By Steven Goddard
Now that Arctic ice area is normal, Antarctic ice area is normal, sea level rise is failing to accelerate, temperatures are below all of Hansen’s scenarios, and the IPCC has proven itself to be untrustworthy – where can the CAGW religion go? Simple … Montana!
Glacier National Park Loses Two More Glaciers Due To Global Warming
According to Dan Fagre if the melting continues at its present rate then towards the end of another decade therewould be no more glaciers left in the Glacier Park. The glaciers of the park have been melting since 1850. The Glacier National Park at the beginning boasted of 150 glaciers of which 37 glaciers were eventually named.
You can’t currently get into much of Glacier National Park because there is too much snow, but if you could you would see something like this.
USPS Photo
Later in the year you would see this :
USPS Photo
Note the steep sided cliffs, formed by glaciers thousands of feet deep. Is it possible that glaciers thousands of feet thick melted since 1850, as the news stories claim? Of course not. The USGS has a good article titled “History of Glaciers in Glacier National Park” :
The history of glaciation within current Glacier National Park boundaries spans centuries of glacial growth and recession, carving the features we see today.
They suggest that the current glaciers mainly formed during the LIA (Little Ice Age)
These modest glaciers varied in size, tracking climatic changes, but did not grow to their Holocene maximum size until the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) around A.D. 1850. While they may not have formed in their entirety during the LIA, their maximum perimeters can be documented through mapping of lateral and terminal moraines.
The size of the glaciers in 1850 was an anomaly during the Holocene :
Climate reconstructions representative of the Glacier National Park region extend back multiple centuries and show numerous long-duration drought and wet periods that influenced the mass balance of glaciers (Pederson et al. 2004). Of particular note was an 80-year period (~1770-1840) of cool, wet summers and above-average winter snowfall that led to a rapid growth of glaciers just prior to the end of the LIA. Thus, in the context of the entire Holocene, the size of glaciers at the end of the LIA was an anomaly of sorts. In fact, the large extent of ice coverage removed most of the evidence of earlier glacier positions by overriding terminal and lateral moraines.
The current glaciers started to recede long before the invention of the SUV.
Tree-ring based climate records and historic photographs indicate the initiation of frontal recession and ice mass thinning between A.D. 1860 and 1880.
“Dramatic recession” occurred between 1917 and 1941. This was before the invention of the Hummer and the Soccer Mom. Hansen wasn’t even born yet.
The coupling of hot, dry summers with substantial decreases in winter snowpack (~30% of normal) produced dramatic recession rates as high as 100 m/yr from A.D. 1917-1941 (Pederson et al. 2004). These multidecadal episodes have substantially impacted the mass balance of glaciers since A.D. 1900.
Summer temperatures in Montana have not changed for over the past 80 years. Summer is when the snow melts.
NCDC Montana Summer temperatures since 1930
Winter precipitation has not changed in Montana since 1930. Winter is when the snow falls.
NCDC Montana Winter Precipitation
Conclusion: there is little if any evidence tying the changes in Montana glaciers to CO2. Glaciers were a mile deep there during the last ice age, and have been receding and growing in cycles ever since. They may have been completely gone after the MWP and reformed during the LIA. Once again, climate alarmists have chosen a flawed poster child.
This pattern is similar to what was seen at Glacier Bay, Alaska, where most of the glacial melt occurred between 1850 and 1900.
USGS map of glacial retreat at Glacier Bay.
Montana is the location of the latest CAGW pilgrimage, after Copenhagen got snowed out. Where next?
Heretic! How could you compare ice melt to the actual temperature instead of the temperature anomaly!
The fun will start if the glaciers start growing again, then there will be nowhere to run.
What about the Tahiti Glaciers, they must have melted due to Doom.
Similar to Montana, pre-historical findings of several thousands of years ago in the Swiss Alps show that the glaciers receded and advanced several times during the Holocene, with a maximum during the LIA:
http://www.giub.unibe.ch/klimet/docs/climdyn_2007_grosjean_et_al.pdf
(but forget their conclusion, that is not based on their own findings)
How the ipcc invented a new calculus
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/howtheipccinventedanewcalculus
Thanks, Steven, for another insightful post.
The graphs are an excellent illustration of why averaging climate parameters has no meaning. The reality is that we only experience weather in the current moment in time and climate is just a poorly understood abstract history of past weather events. Because of deterministic chaos, the future is just prophecy.
The glaciers are receding, because the global average temperatures are not yet warm enough to maintain them…
I was reading a particularly vicious bit of the: “only holocaust deniers wouldn’t believe us” in the Australian press, when it occurred to me that this is really that last desparate attemps to string together an argument by the climate forecasters |(who can’t forecast the climate).
When you can argue the evidence … produce the evidence, if however you don’t have the evidence, … resort to appeals to scientific authority as the “experts”, and when the public realise through climategate that these people have no scientific credibility … call us holocaust deniers and hope the dirt sticks!
Personally, I’m happy sticking to the simple test: “show me the evidence that tells me it isn’t just noise” — and if they can’t even put up the evidence to pass this most simple test, why on earth should I waste any time trying to follow their twisted logic.
Yes, the glaciers are all melting because the British papers tell me so.
Example, from today’s Independent: Peru glacier collapses, injures 50
Governor Cesar Alvarez blamed “global warming” and said all the glaciers will be gone in 20 years if measures are not taken “to tackle climate change”.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/peru-glacier-collapses-injures-50-1942387.html
There you are. Proof.
I am getting the impression that there are a lot of very slow and maybe somewhat dumb learners out there in the climate warmista pool.
More and more of the most stupid and easily disproven but most profound sounding supposedly climate research based alarmist proclamations from small time “climate experts” are being knocked over like nine pins in the various high profile skeptic climate blogs.
