More than half gone
Climate change means (among other things) running out of water. We’ve talked about Phoenix and water, the Sierras and water, the Colorado River and water…there are also the Alps and water.
Switzerland’s glaciers have lost more than half their volume in less than a hundred years, and the long hot summer this year has accelerated the thaw, a new study shows.
More than half gone and the melt is speeding up, so that’s not good. Since we’re not doing much of anything to stop it, it’s very bad.
The glaciers support ski resorts and attract climbers and hikers in summer, but are also essential to Europe’s water supply. Now, communities across the Alps are worrying about their future.
Climbing and hiking are luxuries. Water, not so much.
The findings are in line with long standing evidence that Europe’s glaciers are shrinking, and that there is a direct link between the ice loss and global warming.
Ice caps are particularly sensitive to changes in temperature, so if the earth warms, glaciers are the first to notice, and respond, by melting.
Well they don’t notice, but they react.
Mauro Fischer, a glaciologist at the University of Bern, is responsible for monitoring the Tsanfleuron and Scex Rouge [glaciers]. Every year in spring he installs ice measuring rods, and checks them regularly over the summer and autumn.
When he went to check them in July, he got a shock.
The rods had melted completely out of the ice, and were lying on the ground. His ice measurements, he says, were “off the chart – far beyond what we’ve ever measured since the beginning of the glacier monitoring, maybe three times more mass loss over one year than the average over the last 10 years”.
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Glaciers are often referred to as the water towers of Europe. They store the winter snow, and release it gently over the summer, providing water for Europe’s rivers and crops, and to cool its nuclear power stations.
The news item is from August, but I don’t think global warming has gone into reverse since then.
I’ll bet the same thing is happening to Himalayan glaciers, the meltwaters of which feed the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers, upon which upwards of a quarter of the human population of the planet depends.
The same is true in the Andes. There are entire ski resorts there now that were built on glaciers, with lifts that start on bare ground and lead up to bare ground at the top. And it’s an enormous issue, because like those places in Switzerland, most rivers in the Andes are fed by glacial melt. Without glaciers, no rivers. Without rivers, no crops, no animals, no people.
Vast, sweeping, society-transforming change is needed. Starting two years ago. I have activist friends who talk as if we have ten years in which to get started and implement these changes. People dedicated to this cause (some of whom are in paying gigs) and they still do nothing more than document the rising level of doom.
Both parties are useless on this issue. Most mainstream political parties are. Real change requires breaking the power and influence of the fossil fuels industry and moving quickly away from consumer capitalist growth paradigm to steady-state economics. We haven’t even begun to do any of that.
And as far as I can tell we never will, because the people in charge won’t or can’t. Right wing people in charge won’t and left wing people in charge can’t (because they’ll be replaced if they try).
FWIW I just listened to this about a proposal to replace fossil fuels at minimum cost
https://robertbryce.com/episode/kirsty-gogan-and-eric-ingersoll-co-founders-of-terrapraxis/
I downloaded the report linked to on that webpage, but haven’t yet read it.