Glacier National Park replacing signs that predicted glaciers would gone by 2020

Imagine what the oceans would be like if we still kept dumping trash into them like was common in the 1970s, much less the nuclear waste dumping that Cousteau helped stop some 10 years previous.

Surely some of the reasons for stronger protection came from people who had seen all those amazing underwater videos of life under the sea, narrated by the engaging French voice revealing his love and joy for the ocean.

I can't find a prediction of his that the ocean would be dead. I did find this regarding coral reefs, from https://scitechdaily.com/jacques-cousteau-predicted-detrimen...

> Over dinner on R.V. Calypso while anchored on the lee side of Glover’s Reef in Belize, Jacques Cousteau told Phil Dustan that he suspected humans were having a negative impact on coral reefs. Dustan—a young ocean ecologist who had worked in the lush coral reefs of the Caribbean and Sinai Peninsula—found this difficult to believe. It was December 1974.

> But Cousteau was right. During the following three-plus decades, Dustan, an ocean ecologist and biology professor at the University of Charleston in South Carolina, has witnessed widespread coral reef degradation and bleaching from up close. In the late 1970s Dustan helped build a handheld spectrometer, a tool to measure light given off by the coral. Using his spectrometer, Dustan could look at light reflected and made by the different organisms that comprised the living reefs. Since then, he has watched reefs deteriorate at an alarming rate.

I quote now from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/5-ways-ja...

> Cousteau ultimately gathered nine million signatures from around the world, and in 1997 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization made a declaration on the responsibilities of present generations toward future ones that included language about environmental preservation and the responsibility to “bequeath to future generations an Earth which will not one day be irreversibly damaged by human activity.”

> Cousteau spoke on those obligations at the UN conference he had attended in 1992. “Future generations would not forgive us for having deliberately spoiled their last opportunity,” he said. “Let us stop this delayed-action genocide! Let us cease thinking only of ourselves and reasoning only in the short term....This is our responsibility, as we hold in our hands the future of tomorrow’s exacting generations.”

But Cousteau was right.

Overfishing, drag nets, coral bleaching, ocean acidification. The situation is not great. We treat the oceans even worse than our air.

And as the article says:

> In 2017, the park was told by the agency that the complete melting off of the glaciers was no longer expected to take place so quickly due to changes in the forecast model, Kurzmen said. But tight maintenance budgets made it impossible for the park to immediately change the signs.

> ... the new signs will say: “When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.

A model that was backed by John Carmack, who seems to be off the hook for some reason