[UPDATE: and it’s not just Climategate email, see the analysis by McIntyre added below – Anthony ]
From Dartmouth College and the irascible Lonnie Thompson of OSU, who still ‘publicly’ thinks in PR that Kilmanjaro and Peru’s Quelccaya glaciers are affected by temperature, not sublimation due to lack of precipitation. See below for the Climategate email that makes nonsense of the temperature claim made in the press release below. Also of note is Thompson’s claim that “PERUVIAN GLACIER MAY VANISH IN FIVE YEARS” made on February 15, 2007, and it was still there in 2012 by this photography.
===========================================================
Temperature, not snowfall, has been driving the fluctuating size of Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap, whose dramatic shrinkage in recent decades has made it a symbol for global climate change, a Dartmouth-led study shows.
The findings support many scientists’ suspicions that tropical glaciers are rapidly shrinking because of a warming climate, and will help scientists to better understand the natural variability of past and modern climate and to refine models that predict tropical glaciers’ response to future climate change.
The study appears in the journal Geology.
Dartmouth glacial geomorphologist Meredith Kelly and her lab team used field mapping combined with the beryllium-10 surface exposure dating method and ice cores obtained by Ohio State University paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson to examine how the Quelccaya Ice Cap has expanded and retreated over the past millennium. It is the first time that a record of past glacial extents has been compared directly with an annually dated ice core record from the same ice mass.
During the last millennium, a significant cooling event known as the Little Ice Age occurred, but scientists don’t know what caused the cooling or its geographic extent. The Dartmouth-led team determined beryllium-10 ages of moraines – or glacier sediments — that mark the past positions of Qori Kalis, an outlet glacier that has been monitored by Thompson since he first visited Quelccaya in the early 1960s. The Quelccaya Ice Cap, the largest ice mass in the tropics, sits 18,000 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes.
The results show that Qori Kalis advanced to its late Holocene maximum position prior to 520 years ago and subsequently retreated with only minor re-advances since that time. The comparison of the moraine record with the ice core record suggests that temperature was the driving force of glacial expansion and retreat, says Justin Stroup, lead author and a PhD candidate in Dartmouth’s Department of Earth Sciences.
“This is an important result since there has been debate about the causes of recent tropical glacial recession – for example, whether it is due to temperature, precipitation, humidity, solar irradiance or other factors,” says Kelly, a co-author of the study. “This result agrees with Professor Thompson’s earlier suggestions that these tropical glaciers are shrinking very rapidly today because of a warming climate.”
Furthermore, the ebbs and flows of other glaciers in tropical South America are similar to the Qori Kalis extents, indicating a regionally consistent pattern of past climate conditions. On a global scale, the results suggest that glaciers were larger than present and depositing moraines in both northern and southern hemispheres at about the same time, indicating that the climate mechanisms which caused the late Holocene cooling likely influenced a globally synchronous pattern of cooling.
The research, which was funded by National Science Foundation, includes Dartmouth College, the University of Cincinnati and Penn State University.
=============================================================
OK now read this Climategate email from Phil Jones, who in polite terms, says the claim is B.S. Note the reference to Peru’s Quelccaya glacier which I have bolded – Anthony
5315.txt
date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>
subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff” <geoff.jenkins@metoffice.xx.xx>
Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.
Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson” <thompson.3@osu.xxx.xxx>
You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson <thompson.4@osu.xxx.xxx>
I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.
I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well ! I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.
Cheers
Phil
At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:
phil
<<kilimanjaro.doc>>
we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an
example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.
I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?
would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
be grateful for your help
cheers
geoff
Dr Geoff Jenkins
Head, Climate Prediction Programme
Hadley Centre
Met Office
FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK
tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx
mobile: 0787 966 1136
[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-
================================================
UPDATE: Nick Stokes responded in comments, I responded, and I’ve decided to add it to the body of this post.
“email from Phil Jones, who in polite terms, says the claim is B.S”
That’s not my reading of it. Jones seems to be saying (contrary to this paper) that Thompson says it’s due to sublimation:
“Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.”
Sounds like Jones thinks its’ temperature. Maybe he misunderstood Thompson, or LT has changed his view. But it seems Jones then and LT now both think it is temperature.
REPLY: Well I’d expect that, as your confirmation bias for temperature is legendary. The point is that “Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down.”, now look at this photo of Thompson standing next to an ice spire on Kilimanjaro and tell me with a straight face that’s not sublimation going on ( I assume you understand how sublimation presents itself with ice):
Land Use Change Impacts On Regional Climate Over Kilimanjaro” By Fairman Jr. Et Al 2011 pretty much put an end to that debate. More here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/23/34609/
On Quelccaya, McIntyre did a thorough dissection independent of me, and concluded:
“It seems to me that, among specialists, Thompson is probably standing fairly alone in claiming that d18O at tropical glaciers is a proxy for temperature rather than amount effect. (Because of Thompson’s eminence, the contradiction of his results is mostly implied, rather than directly stated.)
