Remember the gawd-awful movie The Day After Tomorrow from 2004? Gore used footage from the movie in his now bullet hole riddled An Inconvenient Truth for “dramatic effect”. In an odd twist, an event that inspired that movie turns out to be more about geology than climatology.
From the New Zealand Herald:
University of Canterbury research indicating a glacial ridge in the South Island was formed by a landslide could pour cold water on evidence that climate change happened simultaneously around the world. Scientists had believed the Waiho Loop moraine was created during a brief cold snap about 13,000 years ago that also affected Europe and North America.
Located 100m above the plains on the foreland of the Franz Josef Glacier in South Westland, between the township and the sea, the glacial moraine had been the focus of much international research.
The Waiho Loop moraine was widely used as evidence for direct inter-hemispheric linkage in climate change.
Professor Jamie Shulmeister, who worked on the research with Associate Professor Tim Davies and honours student Daniel Tovar, said the discovery was made as a result of a study of the Waiho Loop glacial moraine.
Professor Shulmeister said there had been huge scientific debate on the climatic implications of the Waiho Loop.
The sudden climatic event had inspired the Hollywood blockbuster movie The Day After Tomorrow, he said.
But no one had ever studied the Waiho Loop sediments. “But these new findings suggest the loop – which sits near the South Island’s Alpine fault line – was the result of a landslide, not climate change.”
“When graduate student Dan Tovar had a look, he discovered to our surprise that it was mainly made up of a rock type known as greywacke, which is different from the rocks that make up all the other moraines in front of the Franz Josef Glacier.”
Professor Shulmeister said greywacke occurred about 13km up the valley from the Loop.
All the other moraines were predominantly composed of schist which outcropped near Franz Josef township.
“The greywacke was also rather more angular than the rocks in the other moraines, suggesting it had not been transported in water or at the base of a glacier.”
As a result of the study, Professor Shulmeister’s team believes a large landslide dumped a huge volume of rock on top of the glacier, causing it to advance and, when the advance stopped, the moraine was created.
Professor Shulmeister said the findings, to be published this week in the international science journal Nature Geoscience, were like “throwing a cat among the palaeoclimate pigeons”.
See the abstract here.
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That’s a very clever headline!
I see. A landslide dumped a blanket of rock on top of the glacier, allowing the face to stay a little cooler and advance until the rock got dumped off? The rock was angular because it traveled on the glacier rather than being ground up under it.
No, no, the science is settled. The Earth is melting.
(ignore that man behind the curtain)
But it can’t be! The global climate at this very day and age is the appropriate temperature!! We are the ones who are making the earth someday explode!!
Thanks for the facinating info. I will take a look at some of your other posts to see if I can get a grip on this. Make me warmer just thinking about it… Bryan
cool. Um just in a general direction to anyone who can give me better help the ‘contact’ and ‘FAQ’…. I have just signed up here and I know absolutely NOTHING except that this WORD PRESS thing is way better than ‘Cutenews’ I have been told that this is way better and from what I can see it is. But I have absolutely no idea what I am doing, when I say NO IDEA, I mean I HAVE NOOOOO CLUE!!!! AT ALL all I know is how to get to this site and login and I don’t know what to do from there. Can anyone help me?
Reply: I think you may need to check your computer configuration. There appears to be some unknown problem between the keyboard and the chair.~jeez
The Franz Joseph is an example of a glacier that has been advancing (since 1984).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Glacier
Amberxeleven
He means its an error nr. 40.
The error is sitting 40 cms from the screen (LOL).
Someone did a study of New Zealand glaciers measuring how rapidly they respond to ‘climate change’. Some glaciers responded in as little as 5 years, like the Franz Joseph, while others took as long as 200 years to respond.
All of the slow response glaciers were retreating. However, a significant number of the fast response glaciers were advancing.
