Guest post by Tom Fuller
How glaciers have responded to the warming of the past 130 years is a complicated story, although many millions of words have been written to try and explain it.
How glaciers have been used to promote fears of a disastrous future is a much simpler story, but it really only gets told in skeptic weblogs. The story competes with a much easier tale, one that is told by the media strategists for environmental organisations and is repeated by politicians and others seeking temporary fame or permanent fortune through shaping our future to meet the challenges of climate change.
As a non-scientist, what I take from the many articles and papers I have read can be summarized as follows: Glaciers advance and retreat in response to a variety of forces, some mechanical, some climatic, some of each regular, some of each unusual. This has been going on as long as there has been ice. I realize that this is so vague as to be useless and vapid, but I want to start from a non-controversial position. It will probably start to get controversial with the next sentence, and will probably not stop after that.
It is my best understanding based on what I have read (and please feel free to correct errors or hints of bias), that at this point in time more glaciers are retreating than are growing, and probably by a significant percentage. However, some of those that are retreating actually began retreating before global warming started. So, many glaciers are retreating, many should be attributed to global warming, but there are many exceptions–it is by no means a universal phenomenon.
There has never been anything like a census, even using satellite photography over the past 30 years, although photographs of 100,000 glaciers are available at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (I’d love to be proven wrong on that point, as continuous satellite coverage would be really useful.) The Assessment of The Status of The Development of The Standards For the Terrestrial Essential Climate Variables, published in 2009, references the inventory of the 100,000 glaciers, but draws no conclusions on overall status.
It is also my best understanding that those pushing the story of catastrophic global warming have used and misused glacier melt to advance their quest for political agreement to their preferred solutions. They started with the glacier at Kilmanjaro, prominently featured in Al Gore’s move An Inconvenient Truth. However, it turned out that Kilmanjaro’s glacier had been receding long before human contributions to global warming, and it sort of receded to the background.
But glaciers on a mountain make a pretty picture, and Kilmanjaro was replaced by Himalayan glaciers, which are just as pretty, and didn’t seem so controversial. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in their 4th Assessment Report wrote, “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world.
(see Table 10.9)
And, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).”
This finding was meat to a hungry press corps, and was featured prominently in print, on television and on the internet. But it was wrong, as most readers here already know. Worse, the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, had been informed it was wrong years before.
But again, as with polar bears, Antarctic ice and pictures of flooded cities, the image and the fear it produced was too important to let go. I’m not speaking of the scientists, although the warmist weblogs keep accusing me of doing so. I’m speaking of slick media strategists working hard to keep an issue alive, donations coming in, lobbyists full of talking points and committee votes on tough issues like Cap and Trade. So although the IPCC finally admitted their report was in error, it still gets spun as a typographical error that doesn’t change the inevitability of glacial disappearance.
The warming we have experienced has caused many glaciers to lose mass–in a few cases, glaciers have disappeared entirely, or are likely to do so soon. But the issue is not as simple as the media have been spoon-fed to believe, at least not according to the articles I have read.
But complexity gets in the way of a scare story, and so the narrative must be simplified–and exaggerated.
As has been the case in each instance of symbols being hijacked for political purposes, a sober and compelling story could have been told. It would have had many qualifications, and would have probably ended with a call for further research and keeping a close eye on the situation. I honestly believe such a story would have resulted in more and more effective action than the sledgehammer horror story approach the activists took.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
How glaciers have been used to promote fears of a disastrous future is a much simpler story, but it really only gets told in skeptic weblogs. The story competes with a much easier tale, one that is told by the media strategists for environmental organisations and is repeated by politicians and others seeking temporary fame or permanent fortune through shaping our future to meet the challenges of climate change.
As a non-scientist, what I take from the many articles and papers I have read can be summarized as follows: Glaciers advance and retreat in response to a variety of forces, some mechanical, some climatic, some of each regular, some of each unusual. This has been going on as long as there has been ice. I realize that this is so vague as to be useless and vapid, but I want to start from a non-controversial position. It will probably start to get controversial with the next sentence, and will probably not stop after that.
