A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.
Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhone glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green lake.
“Not gonna lie, it made me cry,” Porter said in a viral post on social media platform X on Sunday night.
My dad thinks climate change is a scam and “someone [i]s making a lot of money from it”
My dad also laments that the local lake doesn’t freeze over like it did when he was a teenager, DRIVING on top of it with his brothers.
Totally unrelated to climate change though. Cause that’s totes fake.
Also storms are more violent and frequent, winters are basically spring 2.0 now and the local river has flooded way past historic levels and could threaten the downtown area of their city within the decade.
But all that is SOOOOOOO unrelated.
The cognitive dissonance is so strange to me. I’m a native Cheesehead and it’s a well documented fact that ice fishing season in Wisconsin is quickly getting shorter and shorter due to the higher winter temperatures.
Maybe it’s a branding issue. What if we start referring to “climate change” as “demise of ice fishing” or “imminent collapse of the snowmobile industry”?
He is partially right - there are people making a lot of money from climate change… Or at least from causing it
To be fair there are also a lot of ‘green’ company scams out there too. Grifters are everywhere
Talked to a random farmer last week:
“Weather is unpredictable, so wet, then hot, then cold. I need to work 36 hours straight or our hay will get wet. But I gotta feed my cows. Well, I guess this is just how it is, right?”
I really didn’t know what to say to him. Evaporation, water cycle, soil compaction, diesel, methan, milk? He wouldn’t even try to understand any of this. I don’t want to become one of the cynical “we are fucked”-people. Everyone can change something in their lifes.
While I think climate change is a real issue and we need to do something about it, I can see the rationale behind your dad’s thoughts and childhood memories.
Is the planet getting hotter is one thing and was it caused by humans is another thing.
Don’t worry. Some people I know can still go skiing, so clearly it’s all fake and a non-issue.
In case you have felt the world be a little lighter recently, he died a month ago: https://lemmy.world/post/17387694
“It won’t happen in our lifetimes”
guess what mfers
I believe climate change deniers changed their tune from “it’s not happening” to “it happened before, so what’s the problem?” Most people believe in man-made climate change, but deniers want people to feel powerless and hopeless, and succumb to the system of continuous consumption of finite resources under capitalism.
Maybe we need analogies for what is happening that they can understand e.g. “sure, houses have burned down before…and some rooms in the house didn’t burn, so you can still live in them…but usually you get off your butt and fire-proof your curtains and paint and help your upstairs and downstairs neighbour, because if you don’t maybe their irresponsibility will make your insurance premium rise…”
I tried to do the same thing at Franz Josef glacier earlier this year. I didn’t even get the glacier in shot.
Is that the one that says “the glacier may look like this [picture] in 2100 if global warming keeps happening” and the glacier is noticeably more receded than that?
Yes. Was there 7 years ago and it had already receded way past the 2100 pic.
Fuck that’s depressing
If only all the scientists could have predicted all of this. Maybe even tried to warn us about it and write it in signs.
Stupid scientists…
We are fucked.
Reminds me of an economist who was telling everyone that a few degrees of climate change would barely cost 1% of economic growth so it would not be an issue at all. The climate scientists replied that at -4°C there was a mile of ice at the spot he was sitting and you would think that this would surely affect the economy, and that +4°C would have similar results.
