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‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 months ago by lemmee_in@lemm.ee to c/world@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] Transporter_Room_3@startrek.website 148 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 51 points 4 months ago

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"?

[-] P1nkman@lemmy.world 26 points 4 months ago

imminent collapse of the snow industry

That should make the tourism industry get their lobbying straight.

[-] finestnothing@lemmy.world 49 points 4 months ago

He is partially right - there are people making a lot of money from climate change... Or at least from causing it

[-] greenskye@lemm.ee 12 points 4 months ago

To be fair there are also a lot of 'green' company scams out there too. Grifters are everywhere

[-] ripcord@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

I would say "some", not "a lot". Unless you know about way more "green" scams than I'm aware of.

[-] SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

Yup, and it has a name - Greenwashing.

[-] amanda@aggregatet.org 5 points 4 months ago

That’s capitalism for you: one company makes money creating the problem and another fixing it! It’s double-pumped!

[-] Tugboater203@lemmy.world 20 points 4 months ago

A thousand year event, every year.

[-] andrewth09@lemmy.world 17 points 4 months ago

The hottest day on record every year

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[-] Imperor@lemmy.world 77 points 4 months ago

Don't worry. Some people I know can still go skiing, so clearly it's all fake and a non-issue.

[-] Plopp@lemmy.world 38 points 4 months ago

I've seen a guy hold a snowball on TV. We're fine.

[-] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago

In case you have felt the world be a little lighter recently, he died a month ago: https://lemmy.world/post/17387694

[-] Plopp@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

Rarely do I celebrate people's deaths, but in some cases I do. 🎉

[-] Gsus4@mander.xyz 66 points 4 months ago

"It won't happen in our lifetimes"

guess what mfers

[-] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] Gsus4@mander.xyz 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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..."

[-] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 42 points 4 months ago

I tried to do the same thing at Franz Josef glacier earlier this year. I didn't even get the glacier in shot.

[-] Wanderer@lemm.ee 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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?

[-] nilaus@lemmy.world 22 points 4 months ago

Yes. Was there 7 years ago and it had already receded way past the 2100 pic.

[-] JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago

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..

[-] Droechai@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago

It's not the scientists fault, it's the Prussians who focused more on arms and military than social security nets and infrastructure. It's all been down hill since then

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[-] Timely_Jellyfish_2077@programming.dev 36 points 4 months ago

We are fucked.

[-] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago

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.

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[-] Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 26 points 4 months ago

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 🤣🤣🤣"

[-] JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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...

[-] Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee 6 points 4 months ago

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

[-] MagicCuboid@lemmy.world 13 points 4 months ago

Chasing Ice remains a terrific documentary that clearly showed all of this happening 15 years ago.

[-] amanda@aggregatet.org 11 points 4 months 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

[-] cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago

to the surprise of noone

[-] sirico@feddit.uk 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah, we'll deal with it when it affects us personally! Not like nature will just brush us away..right?

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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024

578 points (97.2% liked)

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