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?
Kate (02:12:57) :
If all the glaciers are gone within 20 years, won’t that be the end of Peruvian glacier collapses? Wouldn’t that prevent anymore injuries from glacier collapses?
On another note, remember the big Yellowstone fires a few years back? Some said that was the end of the beauty of Yellowstone. My wife and I took a back country hike into Heart Lake. Guess what, the trees are coming back and the animals are thriving.
I guess forests go through cycles as well. We just don’t live long enough to realize what we see today is a snap shot in time and all the world is in transition.
Kate (02:12:57) :
That independent article is a lot of nonsense
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/peru-glacier-collapses-injures-50-1942387.html
Glaciers do not “detach and fall” because of warming, they shrink and retreat. In fact, falling seracs (large blocks of glacier ice) are many times a sign of advancing glaciers.
In any case there are very little information about the event to be able to judge it.
“12 percent loss in the amount of fresh water reaching the coast”
Might be, but have they taken into consideration changes in land use, irrigation, hydropower plants, etc. I would bet they haven’t. Besides, measuring water flow is not an easy task, and Peru is not a model of river instrumentation.
Here is a 2006 study by Pederson and others of drought variability in Glacier NP and other Rocky Mt. areas, for the recent few hundred years.
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/cirmount/wkgrps/ecosys_resp/postings/pdf/pederson_etal2006.pdf
Of the shrinkage of the Sperry Glacier between 1850 and 2003, 81% of the shrinkage had occurred by 1945, before the post-war surge of CO2 could have had an effect. See figure 6:
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/cirmount/wkgrps/ecosys_resp/postings/pdf/pederson_etal2006.pdf
Glaciers are growing
Of course, this must be due to ACC, or “climate chaos” or perhaps “global weirding”.
Some have even been growing for decades, and one, on Mt. St. Helens is brand new.
This is very inconvenient to the kool-aid drinkers. I suspect that what is happening is that overall, the glaciers have stabilized, similar to the way the polar icecaps have.
Ah, the land of frozen. The 76-77 drought bypassed it, according to a National Geographic article.
A very early Bugs Bunny had this to say about Montana:
30 days has April, June, September and Montana.
Which is Winter.
Which is always cold, except in Summer, which is almost never.
Climatologists are like journalists.
When you don’t have the facts to support your storyline, you just make sh*t up.
All’s good for a “good cause”
The most recent maximum glacier area in the park around 1850 matches the end of the LIA. Very reasonable to notice glaciers getting smaller since then. AGW propaganda again.
The linked article is pretty lame, Thaindian News is sadly pretty much MSM light, the article laments Global Warming and the passing of the glaciers, and doesn’t even mention CO2. On the brighter side, comments on the article are predominantly skeptical, but their tone suggests most readers are woefully uninformed.
Steve, please check your material, snowfall in the Rocky Mountains is measured in many feet per year, but the graph’s Y-axis suggests average yearly? snowfall is only 2-3 inches. Even on the dry plains of Montana east of Glacier Park, that seems sparse.
I drove through Glacier National Park in June of 1999 and it was beautiful, in spite of poor weather. Even in June, at one point the road had walls of snow on both sides at least ten feet high. There’s been 11 more years of global warming since then – they must be getting ready to turn the place into a banana plantation.
Dave (04:42:40) :
In 1974 I went on a 2700 mile bicycle ride from Palo Alto to Billings MT. The original plan was to ride to my parent’s home in Northeast Ohio, but I decided to stay in the mountains instead. That year the Park service decided that cars and vans and whatnot made the Going-to-The-Sun made for dangerous conditions for bicyclists, and instead of banning motor vehicles (or making the road one way) they’d just ban bicycles. When I got there the hue and cry had been great enough to rescind that and implement an open-in-the-AM plan, but for some reason they wouldn’t implement that for a couple more weeks and I didn’t have time to wait.
So I wound up hitching a ride over in the back of a pickup truck driven by a drunk Indian. It wasn’t until days later that I realized that in addition to missing some good photos, I lost one or two thousand feet of altitude that I was looking forward to riding down.
See http://wermenh.com/biketour-1974/leg5.html
It still annoys me….
I also need to do the Jasper-Banff ride someday. The ride from Lake Louise down to Banff was so fast that I don’t feel a need to do that leg uphill.
Dave (04:42:40) : I’ve driven that road at from St. Mary’s west. At the western end is Lake McDonald which is a 400+ ft deep glacial lake. I find it fasinating the a glacial lake exits in Glacier National Park yet people are not able to connect the dots that the only way these lakes exist is that glaciers melt over time when ice ages end. Further, very few of the mountains in the park are over 10000 ft. so the there is no freeze line to stop the recession of the glacier.
Natural events are not evidence of CO2 warming. The scientist in the park sevice or the USGS shoul be taken to task for not being forthright about this.
Sera (03:51:13) :
All the sons and daughters spinning ’round the world
Away from their families and friends
Ah, but as the world gets older and colder
It’s good to know where your journey ends
h/t Peter Allen (I Still Call Australia Home)
Written in 1980 at the height of the ‘ice age is coming’ hysteria – I bet it’s been puzzling schoolchildren for years why it doesn’t say ‘warmer’, as taught by their teachers.