It is my best understanding based on what I have read (and please feel free to correct errors or hints of bias), that at this point in time more glaciers are retreating than are growing, and probably by a significant percentage. However, some of those that are retreating actually began retreating before global warming started. So, many glaciers are retreating, many should be attributed to global warming, but there are many exceptions–it is by no means a universal phenomenon. There has never been anything like a census, even using satellite photography over the past 30 years, although photographs of 100,000 glaciers are available at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (I’d love to be proven wrong on that point, as continuous satellite coverage would be really useful.) The Assessment of The Status of The Development of The Standards For the Terrestrial Essential Climate Variables, published in 2009, references the inventory of the 100,000 glaciers, but draws no conclusions on overall status.
It is also my best understanding that those pushing the story of catastrophic global warming have used and misused glacier melt to advance their quest for political agreement to their preferred solutions. They started with the glacier at Kilmanjaro, prominently featured in Al Gore’s move An Inconvenient Truth. However, it turned out that Kilmanjaro’s glacier had been receding long before human contributions to global warming, and it sort of receded to the background.
But glaciers on a mountain make a pretty picture, and Kilmanjaro was replaced by Himalayan glaciers, which are just as pretty, and didn’t seem so controversial. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in their 4th Assessment Report wrote, “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).”
This finding was meat to a hungry press corps, and was featured prominently in print, on television and on the internet. But it was wrong, as most readers here already know. Worse, the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, had been informed it was wrong years before.
But again, as with polar bears, Antarctic ice and pictures of flooded cities, the image and the fear it produced was too important to let go. I’m not speaking of the scientists, although the warmist weblogs keep accusing me of doing so. I’m speaking of slick media strategists working hard to keep an issue alive, donations coming in, lobbyists full of talking points and committee votes on tough issues like Cap and Trade. So although the IPCC finally admitted their report was in error, it still gets spun as a typographical error that doesn’t change the inevitability of glacial disappearance.
The warming we have experienced has caused many glaciers to lose mass–in a few cases, glaciers have disappeared entirely, or are likely to do so soon. But the issue is not as simple as the media have been spoon-fed to believe, at least not according to the articles I have read.
But complexity gets in the way of a scare story, and so the narrative must be simplified–and exaggerated.
As has been the case in each instance of symbols being hijacked for political purposes, a sober and compelling story could have been told. It would have had many qualifications, and would have probably ended with a call for further research and keeping a close eye on the situation. I honestly believe such a story would have resulted in more and more effective action than the sledgehammer horror story approach the activists took.
Thomas Fuller href=”http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Tom Fuller- I am not a AGW acolyte, but, I appreciate your effort at presenting a reasonable, cogent, argument. Politics, science, and religion have congealed in the
AGW debate. Human nature has not changed. Eventually even the most carefully concealed lie gets outed-even more so in our digital age. I am an educated layman,
but, when the wool is pulled over our eyes, by the IPCC, Hadley, etc. real sicence
gets pulled down too.
I have always held that this whole thing was/is about control and not saving the planet..
The planet does not care.
… would have been a less biased starting point, since the glaciers have been retreating since at least that far back. If they hadn’t, it would be rather difficult to drop the ball in Time Square on New Year’s Eve, since it would have been under ~1.5 to 2.0 miles of glacial ice. It may be a minor point, but it’s one worth pointing out.
Effective action towards what ends? The entire AGW theory has already been shot to pieces. Having a “soft sell” campaign on a bogus “problem” isn’t any better than clubbing someone over the head with loud advertising. One still ends up with damaged goods (loss of personal freedom, national sovereignty, starving Third World populations), while ending up in the poor house, as the snake oil salesmen end up filthy rich and holding the reins of power, as the Earth goes about its merry way of heating up and cooling down.
I’ll pass, thank you very much.
Glaciers are flowing ice and need input (pecipitation) to produce output. Melting at their termination is natural. You need to know the speed of the glacier first before you can come to any conclusion based on temperature. I repeat, melting at the termination is normal: lower flow rates will therefore produce retreat.
Would we really want to live in a period of time where glaciers were growing?
Given all the other “climate” choices that we could be trying to live through,
How in this world did an almost perfect time for us to be here,
get turned into a disaster?
