‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers
‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers
Married couple from Bristol attract awe and abuse on X with photos that show ‘staggering’ changes in the Alps
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"?
imminent collapse of the snow industry
That should make the tourism industry get their lobbying straight.
He is partially right - there are people making a lot of money from climate change... Or at least from causing it
A thousand year event, every year.
The hottest day on record every year
That sounds like some northern Minnesota things lol
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.
No, it really isn't. We know it's us now. We've known.
Don't worry. Some people I know can still go skiing, so clearly it's all fake and a non-issue.
I've seen a guy hold a snowball on TV. We're fine.
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.
Switzerland has always been the go to holiday destination for my grandparents, parents and now me. The difference in pictures (and memories) between the generations is terrifying
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.
Dear gods, the ice cream market would have plummeted!
I'm sure a lot of the comments on other platforms would say something along the lines of "They obviously took one picture in the summer and one in the winter... 😒 But enjoy your antifa money 🤣🤣🤣"
I always thought the Mer de Glace at the Mont Blanc illustrates this really well. You arrive and there's a sign "the glacier was here in 1910" and that's where tourists back then.
To get to the actual glacier, you have to eall down many flights of metal stairs for about half an hour and there's several signs for different years, 1950, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, something like this, with the years between each sign getting shorter but the distance staying roughly the same. And from the top it's really far away.
Of course, once you actually reach the glacier, you get to the main attraction, a 3m diameter tunnel they bored 100m deep into it as a tourist attraction with ice sculptures inside. Above the tunnel you can see the remains of the tunnel from the previous year, half melted...
I first went in 2013, you had to climb down quite a long flight of steps to get to it.
Went this summer, and there's an actual gondola 🚡 to take you down to it, then 400 steps down after that
Actually horrifying
Chasing Ice remains a terrific documentary that clearly showed all of this happening 15 years ago.
the post also attracted a steady stream of comments from climate denying-accounts subscribed to X’s premium service, many of which were abusive and misrepresented established climate science
My god
to the surprise of noone
Yeah, we'll deal with it when it affects us personally! Not like nature will just brush us away..right?
There is clearly a catastrophic amount of melting but the perspective, both angle and zoom, exaggerate the melting here. The older photo is more zoomed in and has the mountains higher in the frame. That gives the anti-environmental people something to work with to attempt to discredit the melting.
I put together this gif for a side-by-side comparison. The picture was taken from a slightly different location, so it's not perfect, but the difference is obvious.
Wow. Well done!
So if I'm interpreting your analysis correctly, we don't just have a global warming problem, but there's also ghosts!?
More likely, it was just taken on 2 different devices. It's reasonable that the camera or phone they owned changed in 15 years.
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Everyone in this sub agrees that climate change is a disastrous event, and that we're not doing enough. But as soon as you suggest changing to a system that actually may do something against it, you guys drop the t-word like there's no tomorrow.
Edit: to all of you fellas downvoting me, I have a message. Don't worry, we will surely defeat climate change by reforming capitalism against the interests of those controlling the media and our politicians through their vast wealth, as we've been achieving for the past 20 years in which the CO2 emissions have been reducing exponentially!
While capitalism is a big accelerator of climate change, socialism could do the same. Whether you exploit the environment for capitalist profit or the perceived profit of human society, the end result can be the same.
All animals want to exploit nature for their benefit, even if it is a short term benefit but a long term loss. Humans, and arguebly capitalism, are just more efficient. But here is an infamous example of socialism fucking the environment
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
PS People's issue isnt with socialism, it's with supporting authoritative regimes, that dont even claim to be socialist(Russia for example)
While capitalism is a big accelerator of climate change, socialism could do the same
The difference is that capitalism by its nature requires the degradation of the environment. Capitalism, by definition, needs to increase profits year after year. Unlimited growth is impossible in a finite planet with limited technology without degrading the environment, so capitalism simply ignores the climate in its quest for higher profits. After all, you can't risk getting outcompeted by another company which will be less afraid of abusing nature.
Socialism, on the other hand, doesn't need perpetual growth. The objective isn't infinite profit, the objective is higher living quality for people, which doesn't necessarily rely on increased material wealth, especially not in a context of degrading climate which negatively affects the quality of life of people. It doesn't mean socialism doesn't have to work hard to prevent degrading nature, it just means that it's not a necessary logical consequence of socialism whereas it is of capitalism.
You talk about historical proof. The reality is that historically, the groups concerned by climate change have consistently been to the left of the political spectrum, whereas the right wing (capitalism's most loyal defenders) doesn't seem to care. For 36 years we've had an International Panel on Climate Change (though ExxonMobil had reports of Climate Change being manmade since the early 70s and hid them), and for 36 years scientists have been saying the same: we're not doing enough. What's been the response of capitalist governments everywhere? "We shall continue not doing enough". How many years of capitalism in all countries failing to step up to the problem do you need to realize that capitalism simply has no incentives to solve this problem because it's fundamentally an antidemocratic system, in which the interests of a few in the owning class are held above those of the working class?
They obviously took one picture in the summer and one in the winter... 😒 But enjoy your antifa money 🤣🤣🤣
August 2009 and August 2024, but enjoy your... I don't even know? MAGA money?
Petah, what kind of money do users who suck the dicks of oil companies like?
Covered in cum presumably
Not sure if this is supposed to be a joke comment or just weird.
That is not how glaciers work. Please educate yourself.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-glacier
"A glacier is a large, perennial accumulation of crystalline ice, snow, rock, sediment, and often liquid water that originates on land and moves down slope under the influence of its own weight and gravity."
perennial - "lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring."
No way I'm taking bribes from "Big Antifa"!
But enjoy your antifa money 🤣🤣🤣
You know you are on an anarchist instance right?
I tried to reference them
The earth changes?! How dare it!?
I doubt anyone here actually needs to hear it, but just in case: the problem is that we're changing it, and we're changing it for the worse
Also, we're changing it far too quickly for everything else to keep up.
Yawn. Same old talking points.