The blogs are just using original and historical data to throw cold water on those alarmist statements, original and historical data which should also be readily available those same “climate experts and scientists” if they really wanted to check the veracity of their profound sounding statements on future climate related disasters in the making.
A lot of “grant deliverers” are in all likelihood starting to either read a lot of the more high profile blogs like WUWT and others or at the very least some of their minions most certainly are and are passing the news on around the coffee table or the water cooler.
And some of the more outrageous statements and who their originators were will be remembered and documented for perusal far into the future.
The climate warmista tide is turning and is just starting it’s ebbflow and all the little warmista climate researcher fish with all their profound statements on the oncoming climate disasters which from their small pool, could not be seen to be of a different type to that they actually thought it would be, will be left stranded high and dry and slowly gasping to financial death for the lack of grant funds as the climate warmista tide slowly ebbs.
The big fish in the climate alarmist pool can get away with this for quite some time into the future but the small fry “expert climate researchers” are going to find in the years ahead that what they thought was good personal publicity at the time using grant grabbing climate alarmist statements will come back to haunt and perhaps destroy their careers in ways that they never dreamed of when they first made those statements.
But then some people never will learn!
Incontrovertible proof that the glaciers are composed of flippy-floppy ice.
Mike Haseler (01:34:09) , well said. I agree 100%. I’ve been saying for a long time that they either put up the evidence or shut up. At the moment AGW alarmists are just that – alarmists. They have no proof that:
a) man is causing most of the global warming we can measure; in fact they can’t even demonstrate how much of the climate change is man-made, if any, or
b) the global warming we can measure is outside normal operation parameters for this planet, or
c) even if global warming is eventually going to increase, that it’s more bad than good for this planet, up to a point over the next couple of centuries, by which time we would have either destroyed ourselves, an asteroid has destroyed us, or we have grown up and advanced in technology enough to solve the climate problem, if indeed it’s real.
patchouri……neutral?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7078140.ece
Thank you for this. Glacier National Park is one of my favorite places on this earth, and it irks me to no end to see it constantly used as a “well, what about…” come-back line on some warmist’s laundry list.
My response is typically grumpy: if you haven’t watched grizzly bears through your tent flap at 5 a.m. checking out your campsite, or stepped aside on a steep mountain trail to avoid bumping into a not-scared-of-humans mountain goat, then you don’t get to talk to me about Glacier.
Now I have a more mature (and substantive) response. 🙂
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
‘Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river
h/t Clash
The next decade will prove things one way or the other for a lot of the theories. Warming has to resume in earnest soon and the Arctic has to be ice free in the next decade. If not, its a cycle.
speaking of glaciers
Himalayans: melting since 1850, everything is fine.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/Raina-Himalayan%20Glaciers%20Reprint.pdf
Greenland, glaciers stopped accelerating
http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/greenlands-ice-armageddon-comes-end
really good glacier page
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_4CE_Glaciers.htm
Proof that THEY are wackos and liars. Glaciers “growing” from global warming. duh, they advance because of increased snowfall and cold weather
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1203500/In-pictures-How-global-warming-changing-face-northern-hemisphere.html
This article
http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1003/full/climate.2010.19.html#B9
is interesting in that it quotes that only at most 20% of water resource in India comes from melting glaciers, in contradiction to the scare “no more drinking water” stories the IPCC etc feeds us.
Glacier NP is a great place to visit… even if it is “melting.”
Kate (02:12:57) :
Kate , Im sure you meant to be sarcastic, as a proof that people read newspapers and use it as proof of a trend supporting AGW theory? Or?
we all have to be careful we don’t get misled by “vodoo science”.
I live in Montana and looked into this issue once before. There was a study done on the Glaciers in Glacier National Park done back in the 1980’s before the global warming hype. His bottom line was that he felt that the glaciers were advancing and receding with the AMO cycle.
I was curious about the 1850 date that is always used. Moon Lake, ND has an excellent precipitation proxy going back 1500 years. 1800 to 1860 was the most wet period in the whole history. I think this explains why the glaciers have been receding since 1850.
“Conclusion: there is little if any evidence tying the changes in Montana glaciers to CO2”
You know that
I know that
Why don’t “they” know that?
I’m more than a little familiar with Glacier Park as my family has lived in the area since 1886. While there may have been a respite from the glaciers melting during the LIA, in actuality the glaciers have been melting for over 10,000 years.
10,000 years ago the area was under several thousand feet of ice. It was the weight and the movement of this ice that carved out what is now the Flathead Valley and Flathead Lake. What we are seeing now is the end of that multi-century process.
Fun facts, 3 or 4 years ago the Going-To-Sun road that crosses Glacier Park did not open till late June due to snow. Each year it takes weeks to clear the road of snow and requires the use of surveyors to find the road each spring.
If you ever have the opportunity in your lifetime, drive the going to Sun-To-The Sun road through the park. It’s one of the most beautiful drives in America.
S.G.: “Note the steep sided cliffs, formed by glaciers thousands of feet deep. Is it possible that glaciers thousands of feet thick melted since 1850, as the news stories claim? Of course not.”
I would say yes. You have many examples in the Alps. This photo pair is a classic one from the Rhone glacier in 1897 and now: http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/7080/rhone.jpg
Of course most of the change did happen because the change in temperature and precipitation at the end of the LIA, we are still warming up from that event.
Glaciers have retreated, but that does not mean that IPCC doom projections and IPCC models are right. In fact glacier behaviour is extremely different from one place to another, and in many cases precipitation change has been more important that temperature change. That is why no climate model would be able to simulate glacier response.
Sera (03:51:13)
Yeah, top tune by the Clash but what does he say right at the end just as it fades out? Never worked it out….