From ETH Zurich: The stupefying pace of glacier melt in the 1940s
The most recent studies by researchers at ETH Zurich show that in the 1940s Swiss glaciers were melting at an even-faster pace than at present. This is despite the fact that the temperatures in the 20th century were lower than in this century. Researchers see the main reason for this as the lower level of aerosol pollution in the atmosphere.
In Switzerland, the increase in snow in wintertime and the glacier melt in summertime have been measured at measurement points at around 3,000 metres above sea level – on the Clariden Firn, the Great Aletsch glacier and the Silvretta glacier – without interruption for almost 100 years. As part of his doctoral work, Matthias Huss used this unique range of measurements to examine how climate change in the last century affected the glaciers. The work was carried out under the supervision of Martin Funk, professor and head of the Department for Glaciology at the Laboratory for Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (‘VAW’) at ETH Zurich, who is also co-author of the study.
A glaciologist on the way to work on the Silvretta glacier (Image: Matthias Huss / ETH Zurich) (more pictures)
Solar radiation as the decisive factor
In its work, the research team took into account the solar radiation measured on the Earth’s surface in Davos since 1934. Studies over the past two decades have shown that solar radiation varies substantially due to aerosols and clouds, and this is assumed to influence climate fluctuations. Recent years have seen the emergence of the terms ‘global dimming’ and ‘global brightening’ to describe these phenomena of reduced and increased solar radiation respectively. These two effects are currently the subject of more and more scientific research, in particular by ETH Zurich, as experts feel that they should be taken into account in the climate models (see ETH Life dated July 9, 2009)
The new study, published in the journal ‘Geophysical Research Letters’, confirms this requirement. This is because, taking into account the data recorded for the level of solar radiation, the scientists made a surprising discovery: in the 1940s and in the summer of 1947 especially, the glaciers lost the most ice since measurements commenced in 1914. This is in spite of the fact that temperatures were lower than in the past two decades. “The surprising thing is that this paradox can be explained relatively easily with radiation”, says Huss, who was recently appointed to the post of senior lecturer at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
On the basis of their calculations, the researchers have concluded that the high level of short-wave radiation in the summer months is responsible for the fast pace of glacier melt. In the 1940s, the level was 8% higher than the long-term average and 18 Watts per square metres above the levels of the past ten years. Calculated over the entire decade of the 1940s, this resulted in 4% more snow and ice melt compared with the past ten years.
Furthermore, the below-average melt rates at the measurement points during periods in which the glacier snouts were even advancing correlate with a phase of global dimming, between the 1950s and the 1980s.
Less snow fall and longer melt periods
The researchers arrived at their findings by calculating the daily melt rates with the aid of climate data and a temperature index model, based on the half-yearly measurements on the glaciers since 1914. These results were then compared with the long-term measurements of solar radiation in Davos.
Huss points out that the strong glacier melt in the 1940s puts into question the assumption that the rate of glacier decline in recent years “has never been seen before”. “Nevertheless”, says the glaciologist, “this should not lead people to conclude that the current period of global warming is not really as big of a problem for the glaciers as previously assumed”. This is because it is not only the pace at which the Alpine glaciers are currently melting that is unusual, but the fact that this sharp decline has been unabated for 25 years now. Another aspect to consider – and this is evidenced by the researchers’ findings – is that temperature-based opposing mechanisms came into play around 30 years ago. These have led to a 12% decrease in the amount of precipitation that falls as snow as a percentage of total precipitation, accompanied by an increase of around one month in the length of the melt period ever since this time. Scientists warn that these effects could soon be matched by the lower level of solar radiation we have today compared with the 1940s.
Reference
Huss M, Funk M & Ohmura A: Strong Alpine glacier melt in the 1940s due to enhanced solar radiation. Geophysical Research Letters (2009), 36, L23501, doi:10.1029/2009GL040789
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@Douglas DC (07:45:38) :
Papa – Romeo – Oscar – Foxtrot – Iglo – Tango
On topic comment:
One my first (and only) trip to Germany and Switzerland in 1972, we spent a night in a grand hotel that was built at the terminus of the Rhone Glacier. On the walls were some of the original artwork of the original research tracing the glacier’s movement. Ever since then I’ve been inordinately fond of that glacier. I likely need to get out more and meet some others. (I did bicycle through the Lake Louise area in early July 1974 – Grand Hotel, smallish glacier, and very cold lake, and fresh snow not very close to my altitude.)
I looked for and found a nice reference resource for it and other Swiss glaciers.
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/glacierlist.html
This has a list of all glaciers whose length and area are being tracked. You can select a particular year to see the changes for that year.
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/glaciers/rhone.html
This describes the Rhone Glacier, and has a graph of length and rate of change between 1879 and 2009. The retreat in the 1940s really stands out. The retreat in before 1910 was faster than in recent decades, but it may have been in the flat valley then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rh%C3%B4ne_Glacier has some paintings and photos.
