Glaciers provide a lot of fresh water, sustained over warm months, free of charge, to the places we can live in. We need them to support life in hotter, drier, or more temperate areas. Here in BC, Canada they provide cool, oxygenated water for countless species including several pacific salmon and other fish species, which constitutes (or constituted, now; I'm no longer sure of the status) one of the largest nutrient transfers on the planet.

Glaciers are a crucial component of many ecosystems and ways of life. We can't live on them, but they make it so we can live where we do live now.

The water doesn’t actually come from the glacier, though, right? It comes from the sky. The glacier hogs it for awhile. The glacier melting won’t cause the rain to stop falling.

The slow release mechanism does seem useful, but a human built reservoir can do the same thing. It doesn’t really seem like something to worry much about? In isolation, anyway. As a canary it might be worrying.

I do feel confused at how everyone is convinced the warming is man made. Like the climate is never static, so it’s either warming or cooling all the time. Our understanding of what happened in the past climate-wise is based on a bunch of methods that are impossible to actually test directly (since we can’t time travel). And the granularity of temperature data I’ve seen from the past is suspect - the short time period we are dealing with here could be an oscillation of a frequency that gets lost in the sampling granularity that actually happens. I’ve done a fair bit of reading looking for the definitive proof, but I just haven’t found it. I’m a bit spectrum-y though and social consensus or pressure doesn’t really work on me, which is kind of unfortunate, I don’t say that proudly. Were you convinced by data on this, or have you just been taught that the experts say this is what is happening? Can you help me?