Glaciers on the Climate Dashboard

I was at Glacier Bay National Park just last week (https://photos.prakhar.me/alaska) and it was just depressing to hear from the park rangers on how far the glaciers have receded. Really grateful to have been able to witness them in person but it is sad to see what we've done to this planet.

It's important to also note, as explained in the article: >"Grinnell was witnessing the glacier react to a relatively natural change in the climate. The Little Ice Age, which was a cold period when the park’s current glaciers were at their largest, ended in the late 1800s as the climate started warming. The melting of the park’s glaciers in the late 1800s, was a mostly natural reaction to the end of the Little Ice Age."

The quote, without context, implied to me that he had an understanding of anthropogenic climate change a century ago. While there were people[1] at that time who did theorize this was happening, I don't think that's what Grinnell was implying in his diary.

It's also the case that the amount of melting then pales in comparison to the amount occurring today - so I'm not attempting to say that what we see today may be the continuing of a natural climate fluctuation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Gustaf_Ekholm

I’ll never forgive the US for pulling out of the Paris accords after we had gotten China to come to the table. That was our moment to get a real grip on this problem and we blew it. It’ll never come back, I’m convinced.

i guess HN hates facts

I think you’re missing multiple points here. It doesn’t matter. It is highly likely that we’ll lose a large number of glaciers within our lifetimes, just based on trends you can measure with your own eyeball if you wanted. Sure seems like we’re on the tail end of a long process that humans just accelerated.

Whether or not you agree with the last point (though it’s odd to me for someone to look at the sheer scale of human industry and think it has no impact on the global ecosystem), loss of glaciers will certainly have a big impact on those areas. These mountainous regions will have less and less snowmelt in the summer, which means less water everywhere downstream of them, which impacts every living thing in those regions.

When change happens quickly, it is harder for the ecosystem or evolution to balance it out.

The long term trend is, indeed, quite worrisome, even if you want to toss out the short term graph.

All that aside: the problem is that humans are accustomed to some normal, predictable climate trends to live our lives. It is very disruptive when those change in unpredictable ways. And the climate will obviously be unpredictable when a glacier disappears from a region that always had one, or when the El Niño event is the hottest ever. Our predictions are based on similar past events, so what happens when we don’t actually have a similar past event to compare to?