Loss of Glaciers

[Wandering Sagebrush]

This is sad, but not surprising news, major glaciers across the world gone by 2050.

 

[Casa Escarlata Robles Too]

Sad state but a lot of that is nature and man.
Frank

 

[AWG_Pics]

I am saddened by the loss of what I knew to exist not so long before my lifetime. As conciliation, I remind myself that, between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, the site of Seattle was covered by ice as much as a mile thick. Human climate change has accelerated the warming of our planet causing many disappointments, but it is not clear that we have been any more influential than an extra nudge to existing processes. For example, the Great Salt Lake has been much deeper and has entirely disappeared on several occasions over the last 13,000 years. How long will it take to iron out any human caused climate effects? I don't know, but surely we will have caused merely an insignificant blip in climate from the perspective of anyone observing from 20,000 to 30,000 years in the future.

 

[Casa Escarlata Robles Too]

I am saddened by the loss of what I knew to exist not so long before my lifetime. As conciliation, I remind myself that, between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, the site of Seattle was covered by ice as much as a mile thick. Human climate change has accelerated the warming of our planet causing many disappointments, but it is not clear that we have been any more influential than an extra nudge to existing processes. For example, the Great Salt Lake has been much deeper and has entirely disappeared on several occasions over the last 13,000 years. How long will it take to iron out any human caused climate effects? I don't know, but surely we will have caused merely an insignificant blip in climate from the perspective of anyone observing from 20,000 to 30,000 years in the future.

How true.
Frank

 

[Foy]

I am saddened by the loss of what I knew to exist not so long before my lifetime. As conciliation, I remind myself that, between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, the site of Seattle was covered by ice as much as a mile thick. Human climate change has accelerated the warming of our planet causing many disappointments, but it is not clear that we have been any more influential than an extra nudge to existing processes. For example, the Great Salt Lake has been much deeper and has entirely disappeared on several occasions over the last 13,000 years. How long will it take to iron out any human caused climate effects? I don't know, but surely we will have caused merely an insignificant blip in climate from the perspective of anyone observing from 20,000 to 30,000 years in the future.

Many thanks for this genuine "boots on the ground" scientist's perspective. I rather suspect there are few geologists within the "97% of scientists agree" fantasy team inasmuch as geologists have the entire 4+ billion years of Earth's history in mind as presently observed effects of human habitation are considered. As eloquently noted above, Earth has seen surface temperature fluctuations from that of an uninhabitable oven to full coverage by ice (aka "snowball Earth") in its history, along with literally hundreds of huge fluctuations in sea levels on the scale of tens to hundreds of meters, triggered by water becoming locked up in miles- thick continental ice sheets and released as the ice sheets melted due to naturally cyclic surface temperature changes. The most recent ice age was a mere blink of an eye, or less, in the past, and at its zenith, sea levels were many tens of meters lower than they are today. The location at which I sip my morning coffee today is at the edge of the great Chesapeake Bay which was, during the last ice age, the 200 mile long(er) pastoral valley of the Susquehanna River, and the brackish rivers and sounds I crossed while driving here yesterday were its western flank tributaries. At least some of the presently observed sea level changes are quite likely just the tail end of the post-Pleistocene warming after the last ice age's peak cooling. Both the initial cooling and subsequent warming occurred with zero influence from animal life, as did all such events going all the way back at least to + or - 1.5 billion years ago when the relatively undisturbed Belt sediments accumulated along the present Montana/Idaho/Alberta/BC border areas
Why "solutions" which wreck the economies of the most impoverished among us are thought to be necessary is frankly beyond me. The smart money is on adapting to climate change, as there's no way to stop it.

Foy

 

[AWG_Pics]

Many thanks for this genuine "boots on the ground" scientist's perspective. I rather suspect there are few geologists within the "97% of scientists agree" fantasy team inasmuch as geologists have the entire 4+ billion years of Earth's history in mind as presently observed effects of human habitation are considered. As eloquently noted above, Earth has seen surface temperature fluctuations from that of an uninhabitable oven to full coverage by ice (aka "snowball Earth") in its history, along with literally hundreds of huge fluctuations in sea levels on the scale of tens to hundreds of meters, triggered by water becoming locked up in miles- thick continental ice sheets and released as the ice sheets melted due to naturally cyclic surface temperature changes. The most recent ice age was a mere blink of an eye, or less, in the past, and at its zenith, sea levels were many tens of meters lower than they are today. The location at which I sip my morning coffee today is at the edge of the great Chesapeake Bay which was, during the last ice age, the 200 mile long(er) pastoral valley of the Susquehanna River, and the brackish rivers and sounds I crossed while driving here yesterday were its western flank tributaries. At least some of the presently observed sea level changes are quite likely just the tail end of the post-Pleistocene warming after the last ice age's peak cooling. Both the initial cooling and subsequent warming occurred with zero influence from animal life, as did all such events going all the way back at least to + or - 1.5 billion years ago when the relatively undisturbed Belt sediments accumulated along the present Montana/Idaho/Alberta/BC border areas
Why "solutions" which wreck the economies of the most impoverished among us are thought to be necessary is frankly beyond me.

The smart money is on adapting to climate change, as there's no way to stop it.

Foy

Well said. My agreement wholeheartedly. The sentence I extracted and bolded is the only reality that has any chance of being effective.

The error our modern social society falls into is: "I see a problem (in this case climate change), we must do something fix it!"

But, overwhelmingly bad things happen and we can count ourselves lucky if we figure out some way to survive -- and move on from there.

Tony