This from the IPCC AR3 (before the science was “settled”):
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
As for the census, check the WGMS, the GLIMS and the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network:
http://wgms.ch/index.html
http://www.glims.org/
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/swiss-glaciers/
Due to the cyclic nature if climate, and glacier life, to take a snap shot of what is happening ‘now’ does not give the complete picture. There are some 16000 glaciers on this planet and the vast majority are not examined. Those that are showing climate change characteristics, ie. melting are actually few and far between. Glaciers melt from below. If we ignore the seasonal summer surface melting which looks impressive but when measured against the vast mass of the ice contained is very little. But geothermal heat from below does the bulk of melting. This also supplies the lubrication, from the water, to aid the movement down valley. If a temperature profile is taken through a glacier then top temperatures are well below zero C and as the temperature is taken through the ice it increases towards zero to the sole of the glacier. Without geothermal heating glaciers would probably move very little due to being frozen to the valley floor.
We really don’t have a clue what is happening with ice on this planet. Even with satellite technology, the question of Arctic and Antarctic ice thickening or thinning over the long term is fraught with debate because of seasonal and long-term natural ocean cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and others. Also there are over 120,000 glaciers in the world, some retreating, others advancing. Presently the so-called “world data base” consists of data from less than 350 glaciers. Most of these tend to be in places somewhat accessible to researchers. Every glacier has it’s own unique situation regarding why it is either advancing or retreating depending on not only temperature and precipitation over long periods of time, but terrain, elevation, prevailing winds over time and other many other factors. In many cases today’s glacier action is the result of temperature and percipation that occured years or even decades ago depending on the elevation. Even the measurement techniques tend to vary depending on the researcher. Many researchers keep their own databases on the glaciers they monitor because they don’t trust the others. The top researchers in this field bemoan the lack of data after more than 60 years of monitoring the “glacier mass balance”.
Hi Tom,
Actually, there is a lot to be said for a complete inventory of changes in glacial mass. The uncertainty in the contribution of glacial loss to rising sea levels makes it more difficult to estimate the contribution of ocean heat accumulation from the satellite measured sea level rise. That is, if you really knew the amount of water added to the ocean from glacial melt, then you could infer the thermal expansion of the oceans and so put a constraint on how much heat could possibly be accumulating in the Earth’s oceans. Which would help estimate the true response of the Earth to forcing. But alas, the contribution of glaciers to sea level rise is uncertain.
“…in a few cases, glaciers have disappeared entirely, or are likely to do so soon.”
If something has already disappeared entirely how can it be likely to do so soon?
I don’t know about glaciers disappearing, but has anyone else noticed that this site has become decidedly warmer since the Google ads disappeared?
I guess my problem with the whole ice melting thing, is that during an interglacial period it’s all supposed to be melting – it’s dynamic, it might look stationary, but it isn’t. If you live in the Northern Hemishpere, you’ve only got to look around you at most of the geography outside your windows to see it’s influence – It’s really nothing to do with the whole AGW debate. Plus, even if it was, shrinking is much better than growing – As then we really would have a problem
There is a spot in the Wallowa Mountains, at the peak of the Wallowa Lake tramway, that was probably the highest point of the glacier that eventually led to the moraine that now stands as a testimonial to the damage done by such a mammoth sized ice field. This spots usually melts away by August. Not this year. I was shocked by how much ice is still there. In fact, two weeks ago, visitors to the top of the tram had to do their site-seeing in a blizzard that left 2 inches of snow on the ground in short order. That ice field still there is likely to be bigger next year at this time. My recommendations? Sell your Wallowa Lake property to someone from out of state, especially greenies from California.
Two years ago, I had an experience that settled the glacier issue for me. While in Alaska, I was driving to the Exit Glacier, outside Seward. A few miles from the glacier, I noticed periodic signs beside the road, with four digit numbers upon them. I was puzzled at first, then realized that they were dates, marking the extent of the glacier in that year. There has been continuous European presence in the area for ~250 years. There was a constant record of the glacier, and in the mid 18th century it reached miles from where it is today. It has steadily, if in starts and jerks, retreated for that entire timespan. Long before industrialization, or AGW, climate change, or anything man has done.
TFuller:
“The warming we have experienced has caused many glaciers to lose mass–in a few cases, glaciers have disappeared entirely, or are likely to do so soon. But the issue is not as simple as the media have been spoon-fed to believe, at least not according to the articles I have read.
But complexity gets in the way of a scare story, and so the narrative must be simplified–and exaggerated.” And that narrative, once ascendant, allowed the proponents to postulate outrageous, impractical, horrifically expensive and societally destructive solutions without significant political or social opposition. Until now.
