Irish Examiner view: Predicted fate of major glaciers sets yet another grim milestone

Just as extraordinary weather events become the norm here in Ireland, we learn that Kilimanjaro's glacier is set to disappear

Fri, 04 Nov, 2022 - 02:02

Another grim milestone was announced this week with the news that major glaciers — including those on Mount Kilimanjaro, and in Yosemite in the US — are to disappear by 2050 due to our climate’s catastrophic collapse.

The announcement had such a ring of familiarity that one is left wondering what, if anything, would have the power to shock the world into action.

Images of vast portions of the polar ice sheets breaking off into the ocean were arresting when first seen, but the shock value associated with such pictures soon wears off. Is it possible that once those images have been seen by people, the impression grows that such events occurred once, never to be repeated?

There’s an undoubted power to the images of Yosemite and Kilimanjaro — even if, truth be told, the latter has the edge in terms of specific identification with glaciers. After all, the snows of Kilimanjaro were once so famous that they served as a story title for Ernest Hemingway: Even if they have never been to Africa, readers will be familiar with the image of the mountain resolving into a distant, snow-capped peak.

Is that part of the problem now as well — the idea that hugely symbolic disappearances like the snow on Kilimanjaro resonate less with us than our own lived experience?

That suggestion doesn’t survive a collision with our own recent reality. The hotter summers and rainier winters we experience are less dramatic than collapsing ice sheets but they’re manifest and becoming more marked every year — yet those aren’t rousing us to overt action either.

If neither the richly symbolic image nor the discomfiting everyday experience can make us take action, what is left to do so?

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