While I don’t consider this conclusive, it certainly indicates that the warming in recent decades could be spurious. The Franz Joseph is a west coast glacier in a pristine location. Air pollution is for practical purposes non-existant and there are no nearby human influences like industry or agriculture, never mind irrigation.
BTW, the claim is that the Franz Joseph’s advance is due to increased snowfall, not cooler temperatures. There is probably something to this as snowfall varies with ENSO/El Nino, but I’m sceptical it fully explains the more than 20 years of glacial advance.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a nearby climate station, but New Zealand’s South Island hasn’t warmed in recent decades and may have cooled a little.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001IJCli..21.1437S
While some people distract themselves and others with Gore-bashing, etc., that does nothing to refocus the discussion on our real problems – dwindling fossil fuel supplies and our addiction to them, combined with our ever-growing world population. I would like scientists to stop nit-picking at each others’ climate change-related theories and focus on figuring out how we’re going to bridge the gap between ever-increasing fossil fuel prices and the time it will take to find acceptable substitutes. In short, let’s “get real”.
– Tim http://www.timprosserfuturing.wordpress.com
Note that if carbon emissions are really a problem, then reducing energy use and switching to substitutes could directly address it. If they’re not, then we should all lean on the press and our government to not allow themselves to be distracted and do the right thing.
aka – a loose nut behind the keyboard.
OT, I guess, but I remember reading somewhere that the reason the earth does not have a thick atmosphere like Venus is because of the Moon. Its gravitational attraction offsets that of the Earth enough to allow gas to escape into outer space.
So Venus may be our sister planet, but it is an unmarried sister.
This actually may make the explanation of Thermohaline Circulation (THC) shutdown effects more sensible, given that the mechanism for massive southern hemispheric cooling was always a ted tenuous.
On a related note, no serious climate scientists ever believed that a THC shutdown would lead to a new ice age in Europe, sensationalist media reporting notwithstanding: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/ccm/1007_thc.htm
I’ve been to the Franz Josef glacier a couple time. And the Fox glacier. Quite impressive. You can walk to the terminal face of each (I’ve done so, twice at Franz Josef and once at Fox). It did seem like a shorter walk the second time (6 years after the first). Hmmm, what’re the LAX-CHC airfares again? I need to get back there again.
The same mechanism is believed to have formed the “moraine” at Moraine Lake in Banff National Park (Alberta Canada nea Lake Louise).
see it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moraine_Lake
So much for “the science is settled” fantasy. It’s an inconvenient truth that the more that true scientists look, the more that the established dogma is overturned. The real world’s a lot more complicated than today’s paradigm of alarmist warming allows.
“He means its an error nr. 40.”
I’d guess a PEBKAC or an ID TEN T
Speaking of inconvenient truths and as a follow-up to your recent post on Arctic volcanic activity at:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/surprise-explosive-volcanic-eruption-under-the-arctic-ice-found/
Your attention is further direct to a blog entry at American Thinker with some Navy pics from the North Pole:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/07/north_pole_ice_melting_fear_mo.html
This just goes to show AGW alarmism for what it is — selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s value judgement, i.e. fiction.
Some unrelated questions to my learned fellow readers. Does CO2 naturally bind together with other CO2 molecules? And is CO2 lighter or heavier than the air that we breath? Does it elevate to a specific height or does it just float high or low? Other than photosynthesis, does CO2 exist in perpetuity or is there another mechanism that changes the molecule?
Thanks in advance
timprosser,
I think your line of reasoning is based on the misbelieve that alternative fuels can wean us off of oil. All of the alternatives are niche players because they both can’t provide the quantity of energy necessary to replace fossil fuels and they can’t provide it in a cost effective way. With oil prices rising as they are they may meet at some point in the not too distant future, but this still won’t help the first problem.
Solar doesn’t produce power at night so its a non-starter.
Wind requires an overinvestment because you have to have 1.5 to 2 times (wild guess but its probably ballpark) the necessary production to compensate for when the wind doesn’t blow.
Geothermal and hydroelectric are limited in application.