But bloggers such as Tom and Anthony and many others have been accenting that complexity and so have been pulling the plug on the “certainty” of the scary, simplified and exaggerated narrative. A cinematic parallel would be the scene in “12 Angry Men” where after Lee J. Cobb said that you couldn’t find a duplicate of the accused’s switchblade anywhere in the neighborhood, Henry Fonda pulled out an identical switchblade, stuck it into the jury room desk and said he had found it in a store during a short walk in the neighborhood during a break. The jury was shocked – the conviction narrative took a hit to the gut. And the “guilty – let’s hang him” narrative slowly began to collapse. The jury didn’t just begin to doubt the narrative. The prejudices that warped their judgements began to be revealed. (Can you say “Climategate”? WWF? Gore’s wealth from “green” credits?)
The narrative is starting to die through a thousand blog cuts.
The above Table 10.9 from the IPCC for Himalayan glacier melt had a large number of errors in it (in addition to the 2035 versus 2350 problem).
I think only 1 of the 9 individual glaciers had the correct melt rate and the timeline that it was measured on.
For example, the Pindari Glacier (line 2) melted back 2,840 metres (even that is wrong) over 121 years —> which equals 23.5 metres per year —> but the Table 10.9 from the IPCC has it at 135.2 metres per year. [Basic math mistakes even].
—–
In any event, no one knows the rate at which glaciers are melting and whether that has changed at all in the last 8,000 years.
Mr. Fuller,
Are you sure it’s just the warming? Is it the warming that has caused Greenland’s Petermann Glacier to grow for years now?
SOOT
************
Further reading on SOOT and glaciers:
Black carbon aerosols and the third polar ice cap
Soot is Key Player in Himalayan Warming – NASA
************
OBSERVATIONS
************
Futher reading:
The stupefying pace of glacier melt in the 1940s
Himalayan Glaciers Not Melting (Quotes and links to report)
"Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change" [pdf]
A list of growing glaciers
I agree with your last statement John. If fact, the whole AGW issue.
To explain;
If IPCC were to say something like “we have to get the societies to get off CO2 addiction. We are spewing ‘x’ amount into the atmosphere, and CO2 concentrations are rising.”, I would agree as I believe this is valid.
But they aren’t talking like that, and it appears that they just want to create a tax system, and form a ‘government of governments’ of sorts. No one at IPCC seems to want to talk about a deadline of shutting down things like coal fired electricity or anything like that.
Further, topic for discussion in Mexico is the supposed to be centered on some kind of payment schemes to poor countries, and emissions discussions are …………..where? (are they even to be tabled?).
I think the whole discussion of emissions should be taken away from the UN and handed over to the G8 or G20.
The UN is sort of like King Midas, only instead of everything they touch turning to gold. it turns to S**T…..always.
The UN has to be the world’s least effective organization!!!!
I think any discussion of glacier progress has to begin with the snout age. There has been no significant glacier developing climate or mini-climate since the LIA, so if snout age is as old or less than the time since the LIA then glaciers are going to recede. That has been going on for centuries.
Economies that depend on glaciers and the water that flows off them are already in trouble just because of that dependency. In fact it is the water, not the glacier that is critical. Glaciers are not like lakes which rise and fall seasonally. They are ponderous, and what melts is difficult to replace. Precipitation that falls to sustain or grow glaciers is not available for farming, energy, or other uses. It is only water that falls in excess of the needs of the glaciers that is useful, multipurpose water. Which raises the point: Where did the notion come from that glaciers must be? There is nothing about this planet that guarantees there will be glaciers. There is no plan. Glaciers happen, or not.
The larger point of this is, if the glacier is melting now, and the runoff of that and the existing precipitation does not generate enough multipurpose water, then you require too much water for too little precipitation. You had better start conserving and drilling. If precipitation is adequate to sustain or grow the glacier, even if aided by colder weather, then yet more precipitation is needed to provide multipurpose water.
You cannot build generating plants with water that is frozen and stuck to a mountain top. You cannot form long term multiuse plans based on melting glaciers. You need a reliable source of precipitation that is not consumed by glaciation.
We actually compete with glaciers for that precipitation in the same way we compete with gravity for river water. It is not too difficult to imagine in a time of need, glaciers could be harvested by water-poor populations just as we have banked river water in man-made lakes.
