Canadian business consultant and climate science denier Patrick Moore once claimed we shouldn’t worry about melting glaciers.
“Why are glaciers perceived as something important?” he asked at a 2007 agricultural forum in Regina. “They are just big globs of frozen water. Nothing grows on them, they are basically dead zones. When the glaciers retreat, trees come in … and a healthy ecosystem re-emerges. Ice and frost are the enemies of life.”
It’s hard to tell whether people such as Moore are ignorant enough to believe what they say or whether they’re just counting on their audiences to be uninformed enough to buy it.
As anyone with a basic understanding of science knows, glaciers are incredibly important.
Glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets (which are types of glaciers) store enormous amounts of nutrient-rich water — close to 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Under normal conditions, they release it slowly enough that their size is maintained by snowfall and freezing temperatures. As the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center points out, glaciers provide drinking water, irrigate crops and help generate hydroelectric power.
Rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets and caps will exacerbate water shortages and cause sea levels to rise. Scientists estimate that glacier melt has caused 21 per cent of current sea level rise. Large amounts of cold fresh water entering warmer ocean water can even affect ocean currents.
Ice sheets and glaciers also reflect solar radiation back into space, keeping the planet cooler, while darker, exposed areas absorb more heat. So, warmer temperatures cause ice and snow to melt, which in turn causes heating to increase. It’s known as a “feedback loop.”
Of course, glacier melt isn’t the only climate-related factor affecting global water supplies. “Climate change is primarily a water crisis,” the United Nations says. “We feel its impacts through worsening floods, rising sea levels, shrinking ice fields, wildfires and droughts.”
As less snow accumulates in mountains, less water flows into streams and rivers, while reduced precipitation contributes to drought. As drought afflicts some areas, flooding is also increasing, thanks to human activities such as deforestation coupled with heavier precipitation over shorter periods. This, in turn, contributes to water and land contamination and topsoil loss and other agricultural damage.
Water shortages aren’t just bad news for all life that relies on drinking water to survive, including humans; they’re bad news for agriculture. Global food production needs to increase to meet growing demand, and crops need water. As George Monbiot notes in the Guardian, “Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.”
Water levels in reservoirs are also dropping, making it challenging to power hydroelectric plants without lowering turbines. British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec get most of their electricity from hydro, but as Andrew Nikiforuk points out in the Tyee, “In order to make up for shortfalls as drought lowered water levels, power utilities in these three provinces switched to fossil fuel-powered stations or paid large sums for electricity imports in 2023, a calamitous year of wildfires and extreme heat. In fact, almost every major hydro producer in Canada has reported major financial losses in 2023-24 due to low water conditions.”
Because hydro power supplies about one-sixth of global electricity and is currently the main form of low-carbon generation, with substantial increases expected, lower water levels could pose a serious problem for energy and climate.
Water in all its forms — including ice and frost — is life. Those who deny this are willing to risk human health and survival for the sake of the dying but still obscenely profitable fossil fuel industry.
The UN points out, “Sustainable water management is central to building the resilience of societies and ecosystems and to reducing carbon emissions.” Above all, that means tackling the causes of climate disruption: burning fossil fuels, destruction of forests, wetlands and other carbon sinks, and unsustainable agricultural practices, especially livestock farming.
We all need clean air and water, healthy soils and biodiversity to survive. No amount of denial or corporate propaganda will change that.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.
Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.
