Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
And the opening of the NewYorkTimes article reads:
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — What will they call this place once the glaciers are gone?
My suggestions are at the end of the post.
There is a redeeming paragraph in the NYT article. It reads (my boldface):
The retreat is not entirely due to man-made global warming, though scientists say that plays a major role. While the rate of melting has alternately sped up and slowed in lock step with decades-long climate cycles, it has risen steeply since about 1980.
“sped up and slowed” suggests the glaciers have been melting all along. And that’s correct. The epoch we are now in is called an interglacial. And what happens during interglacials? Glaciers melt. That’s precisely what they’ve been doing since the last ice age ended many millennia ago. The author of the NYT article even acknowledges that in the opening of the next paragraph:
And while glaciers came and went millenniums ago…
The rest of the article is about how regional climate might be different with the glaciers gone. A hearty thank you to the author for noting that. That’s precisely why we need realistic regional decadal and multidecadal forecasts from climate models…something that climate models are still incapable of doing because the climate science community, under the direction of the UN, has only focused their efforts on the hypothetical effects of human-induced global warming, neglecting the basic processes and impacts of coupled ocean-atmosphere processes.
My suggestion is they leave the park name as it is OR they call it Beautiful Landscapes Are Now Visible…Now That The Dangerous, Cold And Slippery Ice Is Gone National Park.
Here’s a link to the slide show the NYT provided. As I said: beautiful landscapes.
The glaciers are not from the last ice age, they are new!
“The glaciers in Glacier National Park today are all geologically new having formed in the last few thousand years. ”
http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/parks/glac/
Excellent point and absolutely true.
I wonder what “few” is. You’re reading it to mean less than, say, eight, but they they did leave plausible deniability.
Most of the glaciers were much smaller just 3000 years ago.It was during the anomalous Little Ice that most glaciers expanded and the current retreat is no different than during past warm spikes.
Thank you.
The National Park Formerly Known as Glacier
As I recall from Glacier Park ranger talks from years past was that George Bird Grinnell so named the park in the 1880’s because of the circs carved out of the mountains to give them the horn and blade shapes. Glaciers did that more spectacularly in GNP than any where else in North America. It is also known as the Crown of the Continent.
They could call it Unglaciated National Park or Yosemite II.
Just like Prince: The Park Formerly Know as Glacier National, then in about 7 to 8 years we can change the name back
Too bad it’s not in Alaska. Then we could call it Baked Alaska.
In this day-and-age of gender reclassification, how about Trans-Glacier National Park?
Another bs statement: a mass of ice has to be thick enough to flow plasticly to be a “glacier”. Almost all thesr “glaciers” are remnant, stagnant ice blocks. The usage of the term glacier is manipulative, allowing the eco-green to say we have caused a huge change, the “killing” of glaciers. These “glaciers” are long dead. Theu are huge ice cubes melting in the mountains, melting faster perhaps but continuing a process that started long before our oil business.
As to Greenland: edge glaciers will retreat until the advance equals the melting loss. If the non melting accumulation drops below the gravitational thinning and expansion rate, the first issue to be answered is about changes in precipitation in the accumulation zone. You don’t need changes in temperature to create or stop glaciation. You need changes in snow accumulation rates. Ten centimeters excess snow wrt loss per year creates a glacier in 120 ky, one meter, in 12,000 years.
Glaciers are such an advertising gimmick, I have to conclude the glaciologists of the world are complicit in the CAGW scam.
I had no idea that a national park had such a fragile ego tied to its identity.
Who knows, in a decade or two it might be hard to see the glacier for all the ice and snow around it all year.
North and west of Glacier National Park lies Alaska’s Glacier Bay. The chilly Little Ice Age filled it to the Pacific Ocean with glaciers, but during the late 1700’s the glaciers began retreating, and by 1892 the glacier in the main bay had retreated about 50 miles.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/glacier-bay-ice-retreated-50-miles-between-1780-and-1892/
The first public coal fired power plant was not in operation until 1882, by the way. Those facts have not stopped the NY Times from writing scare stories about shrinking glaciers around that bay, as if that were all our fault.
This reminds me very much of the story with the Swiss glaciers. Swiss glaciers have probably the most comprehensive and long-running monitoring of anywhere in the world:
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/lengthvariation.html
It is true that the Swiss glaciers are receding. But what they don’t tell you is that they have been receding since about 1870. Before that they were expanding rapidly. The people of the village of Grindelwald were afraid that thier village might be destroyed by the advancing glacier in around 1870. Then the glacier began to recede.
Like many, or even all, glaciers in Switzerland, the Grindelwald glacier rapidly retreated in the late 19th century.
They also don’t tell you that in 2 periods in the 20th century, the Swiss glaciers were mostly growing or stationary – in about 1920 and around 1970.
The picture is not one of stable glaciers until, say, 1980 and then rapid retreat. The glaciers have been growing and shrinking long before that, with very much a bias towards shrinking.
