Left Coast Correspondent: Canadian and European Glaciers Receding Long Before Cars and Planes; Climate Alarmists Only Disclose 20th Century Info

Click here to read the original Cautious Optimism Facebook post with comments

3 MIN READ - In a followup to Friday’s article on the retreat of Alaska’s Glacier Bay ice sheet, the Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Left Coast Affairs and other Inexplicable Phenomena uncovers more glaciers that have been receding long before man started driving cars. You’ll want to view the five attached pictures for reference.

For those who missed it, the original Glacier Bay map and analysis post is available at:

https://www.cautiouseconomics.com/2025/08/leftcoast28.html

During the 18th and 19th centuries the industrialized societies weren’t yet able to survey and map every glacier from all remote corners of the planet, but we still have accurate measurements of many glaciers in North America, Greenland, and Europe.

A popular tourist attraction is Canada’s Athabasca Glacier, off the famous Rocky Mountains Icefields Parkway. From the highway you turn off and take a short, narrow road less than a mile uphill. On the way up tourists see many small roadside markers, each featuring the written year indicating the glacier's earlier terminus.

The Correspondent was on that road several years ago and remembers seeing markers for years like 1880, 1890, and 1908 demonstrating the glacier was already retreating before mass production of automobiles and commercial flight began,

But the climate alarmism crowd always uses photos from more recent markers for their political material, like 1948 and 1982—basically any combination of years that frames the glacier’s retreat as having started when humans began producing large amounts of CO2.

A prime example is the first photo (attached) where we can see the glacier has retreated many dozens of yards at least from where it stood in 1992.

But also attached is a second photo which climate alarmists will never show you—from 1843. 

Yes, 1843.

Where’s this marker? Well you have to turn your car around and drive back downhill to the Icefields Parkway. Then you must cross the highway and go slightly uphill on the other side to reach the Glacier View Lodge. The marker is just outside the hotel.

In a straight line the 1843 marker is well over a mile from the glacier… which is probably why the global warming crowd doesn’t want the public seeing it: people might start to realize just how much the Athabasca had already shrunk before humans started driving cars.

There is also data on glaciers in Montana that show significant retreat from 1850 to 1900, or glaciers in Greenland that were retreating in the 19th century such as the Jakobshavn Glacier, although to the Correspondent’s knowledge there are no markers in the middle of the ocean to denote where it was in 1850.

And we have old 19th century photographs from Europe. In the next two photos we see the dramatic retreat of Switzerland's Rhone Glacier from 1850 to 1900, also before cars, planes, and electrical power plants.

Rhone glacier: 1850

Rhone glacier: 1900. Note new structures.

And then there’s some help from artists. Photography may not have been commonly available in 1835, but we have a painting that year of the Arolla and Tsijiore Nouve glaciers, also in Switzerland.

If we compare the furthest extent of the glaciers in the 1835 and 1880 images, and if we disregard climate activist allegations that the 1835 Swiss painter was being paid by ExxonMobil, a common theme appears: glaciers around the world were already observed retreating rapidly in the 19th century or even in the case of Alaska’s Glacier Bay, during the late 1700’s.

Yet when the global warming lobby shows "before and after" pictures of glaciers, they always cherry pick dates right before mass automobile production and dates near present day. Their objective is to convince (and frighten) viewers by factual omission that it's all the doing of those greenhouse gases and the future of humanity demands they hand over trillions of dollars in new taxes to save the planet.

There are many other northern hemisphere glaciers with 19th century records, but the global warming crowd isn’t going to volunteer the information. The process of finding them online is tedious and painstaking, but anyone with a little search engine persistence will find more.