…
Because the 1998 El Nino was so big, it provides a good test case for temperature vs amount. It seems to me that the negative downspike for the big 1998 El Nino is decisive against Thompson.
The PNAS version of the data left off showing a sort of uptick. The extension to 2009 does not seem to me to be going off the charts.”
Of course, you lost that debate too, Nick, since your mindset can’t seem to grasp that temperature is not the cause. Land use change is, and Thompson is sampling in the wrong place to detect it. (note that all the Amazon deforestation is going on in the east)
Via a comment from Espen on the CA thread:
ScienceDaily report says: ” Most of the moisture in the area comes from the east, in snowstorms fueled by moist air rising from the Amazon Basin. But the ice core-derived climate records from the Andes are also impacted from the west — specifically by El Niño, a temporary change in climate, which is driven by sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.” (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404142417.htm).
And, as we see, no correlation in 1998 during that super El Nino to bolster Thompson’s claim, in fact, it looks refuted by the data. – Anthony
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From wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quelccaya_Ice_Cap
“Lonnie Thompson and his research team have drilled ice cores from Quelccaya that date back almost 2,000 years and have used them to study changes in atmospheric conditions over this period. In these samples, the oxygen isotope ratio, oxygen-18 to oxygen-16, has risen abruptly in the last 50 years, an indicator of regional warming. As the ice cap is retreating, it is exposing almost perfectly preserved, unfossilized plant specimens that have been dated to 5,200 years before present, indicating that it has been more than 50 centuries since the ice cap was smaller than it is today”
Nothing new then. What casued the cooling 5200 years ago? And what caused the temperature to bumb back now?
Is this another one of those guys who never releases his data and methodologies? Serially?
I don’t see what the big fuss is about. There has been some modest warming in the 20th century, and temperatures are now, according to a number of measures, higher than they have been since the Mediaeval Warm Period, or just possibly only since the 1930s. Why then should we not expect a certain amount of recession in glaciers? The real question, if some glaciers have been receding at an unusual rate (and define that!) is how much is caused by temperature and how much by sublimation.
In Kilimanjaro’s case, the temperature trends suggest it is mostly sublimation. Has anyone mentioned what the temperature trend near Quelcaya has been?
Rich.
Re: Coldlynx
The cooling of 5200 years ago seems to coincide with the end of the Holocene Climate Optimum. Well at least that is what we used to call it.
If Kilimanjaro and Quelccaya were melting and not sublimating, where is the physical evidence for meltwater runoff?
I thought CAGW was going to make itself felt most as you got nearer the poles? Oh well that’s glacial science.
Glaciers retreated when the world was colder!
“If Kilimanjaro and Quelccaya were melting and not sublimating, where is the physical evidence for meltwater runoff?”
Isn’t it obvious? It is hiding in the deep ocean.
steveta_uk says:
February 26, 2014 at 5:06 am
“During the last millennium, a significant cooling event known as the Little Ice Age occurred”
My thoughts exactly. Seems to me if nothing else this admits to and confirms that the Little Ice Age was multi-hemispheric and/or global, and by extension the medieval warm period was as well.
Should have said “probably” was as well.
For the desperate straw-grasping Warmists, since actual temperatures have refused to budge for some 17 years, they need proxies for warming instead. Thus, if some glacier has receded here or calved over there, it “must” be warming. Either that, or the heat is hiding out somewhere, biding its’ time. With Warmists, you never know what the latest stance will be. Oops, just got changed to “aerosols”.
Yes, the temperature of far inland areas drives Monsoon flow div and curl, and therefore, can impact the amount of snowfall in tropical highlands. Oh, I see, not THAT temperature! (face palm). LOL!
Ah, thank you for reminding me of what I wrote on that thread, I had completely forgotten about it. One should really keep a local archive of what one writes in comments when one invests some work into finding interesting data (this was much easier in the days when USENET was the preferred arena of online discussions, since my newsreader always kept local copies of my postings).
son of mulder says:
February 26, 2014 at 9:01 am
If Kilimanjaro and Quelccaya were melting and not sublimating, where is the physical evidence for meltwater runoff?
The lake at the base of the Qori Kalis glacier!
Anthony,
“tell me with a straight face that’s not sublimation going on”
I wasn’t offering my own opinion in my comment; I was trying to find the basis for the heading: “but Climategate emails suggest otherwise”. You quote Jones saying in 2004 that Thompson thought it was sublimation, but apparently Jones disagreed. Then a 2014 paper with Thompson saying that it is temperature. So I can’t see the “otherwise”. The only puzzle is, was Jones right about what LT thought in 2004. Maybe not.
However, I do have an opinion, which is that sublimation and temperature are not unrelated. Sublimation rate depends on vapor pressure, which is highly temperature dependent. The whole process of ice turning into vapor is accelerated by warming, whether or not melting is an intermediate phase.
And this latest paper in fact says nothing about sublimation, for or against. It just says warming shrinks glaciers.