Yes.
And most are not aware that for over half the Holocene, glacier extent was less than it is today and the tree line was at a higher elevation than it is today.
Kurt in Switzerland
Kurt, I have often wondered how much the rate of shrinkage of the Swiss glaciers is due to changes in the amount of snowfall rather than changes in temperature. It is easy to imagine that the amount of snow falling over the Alps has changed enormously over time.
But I cannot find good, long-term measurements of snowfall. Has there been any proper study of this that you know of?
Also, the Swiss glaciers have been retreating to higher altitudes – this presumably should mean reduced rates of shrinkage in the future as obviously it is colder for longer at higher altitudes than lower altitudes.
Charles
read 787. Holzhauser, H. et al. (2005) Glacier and lake-level variations in west-central Europe over the last 3500 years. The Holoccene, vol. 15, p. 789 803 It shows that high lake levels coincide with every advance of the Swiss Alps’ glaciers.
Also read 855. Kaser, G., et al. (2006) Mass balance of glaciers and ice caps: Consensus estimates for 1961–2004. Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 33, L19501, doi:10.1029/2006GL027511
He suggests the balance in Europe is unchanged because when the North Atlantic Oscillation pushes storms northward more moisture nourishes Norwegian Glaciers and starves the Alps, when NAO is negative the reverse happens. I suspect we should be witnessing an uptick in the proportion of advancing vs retreating glaciers over the next 10-20 years
The current shrinking has exposed forests and farms, up to 4,000 years old.
All the park needs is for Al Gore to visit and the glaciers will be fine for decades.
Asking a ranger now-a-days about science is like asking a cop about the law.
I was going cycling in Theodore Roosevelt NP and asked the cute front desk ranger chick about behavior around a buffalo American bison on the road, could I shoo it or go around it or wait it out? Her fat mouth-merkin co-worker yells from his Moon Pie and soda pop, “No! Ya’ gotta go back the way you came!” The road is a 30 mile loop in the Badlands, that’s not an option.
We met no buffalo, but did meet a herd of Mustang watering. They put out two young stallions as road guards that let us know that we were NOT passing. We enjoyed from a distance. When they were done and departing, the bucks pranced in a way letting us know that they enjoyed their job buffaloing humans and life in general.
I was impressed by the difference in bison instructions between summer and winter in Yellowstone. In summer the said something like stay 100 yards away. Do not approach, do not feed, etc. This may make sense, on my 1974 bike trip through the area (no bison then), a waitress told me about one family who came across a bear cub and had their toddler side on it like a rocking horse for a cute picture. I didn’t bother to ask what mama bear thought of the attack on her cub….
Oh yeah. The winter instructions at Old Faithful to the few people around skiing, snowshoeing, and pretty competent outdoors they gave us information about how bison act when they’re irritated, not to be fooled by how slowly they normally walk, actual useful information. Along with don’t approach, don’t feed, and all that.
Bison hang out at the hot springs in the winter. Sort of a wintertime spa. So it is important that visitors know how to handle encounters.
Thanks Bob,
I was unaware that anyone still read the NYT!
The mountains in Glacier National Park have been shaped by ice but their formation was complex and, as such, is of great interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier_National_Park_(U.S.)#Geology
Years from now they may be much reduced in height by water, wind, and gravity. Only then might it be appropriate to consider a new name. Until then (a few million years) they will display a landscape that only valley glaciers can produce.
I’ve been looking at boat plans on the SBC Coastal Fisheries Program & noticed a heading “Vulnerability of Coastal Fisheries to Climate Change Project”. Naturally I had to click on the link & discovered that in the 4 years & 3 months since it was set up, there have been no replies. I guess coastal fisherman know what they are doing,
http://www.spc.int/coastfish/fr/projets/changement-climatique/forum/6-sites.html
Why is it that environmentalists always want to maintain the status quo? The history of the Earth is one of change. If we were just now coming out of an ice age, they would want to prevent low latitude ice sheets from melting. If we were beginning a new ice age, they would want to prevent new ice sheets from forming. When they discover a species that is mismatched with its current environment and struggling to survive, they not only want to protect it, but they insist that the loss of such a species would be catastrophic to the planet. And when they find a species that is thriving and expanding, they call it an “invasive” species and want to limit or eradicate it. If they could, they would go back in time and prevent evolution from occurring because it represents change. In fact, many of them would probably want to prevent life from starting in the first place to keep the planet “pristine” in the eyes of those who would then never come into existence to see it. Some of these people are nothing short of insanely genocidal. Unfortunately, few of them are suicidal.
In their view, mankind is the enemy of nature.
As I was reading the headline for this posting, my eyes got distracted by the ad panel on the right that says: “Hot Girl Walks Around New York With No Pants On. . .” Perhaps that is adding to the global warming.
