Obama Helicopters into Yosemite to Demand an End to Climate "Lip Service"

Obama’s drivel was mindbogglingly ignorant…

“Rising temperatures could mean no more glaciers in Glacier national park, no more Joshua trees in Joshua Tree national park. Rising seas can destroy vital ecosystems in the Everglades and at some point could even threaten icons like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. That’s not the America I want to pass on to the next generation.”

Rising temperatures could mean no more glaciers in Glacier national park
Glacial mass balance has, on average, been decreasing since the mid-1800’s. In other words, glaciers have generally been retreating over the past 150 years. Would it be better if the globally averaged glacial mass balance was increasing? That’s a “big fat no.”
Glacial mass balance was increasing from 2000 BC up until the mid 1800’s.
It was decreasing from 8000 BC up until 2000 BC.
The glaciers at North Cascades National Park have stopped retreating…

Geologists understand that glacial mass balance is almost always positive or negative. While glacially slow, very few glaciers sit still. Geologists also know that most alpine/valley glaciers in North America are of very recent origin, only dating back to the Mid-Holocene Neoglaciation. Most reached their maximum extent in the 1800’s during the Little Ice Age. The “small glaciers” of Glacier National Park, Montana may have not existed during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO). The geological evidence suggests that they formed less than 7,000 years ago as the Earth’s climate began to cool after the HCO…

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. Glaciers were present within current Glacier National Park boundaries as early as 7,000 years ago but may have survived an early Holocene warm period (Carrara, 1989), making them much older. 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. (Key, 2002) The extent and mass of these glaciers, as well as glaciers around the globe, has clearly decreased during the 20th century in response to warmer temperatures.
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.
[…]
USGS

“Mapping of lateral and terminal moraines” clearly demonstrates that the maximum extent of the glaciers was reached during the Little Ice Age (LIA).
Most of the alpine glaciers in Colorado formed after the HCO and reached their maximum extent during the LIA, between 400 and 150 years ago. Most have generally been retreating since the early 1900’s…

[…]
[T]here have been three small Holocone (10,000 years BP to present) glacial advances termed, from oldest to youngest, Triple Lakes, Audubon, and Arapaho Peak advances. Collectively these minor advances are termed Neoglaciation, and the largest glacier during these advances was only 1.6 km long. The Arapaho Peak advance is local evidence for the Little Ice Age (the popular name for a period of cooling in the northern hemisphere lasting approximately from the 14th to the mid-19th centuries). Most of the glaciers and perennial ice patches in Colorado today are the tattered remnants of these small Little Ice Age glaciers.
[…]
Glaciers of Colorado

The glaciers of Mt Ranier National Park may date back to the last Pleistocene glaciation, but they also exhibit a similar variability to those of Glacier National Park and the Colorado Front Range…

The size of glaciers on Mount Rainier has fluctuated significantly in the past. For example, during the last ice age, from about 25,000 to about 15,000 years ago, glaciers covered most of the area now within the boundaries of Mount Rainier National Park and extended to the perimeter of the present Puget Sound Basin.
Geologists can determine the former extent of glaciers on Mount Rainier by mapping the outline of glacial deposits and by noting the position of trimlines, the distinct boundaries between older and younger forests or between forests and pioneering vegetation. Geologists determine the age of some of the deposits by noting the age of the oldest trees and lichens growing on them and the degree of weatherring on boulders. Between the 14th century and AD 1850, many of the glaciers on Mount Rainier advanced to their farthest went down-valley since the last ice age. Many advances of this sort occurred worldwide during this time period known to geologists as the Little Ice Age. During the Little Ice Age, the Nisqually Glacier advanced to a position 650 feet to 800 feet down-valley from the site of the Glacier Bridge, Tahoma and South Tahoma Glaciers merged at the base of Glacier Island, and the terminus of Emmons Glacier reached within 1.2 miles of the White River Campground.
Retreat of the Little Ice Age glaciers was slow until about 1920 when retreat became more rapid. Between the height of the Little Ice Age and 1950, Mount Rainier’s glaciers lost about one-quarter of their length. Beginning in 1950 and continuing through the early 1980′s, however, many of the major glaciers advanced in response to relatively cooler temperatures of the mid-century. The Carbon, Cowlitz, Emmons, and Nisqually Glaciers advanced during the late 1970′s and early 1980′s as a result of high snowfalls during the 1960′s and 1970′s. Since the early-1980′s and through 1992, however, many glaciers have been thinning and retreating and some advances have slowed, perhaps in response to drier conditions that have prevailed at Mount Rainier since 1977.
[…]
Mount Rainier National Park Information Page