It would be nice if they included the altitude of the terminus too.
OT comments:
Don B (03:57:31) :
> The Cryosphere Today site has changed their presentation of polar sea ice from the most recent year to the past two years. If they had used 3 years, the increased ice coverage since 2007 would have been more obvious.
True, but it is nice to see some work on their site, though an error in their interactive map is still there. I’d alway been galled that their graph was two years wide but only showed the last year. My weather station web page used to have a past 24 hours display of temperature, it was greatly improved when I changed it to display 48 hours. It would be nice if they included the anomaly on the same graph.
Invariant (03:21:26) :
> I found this article from January 2. 2010 to be focused, accurate and important. It’s written by Neil Frank.
I’m not sure how important it is in the grand scheme of things, but count it as another score for MSM recognition that AGW isn’t settled science and may be wrong. Hasn’t the Houston Chronical printed some other skeptical pieces in the past few months?
Neil Frank, in my estimation, was the best director of the NHC they’ve every had. I particularly appreciated his blunt assessment of coastal condos and the damage a coast-hugging hurricane could do to them. I wonder how he would have handled the step increase in Atlantic activity in 1995.
Gail Combs (04:02:07) :
It would be interesting to survey the “pro-AGW” papers published since 1990 and figure out how many have that type of meaningless blurb tacked on so the paper would be published. I bet many of the so called “pro-AGW” papers do since I have seen it enough that it has caught my notice.
More interesting still would be to assign proportions to these papers to find out what proportion of the vast body of evidence is fluff. I think that we would be surprised by the results.
The most recent studies by researchers at ETH Zurich show that in the 1940s Swiss glaciers were melting at an even-faster pace than at present. This is despite the fact that the temperatures in the 20th century were lower than in this century.
really ! Let us see the GISS date.
Innsbruck
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=603113200001&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Basel
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=646066420010&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Geneve-Cointr
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=646067000001&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
ST.Bernard
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=646067190010&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
etc
There where some very warm years together between 1945 and 1950.
There was also a peak in sunspots.
http://spaceweather.com/glossary/sunspotplotter.htm?PHPSESSID=6uo1mddldd8lct11gjnhbf6vh6
Coincidence? I don’t no.
greetings
jgfox (05:35:33)
Nice quote from the Papal Bull from Pope Innocent VIII. One recognisable theme is this line:
“and so no doubt at all remains on these points”
In today’s parlance, the “science is settled” concerning witches.
The Swiss glaciers have melted back many times in recent history, as evidenced by the trees melting out of them today. Nothing unprecidented going on there.
Subfossil remains of wood and peat from six Swiss glaciers found in proglacial fluvial sediments indicate that glaciers were smaller than the 1985 reference level and climatic conditions allowed vegetation growth in now glaciated basins. An extended data set of Swiss glacier recessions consisting of 143 radiocarbon dates is presented to improve the chronology of glacier fluctuations. A comparison with other archives and dated glacier advances suggests 12 major recession periods occurring at 9850- 9600, 9300-8650, 8550-8050, 7700-7550, 7450-6550, 6150-5950, 5700-5500, 5200-4400, 4300-3400, 2800-2700, 2150-1850, 1400-1200 cal. yr BP. It is proposed that major glacier fluctuations occurred on a multicentennial scale with a changing pattern during the course of the Holocene. After the Younger Dryas, glaciers receded to a smaller extent and prolonged recessions occurred repeatedly, culminating around 7 cal. kyr BP. After a transition around 6 cal. kyr BP weak fluctuations around the present level dominated. After 3.6 cal. kyr BP less frequent recessions interrupted the trend to advanced glaciers peaking with the prominent ‘Little Ice Age’. This trend is in line with a continuous decrease of summer insolation during the Holocene.
http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/5/697
Pamela Gray (07:56:30)
“If you can get at least 10 articles out of one set of data, you and your project will be re-funded.”
In the trade they call this “salami-slicing”.
Either my reading ability is declining or these authors do not write well.
——————————
Ralph (07:31:14) : Ralph, you wrote: “There is no particular reason why the terrestrial jetstreams should wave…”
Maybe you could explain what you mean with this idea. Maybe you could find a Web reference that purports to explain why the jet streams do have wave patterns – and how that reasoning differs from your own, which isn’t stated in your comment.
Chylek Petr, Chris K. Folland, Glen Lesins, Manvendra K. Dubeys, and Muyin Wang: 2009: “Arctic air temperature change amplification and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation”. Geophysical Research Letters.
