioning economy, you can overcome a lot of natural obstacles (see Singapore).

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