Nuclear is your best bet and liberals would never allow.
As for fossil fuels, there is still enough fuel for centuries.
MikeEE
I should have added…
I don’t believe we’ll be depending entirely on fossil fuels for long, replacements will be found. As the price of oil increase because the easy oil has been consumed alternatives will phase in, and new alternatives will be found. And my guess is that the time frame will be between 10 and 50 years.
One thing that would delay the adoption of alternatives is the widespread realization that release of CO2 is not going to end life on the planet earth. That would enable us to use coal which is cheap thus extending our dependence on fossil fuels.
One thing that would shorten our period of dependence is the use of nuclear power, but nuclear fuel might be more limited than fossil fuels.
Ultimately, the long term solution would seem to me to be nuclear fission. This would provide an endless supply of cheap energy with little downside. That won’t stop people from complaining though.
MikeEE
MikeEE
You left out hydroelectric, but our green friends would never allow a new dam to be built.
MikeEE, I think you meant to say nuclear fusion, which even on optimistic projections is at least 50 years away from being commercially viable and producing substantial amounts of energy.
Another point to bear in mind is that electricity distributions systems are on-demand. That is, supply is regulated to match demand. If the two get out of synch the system crashes. Photovoltaics and wind aren’t on demand, because we can’t control when the wind blows or the sun shines.
This means the amount of energy from these sources can only contribute a small amount of energy to an electricity grid. Estimates vary, but it’s probably around 10%. To put that in perspective, it’s 3 or 4 years demand growth in a developed country and about 1 years demand growth in China.
Passive solar to a degree (pun intended) gets around this problem by storing heat ready for use when the demand occurs.
And of course, substituting oil products in vehicles by mains electricity requires vastly more energy, because of the inherent ineficiences in producing, distributing and storing electricity. To replace all US vehicles with electric vehicles will require at least double (and I think more like 4 times) the electricity current generated and that means hundreds of new power stations.
Reply to timprosser:
One of the problems is the unrealistic expectations and assumptions of people, not scientists. One assumption is the dwindling cache of fossil fuels. Is there? Oil and coal, and their derivatives have been designated as fossil fuels. Most people believe our coal and oil come from old trees and animals(dinosaurs). I would submit that this denies logic. That suggests that only in particular spots on our planet did old trees and dinosaurs go to die and then somehow magically get transformed into a fuel, whereas the trees and animals in the last few millennium only decay to …..well CARBON(forgoing the entire ‘exist as a fuel step’). So what was the mechanism that created oil or coal, why doesn’t that mechanism exist today? Most of mankind already knows we are too reliant on “fossil fuels” and don’t need to be told that we are. There are mechanisms in place today that will, eventually, bring us to the Utopian world of fossil fuel independence. (Once we learn how to store AC power or force DC power to travel long distances.) Another problem is mankind hates to be BS’d. There is significant reason to believe that the earth went through a small but insignificant warming period. Most of this is explained through solar observation. Recently, contrary to the relentless drumming, we’ve experienced a cooling trend in the last 17 months. (In spite of data manipulation.) This flies in the face of the notion that CO2 has any immediate affect on earth’s temperature. (To my knowledge, we haven’t quit increasing our CO2 output.) Another problem is the cost of the proposed solutions. (Which I feel I’m more qualified to address.) We’ve already started to see economies stagnated, nations continuing in underdevelopment, squalor and even riots for food because of some of the policies set in place as a result of the AGW hysteria. While I know I’m over simplifying, we’ve had at least 2 decades to observe the premise that man’s CO2 output is going to cause catastrophe. While I’m not from Missouri, their credo “show me” seems appropriate. According to one of the most ardent advocates of AGW’s “adjusted” data……May 1988 global temp…..37(above the arbitrary mean)…….May 2008 global temp…..36(above the arbitrary mean). There should be more sarcasm to follow that last fact but I’ve already said enough and I need another beer…..
Cheers to all