Hacker News Reader

Comment by username223 | Hacker News Reader

I have believed for years that Americans would have a completely different attitude to global warming if the Lower 48 had more glaciers. In the Alps, you can easily walk to places where there are 100m of ladders to reach a hut that used to be at the level of the ice. In Canada, you can drive to places that used to be the toe of a glacier, then drive another half-mile to the parking lot, built at the edge of the glacier 20 years ago, then walk even farther on loose rubble. 1.5℃ of warming feels abstract and trivial. A giant piece of ice disappearing feels much more real.

View on HN

Whenever I try to read up on it, it seems like glaciers are receding at ~2x their without-climate-change rate. That's a huge increase, but it doesn't seem like there's something that a person can experience at a visceral level here that is based on fact and not just preconception.

It's definitely striking, I can't deny that. I crossed the last remnants of an almost-extinct glacier last year that my guide guessed would be gone in 1-3 years: at the beginning of his career it was a real glacer with non-trivial extents, crevasses, etc.

I grew up in a small town in rural Alaska that would have been completely under glacier ice when Columbus landed in North America. In the time between Captain Cook exploring the area in the 18th century and the next western survey a hundred years later, the coastline had been transformed by glaciers receding and revealing inlets hadn't been there for Cook to map. The glacier that was directly in between my town and the highway to Anchorage when I was a child is all but gone now, and there is a road.

>and revealing inlets hadn't been there for Cook to map.

That must have been maddening for the people who showed up and tried to make sense of it with only Cook's maps.

I live in one of the places in the lower 48 with relatively easy access to glaciers. The change in some of them is fairly noticeable for me over the last say 20 years. It tends to feel grim and helpless if think about it too much. But I hike so I have spent time closer to them than an average person.

This researcher's account is interesting to see comparisons of EU glaciers over the last 100 years or so. https://bsky.app/profile/subfossilguy.bsky.social

And this blog: https://glacierchange.blog/

I think we're further hamstrung by 2℃ sounding smaller than the 3.6℉ it is equivalent to.

There are vast swaths of the us where people say things like "we used to get more snow" or "the snow used to stick around" or whatever.

It's not like people aren't exposed to the changes.

I mean it doesn't seem like Canadians have any different attitude (judging by carbon footprint) and they have glaciers. The truth is nobody really cares about global warming, just their own comfort at this moment :/ It's just the human condition.

Plenty of Americans can see and feel the effects of global warming, they just don't think addressing it is worth the effort.

Do they? Wildfires are some percent more likely and larger, but forests have always burned, and there are other factors like a century of fire suppression. Hurricanes are more violent and frequent, but there have always been hurricanes. Eggheads will tell you those things, but your day-to-day experiences of them are easy to dismiss. Watching a glacier die is visceral:

https://maevethornberry.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Mer-de... https://drdirtbag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/athabasca36...

Most polls find that a substantial majority of Americans acknowledge climate change is real. However, whether it should be acted on with urgency polls differently by party affliation and by geographical region.

Many climate change deniers I know have moved from "it isn't real" to "so what?" Or, perhaps more charitably, to "addressing climate change is not in the national interest."

I don't think people who want to drill in national parks, privatize and raze old growth preserves, or exhaust fisheries without limits are going to be moved by seeing glaciers melt. They fundamentally have different values and place other interests over preservation and conservation.

Tragically common. A tragedy of the commons if you will.

Most Americans can see the effect but are unable to correlate it. The don't understand science. Most of them believe in a magical fairy in the sky.

[flagged]

That ice melting absorbs the energy that would otherwise be warming the atmosphere and causing cataclysmic storms and crop failures due to heat. And that is exactly what is going to happen once the glaciers melt.

The people worried about melting glaciers are not laminating the loss of pretty ice. They are worried about where this extra energy will go once there is no more ice to change phase and absorb it.

The planet's rising temperatures will be the least of some regions' concerns as the knock-on effects from the redistributed water will be much, much deeper than current awareness.

The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data?

We do not know what we do not know however we act like we know everything yet learn new things about the planet daily. The things the survivors are going to learn about the changes that are setting in will be the last thing those that did not survive experienced from those cataclysmic moments.

Sure, and I'm happy a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs so we mammals could take over… but I'd be a bit saltier about a new one hitting tomorrow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com