Let’s hope you all are right about the tide of AGW support turning. Certainly, alarmist stuff like this does allow the sillyness to be pointed out, but any just read the alarmist stuff in the MSM.
Regret that I see no signs of the AGW therefore tax/trade/control/make money brigade faltering or slowing down… certainly not in the UK, where legislation is now coming into effect stage by stage. My hope is that China, India etc will not cooperate with UN attempts, that smaller third world countries will continue bickering and posturing, so that the mounting evidence against significant AGW via CO2 will have time to be noticed.
So, thank you Steve for the article, and all keep shouting “its a scam” as much as you can.
(Pity its come to that, there needs to be unemotional work on soots, aerosols, land use change, UHI, ocean cycles, etc)
Glacier retreat since 1850, It appears the majority of the Illecillewaet Glacier had retreated by the year 1931.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albuhttp://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/goresfilm.jpgms/qq187/bobclive/glacier3.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq1http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/glacierretreatSINCE1850.jpg87/bobclive/Illecillewaetglacier.jpg
http://www.cmiae.org/Resources/glaciers-lichens.php
I live near the north end of the Front Range in Colorado. Ten years ago, it looked like global warming was taking over (fooled me for sure.) The last few years we have been begging for some global warming.
Climate in the west is very variable and always has been. There aren’t many Anasazi living at Chaco Canyon any more.
Great, AGW-shrinking post, Steven Goddard. When all they have left is Montana glaciers, they definitely are spinning on thin ice. Plus WUWT knowledgeable commenters have provided enough research links to put the entire matter to rest. What!?! We must consider the entire Holocene in order to know very much about current global warming and cooling and about glacier advance and retreat? Why, our brains will calve off into the warming sea of data and our grant-glaciers will completely collapse! Please let Earth continue to warm, but let’s freeze out these “utter nincompoops” http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-nincompoop.htm.
It appears the majority of Glacier Illecillewaet had retreated by 1931.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/glacier3.jpghttp:
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/glacierretreatSINCE1850.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/Illecillewaetglacier.jpg
Gores Fairytail would have you believe the retreated started in 1980, photo below taken from Gores film.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/goresfilm.jpg
http://www.cmiae.org/Resources/glaciers-lichens.php
The claim: “Summer temperatures in Montana have not changed for over the past 80 years” is disingenuous. Firstly, the trend line over these 80 years, not shown, is +0.03F per decade. Not very large, but positive. Secondly, why choose to show 80 years? The straw man claim you’re attacking is about 150 years. The data series goes back to 1895. The trend from 1895 to 2010 is a significant one, +0.10F/decade. In fact, the trend from just about any chosen starting date APART FROM 1930 is significantly positive.
1900 to 2010 +0.12
1910 to 2010 +0.08
1920 to 2010 +0.03
1930 to 2010 +0.03 (this is the chart you chose to show)
1940 to 2010 +0.22
1950 to 2010 +0.28
1960 to 2010 +0.17
1970 to 2010 +0.17
What is the point of this sort of disingenuous analysis? Can even the most firmly convinced “skeptic” not see that this data has been cherry picked and the analysis presented is bogus?
In some ways Glacier should be better kept as a secret. At what point do we have too many leftist extremists leave their computer monitors located in basement bunkers and ride up there to mess with nature? For folks like myself that practice conservation, Glacier, Denali, Wrangle Elias and the Lake Louise/Banff Rockies are required field trips.
I rode my mountain bike before sunrise today and as usual, didn’t see another bike out.
If we say too much about Glacier, GE (ZGubment electric) will pack up some more kids on spin junkets and give us reports of great alarm and fear.
1) CO2 is a greenhouse gas
2) The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has increased in the last century.
3) Humans burn fossil fuels which release CO2 and other greenhouse gases
4) Therefore the glacier melt must be due to AGW.
End of story. Go home. Don’t think about it anymore. Who needs evidence when we can employ logic like this?
Sam Neill’s defecting Russian character in The Hunt For Red October wished (unsuccesfully) to see Montana before he died. I can see why. What a tragedy (I muse from Down Under) that such beautiful places are being processed into propaganda for pseudo-scientific panics, to be sent around the world like the latest vulgar rumours about Hollywood celebrities.
Glacier retreat.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/glacier3.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/swissglacier.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/glacierretreatSINCE1850.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/Illecillewaetglacier.jpg
I watched some of the season’s highlights shows for “Deadliest Catch” over the weekend. Anyone who watches those boats fighting their way through ice-clogged waters of the Bering Sea knows the “Arctic ice is MELTING!!!!” hysteria for what it is.
More global warming headed for Montana tomorrow.
http://www.weatherstreet.com/data/SPC_045.jpg
http://www.weatherstreet.com/spc_legend.jpg
WRT Steve Goddard (06:49:43) :
More weather is not climate department, but:
Not just MT: See:
http://www.weatherstreet.com/local_forecast_files/national-weather.htm
Note snow forecast over large areas of western U.S.
And they still didn’t quite get ND right, where they forecast rain:
Looked out the window a few minutes ago:
It was precipitating white stuff.
Also note the ”heavy snow likely” and ”possible” over several 100 miles of the Sierra Nevada. . . .