The Mt. Ranier glaciers also seem to have reached their maximum Holocene extent during the Little Ice Age.
Most valley or alpine glaciers formed after the Holocene Climatic Optimum, during the Neoglaciation period (4,000 to 150 years ago) and reached their maxima during the mid-1800’s. Without the natural warming of the millennial climate cycle, those glaciers would have continued to advance. That would be a very bad thing.


No more Joshua trees in Joshua Tree national park
WTF???

Where Two Deserts Meet
Two distinct desert ecosystems, the Mojave and the Colorado, come together in Joshua Tree National Park. A fascinating variety of plants and animals make their homes in a land sculpted by strong winds and occasional torrents of rain. Dark night skies, a rich cultural history, and surreal geologic features add to the wonder of this vast wilderness in southern California.
National Park Service

It’s a desert. Unless climate change is going to turn it into something other than a desert, it will remain a desert. Maybe the formerly respectable National Geographic can explain Maobama’s moronic claim…

Climate Change Threatens an Iconic Desert Tree
It’s not just the polar bear. Animals and plants in Earth’s other extreme environment—the desert—are endangered by rising temperatures.
By Osha Gray Davidson, National Geographic
Close your eyes and imagine a species living in a harsh environment threatened by climate change. If you conjured up a polar bear, Cameron Barrows has a suggestion: Consider, instead, the Joshua tree—the gnarly icon of the Southwest’s Mojave Desert that looks like it sprang from a Dr. Seuss book.
“Animals living in the Arctic get a lot more attention than plants in arid lands, but desert plants like the Joshua tree are also threatened by a changing climate,” says Barrows, a research ecologist at the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Conservation Biology.
[…]
One study predicted under a scenario of changing climate that between 15 and 37 percent of Earth’s plants and animals will have populations so small by 2050 that extinction is virtually certain.
Other than the Arctic, deserts may have the most to lose as the planet warms because anything surviving there already lives on the edge.
Because plants and animals in ecosystems have complex relationships, it’s not just the Joshua tree at risk, says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Tucson, Arizona.
[…]
Based on climate models using a 3-degree Celsius (5.4-degree Fahrenheit) increase, the range of Yucca brevifolia could be reduced up to 90 percent by the end of this century, Barrows says. Under that scenario, it would exist only in isolated pockets, called refugia, scattered across the 800,000-acre national park.
[…]
NotGeo

The Joshua trees are apparently threatened by a climate model which forecasts 3°C of warming by the end of this century. No scientifically realistic model forecasts anything remotely close to 3°C of warming by the end of this century. The only models forecasting that mush warming are based on Relative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (“The stuff nightmares are made from”).
Rising seas can destroy vital ecosystems in the Everglades and at some point could even threaten icons like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
The average elevation of Everglades National Park is about 6′ above sea level. No actual data indicate that sea level will rise by more than 1 foot by the end of this century. Claims of several feet of sea level rise are invariably based on RCP 8.5 – BAD SCIENCE FICTION.
Sea level rises and it falls… always has, always will. It was about 1-2 meters higher than it currently is about 4,000 years ago during the Holocene highstand. The Everglades moved to it’s current location during the fall in sea level (which was related to the formation and advance of the Glacier National Park Glaciers). When sea level rises, the Everglades move up-slope and inland. When sea level falls, it moves down-slope ans seaward. Florida is dominated by Karst topography.
The idiotic comment about “icons like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island” really doesn’t deserve to be addressed… But, I will address it, because it’s fun and easy. Unsurprisingly, the formerly respectable National Geographic has made similar moronic comments about the Statue of Liberty.

This is NOAA’s record of sea level rise at The Battery in New York City…

Sea level near the Statue of Liberty has been rising at less than 3 mm/yr for as long as it’s been measured. That’s about 1″ every 10 years.
The top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch is 315′ above sea level.
Here is NOAA’s sea level trend projected to 2100 plotted at the same scale as the Statue of Liberty…