[thaumasiotes]

> How much damage has to happen before the global environment becomes unrecoverable?

Where the damage in question consists of dumping freshwater into the sea? It would take more water than exists in the world to do irrecoverable damage that way. Try to avoid learning about rivers.

[cdirkx]

> Over 68 percent of the fresh water on Earth is found in icecaps and glaciers, and just over 30 percent is found in ground water. Only about 0.3 percent of our fresh water is found in the surface water of lakes, rivers, and swamps [1].

Fresh water has a different density than salt water, and ice melting in the artic and antarctica is resulting in a huge influx of fresh water that can disrupt ocean currents [2]. These currents currently distribute a lot of heat around the world, and them stopping would result in places like europe getting much colder, while other regions would become much hotter (and with the warmer oceans, probably also have extremer hurricanes).

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/earths-fresh-water/

[2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulat...

[simonh]

The gulf stream that brings warm water from the Caribbean up towards Britain is driven by dense salty water in northern latitudes sinking and flowing south, but the North Atlantic is being flooded with fresh water from Greenland and the North polar ice. Roll those dice!