But back to the main topic. The last time I visited Glacier National Park was in mid July 2011 and the snow was as high as an elephant’s eye.
http://bit.ly/11QHBLM
The glaciers in Glacier National Park will be just fine. They have grown and shrunk as the climate warmed and cooled for hundreds of thousands of years. They extended far out of the mountains onto the Great Plains during Ice Ages and shrank back into their cirques during interglacial periods. Their termini were out on the Great Plains during the last Ice Age about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, retreated back into their cirques, then readvanced slightly during the Younger Dryas (about 12,500 to 11,500 years ago), shrank to probably less than the present during the warmer-than-present last 10,000 years until about 1500 years ago, readvanced during the Little Ice Age (last 700 years), and have been advancing and retreating on a smaller scale since about 1500 AD. If the cooling period that we are now in continues, they will most likely stop shrinking and begin to advance again. We’ve had two periods of warming this century (1915 to 1945 and 1978 to 2000). More melting likely took place during the first half of the century (before CO2 began to increase significantly) than the last half of the century so there is no reason to blame recent melting on CO2.
+1 …I was hoping you would chime in on this, thanks Dr Easterbrook…
There’s a wealth of data on glaciers in the Swiss, Austrian, Italian and French Alps with an incredible amount of organic matter retrieved and carbon-dated. The evidence* is very powerful that the “Little Ice Age” exhibited the greatest extent for the Holocene and that glacier extent was less than today for well over half the Holocene.
Do Rocky Mountain glaciers exhibit similar data?
Kurt in Switzerland
*evidence in the form of entire tree trunks uncovered well above the current tree line, where today one only finds rubble and ice. At least 12 “warming” periods have been identified, ranging from about 100 to 1000 years’ duration, characterized by summer temperature / insolation at a level higher than today.
How about like Prince – “The Park Previously Known as Glacial National Park”
And are any of these glaciers among the ones revealing forest debris from as recently as only ~1000 years ago? (Medieval Warming Period)
If so then simple, use whatever name was used for the area back then!
On her second visit to Glacier National Park in 1894, Mary Vaux (pronounced “vox”) was aghast at how the Illecillewaet Glacier had retreated since her previous visit seven years earlier. The lowest edge of the Great Glacier, as it was also known then, was clearly withdrawing upslope. We now know that most of the world’s glaciers were in retreat then as they are now.
http://cmiae.org/national-park-feature-article/glaciers-lichens-and-the-history-of-the-earth/
Robuk – You mention Illecillewaet Glacier which is in Glacier National Park in British Columbia, Canada. But this thread is referring to the US version of Glacier National Park in Montana right next to Waterton Lakes National Park.
Illecillewaet Glacier is a most interesting one. Saw it about a year or two ago.
http://bit.ly/1HDUqcj
Hopefully these time series charts showing an INCREASING TREND in spring snowpack in the vicinity of Glacier National Park will help to dispel the myth of the vanishing Glacier National Park snowpack due to global warming. These charts show composited data from all 18 snotel sites near Glacier National Park with complete data over the 34 years from 1981 to 2014.
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/swe.glaciernp.april.1981-2014.png
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/swe.glaciernp.may.1981-2014.png
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/swe.glaciernp.june.1981-2014.png
@Mark Albright
There is a SNOTEL(482) site located just less than a mile from Logan Pass Visitor Center.
The melt out days for that site have all been in July/August since the IPCC and Dan Fagre have said that the area would melt out sooner.
Here are the melt out dates from SNOTEL-Flattop Mtn. since 2005.
2005 June 23rd
2006 June 28th
2007 June 30th (IPCC claims melt out date will be sooner in spring)
2008 July 16th
2009 July 2nd
2010 July 16th
2011 August 2nd
2012 July 19th
2013 July 4th
2014 July 17th
Your observations are great, but the alarmists can claim that snow depth can vary from year to year, but what they can’t explain is why the snow is lasting longer into spring and early summer.
Someone needs to ask Dan Fagre what he thinks about these melt out dates lasting longer into spring and summer, which is completely opposite of what he predicted and what the IPPC supports based on his studies.
Snow input is definitely one important part fo the glacier mass balance.
More important is weahter June/July thru September (northern hemisphere) :
No snowfall during this period will lead to considerable melt during summer.
Three to four cold waves evenly distributed over the summer and glaciers are likely to gain mass.
And concerning the name:
Glacier-404 Natioanl Park
It is interesting that they mention that the melt increased after 1980. When did Mount St Helens erupt….HMMM 1980. I was at Glacier Park numerous times and a park ranger commented that a lot of ash from mount Saint Helens deposited on the glaciers and the dark soot collected heat and helped increase the melt. But that reason would not be convenient to the AGW folks
Perhaps it could just be relocated to Ben Nevis?
Portage glacier in AK, retreated some 900 ft in 3 summers, (as demonstrated by terminal moraines). Starting in 1911… Ooops !
Of course. Climate change did it. Not the fact that they were too small to compete with the big guys, with mushrooming costs of insurance, and unable to invest in things like snowmaking and high-speed lifts.