The abstract reads
“Understanding Arctic temperature variability is essential for assessing possible future melting of the Greenland ice sheet, Arctic sea ice and Arctic permafrost. Temperature trend reversals in 1940 and 1970 separate two Arctic warming periods (1910-1940 and 1970-2008) by a significant 1940-1970 cooling period. Analyzing temperature records of the Arctic meteorological stations we find that (a) the Arctic amplification (ratio of the Arctic to global temperature trends) is not a constant but varies in time on a multi-decadal time scale, (b) the Arctic warming from 1910-1940 proceeded at a significantly faster rate than the current 1970-2008 warming, and (c) the Arctic temperature changes are highly correlated with the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) suggesting the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation is linked to the Arctic temperature variability on a multi decadal time scale.”
http://climatesci.org/2009/06/01/new-paper-arctic-air-temperature-change-amplification-by-chylek-et-al-2009/
@Jimbo (04:12:29) :
“Its supercomputer makes 1,000 billion calculations a second – then tells us to expect a mild winter. But what would you expect from a ’scientific’ organisation that for 20 years has been dominated by climate change zealots, and whose current chairman is the former boss of the World Wildlife Fund?”
Maybe that’s why the climate models incorporate a newly discovered phenomenon called greenian motion where the atmosphere and oceans all move to positively re-inforce CO2 greenhouse effects and also cause every place on earth to become environmentally worse off as the average global temperatures increase.
phlogiston (09:00:45) :
Pamela Gray (07:56:30) 10 articles or salami-slicing
Also, the analogy of spokes of a wagon wheel is used. Adjust your title and the “slant” of the material to fit 10 different publications and/or regional publications.
These (sometimes more than 10) articles have titles that read as though the words are permutated, and the paragraphs likewise. Freelance writers do the same thing because the low cents/word pay will not fund your work if you only publish once.
Ice can also retreat due to sublimation, no melting is required.
Changes in air circulation patterns and water content in the local atmosphere can also affect glaciers.
It’s going from “Hide the decline” to “Jack the increase”.
At what point do we call for global legal action–when more than half the temperature records have been found to be “fudged”?
That’s the tipping point I’m looking for.
I’d say those we’ve entrusted to keep tabs on the weather have a lot of explaining to do!
Re: the genuflections to orthodoxy in scientific papers, this reminds me of some scientific papers and theses published in the Soviet Union even in the ’80s. The authors, usually in the first paragraph, managed to link the most arcane scientific investigations (yeast genetics, elementary particles) to Marxism-Leninism. It was routine, nobody cared, but you could lose your job without it.
“jgfox (05:35:33) :
Mark Fawcett (01:55:11) :
“You could always burn a few witches, it did not help in the past, but if it makes you feel better”
Actually, it did work for the Little Ice Age![…]”
Thanks jgfox! That’s a fascinating connection!
You could always burn a few witches, it did not help in the past, but if it makes you feel better.
Nonsense. All sorts of jobs were saved by witch burning.
REPLY: These were the “shovel ready” jobs of that era no doubt. -A
I wonder to what extent this diversity of causes is real, and to what extent it shows that the people are just randomly guessing.
One must also consider the timeframe. Haven’t glaciers been on a serious melting trend since around 1650?
If people are just randomly guessing would you not expect them to be correct once in awhile?
I think the missing glacier ice is showing up in Antarctica – teleportation or some such ‘the science is not well understood’ thing.
I can understand ignoring or hiding the MWP, it blows the whole thing.
But for some reason, people keep ignoring the “dust bowl” years too.
All the wet years that came first, enticing people to farm.
Then the drought that lasted until the middle 1940’s.
Do people really think it was not world wide? only happened in Oklahoma?
Now they would also blame that on ‘global warming’.
When the truth is, it’s all just weather and climate changes.
I also have to wonder if all the people that think climate should not change,
have any clue that climate is the primary driver of evolution.
It’s climate changing that has given them all of the endangered species they collect money for.
Steven Frost (00:16:44) :
“Going on denying what you know is true with these false stories… I will pray for you :(”
Yeah, sure, put in a good word for me with Pope Albert, say a few Hail Joneseys… a little fire and brimstone from the Right Reverend Jim Hansen…
AGW = Al Gore’s Whoppers
phlogiston (08:58:03) :
Very appropriate given Al Gore’s failure a a divinity student and zeal for denouncing of skeptical counter-revolutionaries.
In the 1976 November edition of the Natioanal Geographic (p594) is a set of photos of the Hintereisferner and Kesselwandferner glaciers in the Austrian Alps. The photos were taken in 1903, 1929, 1940, and 1956. The Glaciers are joined in the 1902 photo and appear to retreat with each photo. In the 1956 photo the Hintereisferner is only just visible, having retreated a mile from it’s furthest advance and stopping well before the Kesselwandferner glacier.
Current photos show the Hintereisferner reaching down as far as the 1929 photo.
It did happened in 1700s that when a glacier advanced and threatened a village in French Alps, an Archbishop was called to stop it. It did work.
What will the folks do when the glaciers will advance this time? Call some bureaucrat from Brussels? heheheeeeee.
TonyB (04:54:44) :
That is good info, thanks for the work. Just a comment, not a criticism, I have noted on many, many temp graphs that the natural rise in temps appears to be still on, though slowing, or at best levelling out ready to turn down but nowhere near any sort of downslope. Do you agree?