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Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

france24.com

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Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#91

Post by triceratops »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #80
triceratops wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China vs US. Number only. China: down 2.7% this year US: up 4.2%. That's total, not per-capita. Try some other excuses to do nothing about climate change. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292

-2.7% to what total amount? +4.2% to what total amount? This obscures the numbers. The climate doesn't care about improvement, only about total tons of CO2.

It's obvious you don't believe a word of whatever you're saying all over this comment thread. Especially

> The climate doesn't care about improvement, only about total tons of CO2

Given how easily you pooh-poohed cumulative historical emissions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509432. The climate also cares about all carbon, past and present. Not just the carbon emitted by China specifically today on October 7, 2025, as you keep repeating. (Only current emissions matter, right? So even China's emissions yesterday and the day before are meaningless).

All of your arguments are extremely in bad faith.

I don't understand why you're doing this though. What do you gain? Is it just about "China bad"? Or about denying the developed world's responsibility for climate change? Or is it for the pleasure of trolling? Please help me understand what's going through your mind.

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#92

Post by potato3732842 »

username223 wrote: post #24

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 glaci…

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.

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#93

Post by potato3732842 »

haroldp wrote: post #57
caturopath wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

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 t…

>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.

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#94

Post by maxglute »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #81
maxglute wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total historic emissions is the ONLY serious metric. Since it accounts for all capital buildouts, it takes centuries of emission heavy construction to get developed countries where they are. Countries are going to emit more when they're in steel and concrete phase of nation building. Does climate care about emissions? Does climate care about changing? No. Climate doesn't care it cycles back to ice age. Humans (hypoth…

Why does China have the right to "develop" when they are already one of the most advanced countries on the planet? Do they get to advance until they're in first place? And then what? It stops there or does India get a shot at being first place? Then Nigeria? Meanwhile what does the climate look like if every single country executes the China 1945-2025 playbook?

Because it's not uniformly developed, there's still 100s of millions who are underdeveloped. If we're sensible we'll cap a limit on what first place should emit per capita and that will be the benchmark everyone targets / settles at. Right now that's high income per capita emissions. Realistically, it doesn't stop until some agreed/enforced per capital emission ceiling and if that agreed ceiling takes us to 4/5/6 degrees then that's where we're going to settle. Ultimately the fair requirement is suggest countries have X historic per captia emissions adjustment to unfuck themselves / prepare for climate change. If wealthy countries are generous they can subsidize the transition, but we know that's unlikely so really it's about how (or whether) to mitigate the free for all.

In an even fairer world, huge renewable exporters would get credit / per capita adjustments for exporting net renewable and fossil exporers would get opposite. Oh and countries with high TFR or advanced economies with high immigration that multiplies an immigrant's emission (i.e. poor -> rich flow) would get penalized. But that's even less likely to happen because it's obvious whose interest these sensible proposals undermine, because climate change isn't a scientific of enviromental problem, it's a geopolitcal one.

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#95

Post by defrost »

graeme wrote: post #74
triceratops wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China's CO2 emissions have continued to increase rapidly along with renewables China's emissions fell 2.7% this year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292 Not per-capita emissions, total emissions.

I'd love for CO2 to be peaking, but the comments on that link suggest this is a single month's measurement and that month is not representative as there was a policy cutoff for end of the month that frontloaded solar investments.

CO2 emissions haven't yet peaked but global coal use has, all countries have significantly dropped their coal usage with the exception of India and China.

Per annum total global coal use has peaked and is projected to fall from this year forward.

China's use is becoming "better" (closing many small dirty old coal power stations, opening fewer but larger and more efficient less polluting new ones) while having a set long term plan to phase out coal while using it now to power a transition to renewables (wind turbines and solar panels don't make themselves yet, nor do they yet power their own production).

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#96

Post by pfannkuchen »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #68
pfannkuchen wrote: post #47

Sounds like free real estate! Humans have a pretty hard time living on glaciers AFAIK.

Glaciers provide a lot of fresh water, sustained over warm months, free of charge, to the places we can live in. We need them to support life in hotter, drier, or more temperate areas. Here in BC, Canada they provide cool, oxygenated water for countless species including several pacific salmon and other fish species, which constitutes (or constituted, now; I'm no longer sure of the status) one of the largest nutrient…

The water doesn’t actually come from the glacier, though, right? It comes from the sky. The glacier hogs it for awhile. The glacier melting won’t cause the rain to stop falling.

The slow release mechanism does seem useful, but a human built reservoir can do the same thing. It doesn’t really seem like something to worry much about? In isolation, anyway. As a canary it might be worrying.

I do feel confused at how everyone is convinced the warming is man made. Like the climate is never static, so it’s either warming or cooling all the time. Our understanding of what happened in the past climate-wise is based on a bunch of methods that are impossible to actually test directly (since we can’t time travel). And the granularity of temperature data I’ve seen from the past is suspect - the short time period we are dealing with here could be an oscillation of a frequency that gets lost in the sampling granularity that actually happens. I’ve done a fair bit of reading looking for the definitive proof, but I just haven’t found it. I’m a bit spectrum-y though and social consensus or pressure doesn’t really work on me, which is kind of unfortunate, I don’t say that proudly. Were you convinced by data on this, or have you just been taught that the experts say this is what is happening? Can you help me?

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#97

Post by tpm »

lm28469 wrote: post #56
toomuchtodo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not forever. Global population will peak end of century (sometime between 2055-2084) and then begin to rapidly decline based on fertility rate curves. Solar PV panels can be recycled 100% today, trivially, as can lithium and sodium batteries (these materials are abundant in the Earth's crust, but only so much will be needed to establish a circular supply lifecycle loop). I suppose we can argue about the scale o…

> Population will peak end of century and then begin to rapidly decline based on fertility rate curves. If that's truly how it'll go we don't even need EVs and renewable to attain equilibrium. But something tells me we'll manage to fuck it up somehow

we absolutely need to stop pushing CO2 into the atmosphere ASAP.

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#98

Post by metalman »

the pictures in the article show how patheticly out of touch the response to global warming is , pathetic and apathetic, people looking at melting grubby glacier with there coat over there shoulder, a town devestated by a glacial collapse sitting underwater, but with a little bright orange sediment barrier installed to meet regulations meanwhile gretta is getting shit kicked by zionist goons for showing the connections between social and environmental collapse

Re: Swiss glaciers have shrunk by a quarter since 2015, study says

#100

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

triceratops wrote: post #91
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-2.7% to what total amount? +4.2% to what total amount? This obscures the numbers. The climate doesn't care about improvement, only about total tons of CO2.

It's obvious you don't believe a word of whatever you're saying all over this comment thread. Especially > The climate doesn't care about improvement, only about total tons of CO2 Given how easily you pooh-poohed cumulative historical emissions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509432 . The climate also cares about all carbon, past and present. Not just the carbon emitted by China specifically today on Octobe…

This thread is highlighting that climate change initiatives are about harming the West in favor of everyone else.

China is by far the biggest carbon emitter. People try to obscure that through "per capita" and "historical cumulative" figures and "percentage improvement".

The way people contort themselves to protect China, the mega-emitter is laughable. They improved 2.7%!! So they went from 31% to 30.92% of total manmade CO2?

You're not serious about the climate, you just want to punish the US/West.

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