Thursday, October 16, 2008
Snow mass
Alaska's glaciers have been shrinking for some time. Indeed, this year, with its heavy winter snow and very cool summer, marked the first time that glacial mass increased in almost twenty years. A sure sign of anthropogenic climate change, right?
Maybe not:
Since Alaska's glacial maximum back in the 1700s, Molnia said, "I figure that we've lost about 15 percent of the total area."
What might be the most notable long-term shrinkage has occurred at Glacier Bay, now the site of a national park in Southeast Alaska. When the first Russian explorers arrived in Alaska in the 1740s, there was no Glacier Bay. There was simply a wall of ice across the north side of Icy Strait.
That ice retreated to form a bay and what is now known as the Muir Glacier. And from the 1800s until now, the Muir Glacier just kept retreating and retreating and retreating. It is now back 57 miles from the entrance to the bay, said Tom Vandenberg, chief interpretative ranger at Glacier Bay.
That's farther than the distance from glacier-free Anchorage to Girdwood, where seven glaciers overhang the valley surrounding the state's largest ski area. The glaciers there, like the Muir and hundreds of other Alaska glaciers, have been part of the long retreat.
Overall, Molnia figures Alaska has lost 10,000 to 12,000 square kilometers of ice in the past two centuries, enough to cover an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Glaciers in Alaska have been shrinking for more than 200 years. There have been traffic jams in Los Angeles and coal-fired power plants in Ohio for only a fraction of that time. Draw what you conclusions you will.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Oct 17, 10:40:00 AM:
It is obvious that most climate models are deeply flawed. Building an economic model based on the weather is crazy. We will see what rising CO2 levels does to the pH of the worlds oceans, but "the sky is falling" kind of journalism has been with us since my fathers day, at least. When he was young it was the Knights of Columbus who were going to get their guns out from underneath the alters of the church and take over the country.
By , at
Fri Oct 17, 03:39:00 PM:
We can already see what CO2 is already doing to the oceans' pH.
Tidal glaciers, by the way, have cycles of advancing and repeating that are only affected at the margins by changes in climate. Look it up.
There was some natural rebounding of temps in the northern hemisphere post-1850, but the current warming goes far beyond that, as seen in the completely verified hockey stick analysis from the 2001 and 2006 IPCC, and the more recent paper that came several months ago (can't remember if it's Nature or Science).
By , at
Fri Oct 17, 07:20:00 PM:
IPCC is not a group of scientists, but rather an arm of a leftist-dominated association of government agencies (the UN). IPCC controls funding of virtually all climate "research." Yet "scientists" who accept funding from IPCC know that its charter asserts as axiomatic the proposition that the planet's climate is radically changed (and worsened) by modern man. The work of these "scientists" is as tenable as that of the tobacco researchers who were in the pay of Liggett & Meyers.
And no, the hockey stick has not been verified... at least not by anyone whose work is worthy of being described as "scientific."