Mr. Fuller,
Anyone who has spent time objectively examining these issues is aware of the fact that we don’t actually KNOW if human activity has had ANY EFFECT on the planet’s weather or climate, let alone a significant one. Even those who do see an effect in the abused and mangled data find that it is a very small one. If humans have had ANY EFFECT, other than in our own back yards, the effect has largely saturated (i.e. gotten about as big as it’s ever likely to get).
If anything ‘catastrophic’ were happening, the evidence would be unmistakable, and we wouldn’t be nit-picking about miniscule things like 0.007°C per year for the past hundred years, or a few millimeters per year of sea-level changes, in the face of normal variations of tens of degrees or tens of meters per day in many places, day after day, year after year, as has been the case forever.
Nonetheless, in your recent series of posts, you keep making matter-of-fact comments about the warming that has supposedly been caused by humans, as if this had actually been demonstrated. You rarely if ever qualify these statements, nor do you indicate their relative importance (if they in fact do have any).
In the end, your articles give the impression that Anthropogenic Global Warming is an accepted fact, and all you are complaining about is the packaging of the message that has been delivered to the general public. This is, at the very least, rather disingenuous, and does nothing useful. Rather, it simply fosters belief in the religion that has been manufactured around such ideas. You are not helping. But perhaps that hasn’t been your intention.
/dr.bill
With at least two terminal moraines within short miles of each other and a valley topography that clearly reveals the extent of damage caused by catastrophic melting of these glaciers in Wallowa County, it would be instructive to post signs at all the advances and retreats of these glaciers, plus the valley wide floods that occurred. The landmarks are clearly visible for those in the know.
Thomas:
Just a note to let you know how much I appreciate and have enjoyed your cogent and eminently readable essays. Advancing the debate is not only about talking points and factoids. Coming to a reasonable agreement in a reasonable fashion is the mark of reasonable minds. As a scientist by training, I greatly value the ability to interpret and clearly explain a point of view that is reality-based.
Well done.
In the Andes it seems reduced precipitation is the dominant factor in glacier retreat;
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:TXoxtFwynGAJ:www.dendrocronologia.cl/pubs/2009_LeQuesne%28GlacierVariationsInTheCentralAndesInferredFromHistoricalRecordsAndTreeRings%29.pdf+andean+glaciers+low+rainfall&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjJkAFQa8iW-vCS6AaGt17s3-xF-Lo6Krr9CAhChDgDoODvSdUtWj-DAszBzBEnOyaG9vht5jYcrvvS9_SA4cErji6GjAm5MVnrKszEryjDhnN7W8rX0bcocejN5WP_lPomW9pn&sig=AHIEtbRP22SXTaqOILOo2k3trT704Fg1SA
People tend to see glaciers as the end-all, be-all source of water for valley purposes. Glacial melt water is NOT the most significant source of water for agricultural/human purposes. Rain, aquifer, and ground water are.
Warning! The following observations contains no science.
I live in the Rocky Mountains in Canada and have many glacial remnants out my back door. What has amazed me since childhood is that there are glaciers here at all! They seem to contradict the pleasant temperatures they experience half the year. We take it for granted that the ski hill will melt completely each spring yet for some reason, we also take it for granted that a pocket glacier higher up will not melt. It actually seems quite odd for a default position to take in your mind that “ice” and “summer” ought to be compatible!
It’s another example of how the mind tends to imagine a static world even when in this case, it doesn’t make sense.
If I don’t stop to think about precipitation regimes, and flow dynamics etc, observing glacial remnants around here is really just looking at two points in climate history superimposed on one another.
Data is always better than impressions but I do find it fascinating how the mind flips problems around sometimes.
Learning about glaciers is great for . . . . learning about glaciers.
That’s it I think.
Scientific articles about disappearing glaciers are all about content, not style. Here’s one example: Glacier National Park in Montana now has 25 glaciers, compared to 150 in the 19th century.
Making a connection between disappearing glaciers and a warming climate is a clear and obvious way to communicate the fact that it’s rapidly getting warmer, in spite of distracting talk about temperature stations and sunspots.
You are effectively accusing scientists and others of using glacier melt to promote a political agenda, as a way to attract more funding etc. This is an irrelevant and unsubstantiated charge, and is typical of your entire ouevre.