“We’re past the tipping point for the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies (…) Even if somehow, magically, we’re able to stop global warming tomorrow and return the atmosphere to more normal CO2 concentrations, we would lose most of the Rockies’ glaciers.”
…
“We might have a 20-year window of this much water and then it will start to fall off a cliff,” he says. “How much water is flowing through the river as a function of that time of year is going to start changing remarkably.”
…
“It’s sort of become a catchment for contaminants,” says Criscitiello. Legacy contaminants like DDT are starting to melt out of the snowpack, she says. “This has become a concern.”
:doomjak:
All geo-engineering under capitalism (and, more spicily, under a hypothetical industrial communism) is tech-saviorism and will be bought and wholly owned by the Gates Foundation or local equivalent for the express purpose of keeping the coal mines and oil wells going.
Oh yeah, I fully agree. I don't think any meaningful change is going to happen, in the US especially, until states start to collapse from climate crises anyway, so any actual positive geo-engineering probably wouldn't happen unless some kind of hypothetical post-collapse communist state has the ability to do it. I also won't be surprised if we just kick the can down the road with something like this eventually, and make the problem worse in the long term by acidifying the atmosphere for decades or centuries. I'd hope that an industrial communist state would fix it in the long term, but it's all hypotheticals from here anyway.
I try not to be a doomer as much as I can help it, but now truly is the time of monsters.