If you look at the history of water there, it falls as snow, then sits around for a long time in the wind, creeping down. Eventually it reaches a lower altitude where what hasn’t sublimed melts. With warming, melting comes earlier, but sublimation is faster too, which may be the dominant effect,.
REPLY: and yet, during the big El Nino of 1998, an excellent test case for temperature, the opposite effect was seen. – Anthony
Two points, here.
First, the Kilimanjaro glacier has been a post on this site before; and on one of these occasions I wrote that the edge of the glacier looked as though a rotary plow cut it. My wife, with an M.S. in glacial geology, explained to me the the “glaciers” are actually snowfields. They’ve never grown to the thickness needed to become a glacier. I’ll bet these pups have vanished and regrown numerous times in the Holocene.
Second, the ice spire reminds me of inselbergs along I-80’s Telephone Canyon in southeastern Wyoming made of limestone calved from a limestone layer. These have slide downhill via gravity while riding on loose material. In the case of the snowfields the snow melting at the base of the spire might have provided lubrication for these to have crept downhill and away from the main body of the snowfield.
{ The results show that Qori Kalis advanced to its late Holocene maximum position prior to 520 years ago. }
So we’ve been warming up for 520 years.
I’d agree with that
Though all the headlines say “temperature, not snowfall, driving glacier size” they fail to mention the fact that the study is talking about the period between 12,400 and 11,600 years ago for Quelccaya glacier. From the study:
“Therefore, we suggest that Quelccaya recession at 12.4–11.6 ka may have been influenced by warming. This recession occurred contemporaneously with Antarctic warming and increasing atmospheric CO2 (EPICA community members, 2004; Monnin et al., 2001), and is similar in timing to the recession of mountain glaciers in southern midlatitude locations (Kaplan et al., 2010).”
and
“In contrast to nearby paleoprecipitation proxy records that register wet conditions throughout the YD, the recession of Quelccaya from the Huancané II moraines occurred by ca. 12.4 ka. Quelccaya recession may have been influenced by Southern Hemisphere warming subsequent to the ACR, rising atmospheric CO2, or, perhaps, other factors such as El Niño–Southern Oscillation variability.”
So in reality, nothing to see here…please move along.
LOL! That picture of Thompson is THE most convincing sublimation evidence possible. Anytime anyone talks temperature and Kilimanjaro glaciers, that picture should be Exhibit 1.
Nick writes “Sublimation rate depends on vapor pressure, which is highly temperature dependent.”
Sublimation happens below the triple point which is where the vapour pressure is not highly dependent on temperature 😛
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapour_pressure_of_water
Having said that re “Nick writes” above, I do believe increased CO2 could well directly increase the sublimation rate through increased DLR which can only be absorbed at the very surface of the water (as ice).
So for the same reasons DLR cant directly warm the oceans (ie its not absorbed beneath the surface molecules which are evaporating and are cooler than the molecules below them), it can increase the sublimation rate of ice.
TimTheToolMan says: February 26, 2014 at 6:31 pm
“Sublimation happens below the triple point which is where the vapour pressure is not highly dependent on temperature”
No, you’re looking at the wrong reference (water). In fact, just below the triple point, vapor pressure of ice increases about 8% per °C. At lower temperature, the proportional increase is even higher. See
Sec3.4.1.
In absolute terms the vapor pressure is lower. But sublimation is important because it goes on for very long periods. And if it’s the main pathway of ice loss, then 8%/°C matters.
The DLR stuff is irrelevant. As in the ocean, the surface is a net LW emitter. DLR part balances the emission.
Nick Stokes, I assume you are aware that ice can “disappear” (sublimate) even when the temperature never exceeds the melting point of ice for months on end?
I think Anthony’s point is that the decrease in glacial ice in that part of the world is due to less precipitation, that being independent of temperature.
“Of course, you lost that debate too, Nick,”
Of course, I’m always adjudged loser here. But what I
established was that the downtick was in fact in the tear beginning July 1999, well after the El Nino.
But in fact the downtick you show is in d18O, not any measure of ice. Steve is querying it’s use as a proxy. But he got the years wrong.
Chad Jessup says: February 26, 2014 at 8:27 pm
“I think Anthony’s point is that the decrease in glacial ice in that part of the world is due to less precipitation, that being independent of temperature.”
First I’m well aware of sublimation – that’s why I’m quoting ice vapor pressure dependence on T. While what you say might be the point Anthony has in mind, he spoke of sublimation, which is a different issue. It is important, but it isn’t due to lack of precipitation.
“During the last millennium, a significant cooling event known as the Little Ice Age occurred”
This quote caught my eye too. How big does a cooling event have to be considered significant? 0.5°C hardly seems significant. How about 1°C, is that significant? If a 1°C were considered to be significant how I this different in extent from the warming since the Little Ice Age?
Is this quoted statement tacit agreement that temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were similar to the current warm period?
Auto correct is the bane of my on-line life.