From glaciers melting to sea rise repercussions, fossil fuels are to blame
“The State of the Global Climate is in a state of emergency. Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red… Humanity has just endured the eleven hottest years on record. When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act.” —UN secretary-general António Guterres “Cleverness may help at the margins—as when chemists identify a relatively harmless substance that can substitute for a toxic one. But without self-limits on population and consumption, no amount of cleverness can halt humanity’s accelerating march toward collapse… There is the uber-problem that should be at the top of all our minds—the long-term survival of humanity. We naturally want our species to stick around. And we like to think that our intelligence improves our prospects in that regard. But, so far, the evidence points in the opposite direction.” —Richard Heinberg “If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.” —Richard Heinberg, educator and writer on energy, economic and ecological issues Decades ago, when I visited the Columbia Icefield in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, the well-documented melting of the Athabasca Glacier, one of several that are spawned from the massive icefield, was a stark reminder of the human-induced impact on our planet’s recent history. Five metres of ice a year are being lost now, and as I saw the historical signposts marking the previous glacial limits of the ice, it came as quite a shock to physically witness the accelerating decline of the glacier. The Columbia Icefield is not alone in the rapid disintegration of the world’s glaciers. The Swiss glaciers are now considered to be doomed in this century. The 2026 heatwaves alone brought about a loss of five metres in ice thickness. In Nepal, new glacial breakdown is taking place on a devastating scale. The recent catastrophe in which a glacier and its rocks and mud broke off, causing the deaths of thousands of people, is but one more graphic example of the intensification of a warming planet. If all this is not a call to action for all people, what will finally cause humankind to wake up? As glaciers melt, so does ultimately the capacity for over a billion people to have what was until now a reliable source of water for their survival, and this extends to all biological life forms. Flooding followed by drought is the natural sequence of events as the glaciers are depleted. Without the great icefields of the Himalayas there would never have been the flourishing of civilizations, as the mighty rivers that emanate from glaciers could not have existed. For the same reasons that glaciers melt—predominantly human-induced climate warming—the ocean heats up. Every tenth of a percent of global warming causes a massive die-off of fish who can’t adapt to a warmer