Reader Phil Hutchings writes via email:
This article in Nature Communications caught my eye!
This is a beauty. This week, Nature Communications published an explanation as to why (at least) 58 New Zealand glaciers grew in the twenty-five years to 2008.
The aberrant behaviour by these naughty glaciers was perfectly explicable though – it was caused by “regional cooling”.
Researchers from NZ’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and Victoria University prepared, yes, a model of the Southern Alps. And yes, they found that in their model, lower air and adjacent ocean temperatures (during those 25 years) were correlated with the growing glaciers.
Fair enough.
But where is the support for this claim ?
“While this sequence of climate variability and its effect on New Zealand glaciers is unusual on a global scale, it remains consistent with a climate system that is being modified by humans”
The paper:
Mackintosh, A.N, Anderson, B.M, Lorrey, A.M, Renwick, J.A., Prisco Frei, & Dean, S.M., Regional cooling caused recent New Zealand glacier advances in a period of global warming. Nature Communications, February 2017
nature-communications-feb-2017 (PDF)
Why does your story end at 2008 ? What has happened since then.
Curious ? Did you bother to find out. Read on … Oh dear.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10818264
Here’s a few more, your story starts to seem a little one sided ?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3494892/Tourists-banned-hiking-New-Zealand-s-glaciers-Fox-Franz-Josef-ice-melting-quickly-global-warming.html
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-rapid-zealand-glaciers-hikes.html
Here’s one from youtube. Why do you not mention these things in your story ?
http://www.franzjosefglacier.com/social/blog/watch-2-years-of-glacier-retreat-in-15-seconds/
Perhaps it is just a little “regional warming” since 2008, no worries !
Your “regional cooling” may return, who knows.
This summer in NZ, Westland is having their wettest summer in 16yrs, according to locals. This, in a province that measures annual rain in metres, many of them. The Alps, over 3000m, will be getting a huge snowpack. This might surprise people in a few years, down below. Precipitation is what it is about mainly, not Temp, which is level over time….
Griff, you know that that statement is incorrect and yet you continue to peddle such an incorrect assertion.. Several times these past couple of weeks, I have referred you to the recent Fernandez Fernandez 2017 paper on the Greenland Glaciers.
This paper confirms that there has been a dramatic slow down in the retreat of the Greenland Glaciers. It concludes that of the total retreat these last 150 years, approximately 80% had taken place by 1946, with only 20% of the retreat after 1946.
One of the Glaciers studied showed that approximately 90% of the total retreat had taken place by 1946, and only 10% of the retreat after 1946.
For those not familiar with the Fernandez Fernandez paper, it can be found set out at
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312185500_High_sensitivity_of_North_Iceland_Trollaskagi_debris-free_glaciers_to_climatic_change_from_the_%27Little_Ice_Age%27_to_the_present
To summarize the findings;
As from the end of the LIA (which for some Glaciers was said to 1868, and for others 1898) through to 2005, the average retreat of the Glaciers studied was some 1334m. Of this 1334m, some 1062 metres had taken place by 1946. Only 272 metres of retreat had taken place after 1946.
The finding was that from the end of the LIA to 1946, the average rate of retreat was 15.3 metres per year. Wheras after 1946 through to 2005, the average rate of retreat had slowed down to 4.7 metres per year.
So one can see rather than glaciers retreating at an increasing rate, the rate of retreat has dramatically slowed to about one third that seen up to 1946.
This is perhaps not that surprising since apart from one year in 2010 (coinciding with the strong El Nino that year) , the temperatures in Greenland have not been as warm as they were in 1940.
Greenland is an interesting place. Not as much known with certainty as the climate folk would have us believe. The land is actually below sealevel (partly because of the weight of ice), As a map of the *land* with ice removed it looks like an enormous impact crater full of ice, and that crater is highly geologically active!
You are right. See for example:
http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/2013/0830-greenland-canyon-topographic/16859445-1-eng-US/0830-Greenland-canyon-topographic_full_600.jpg
This makes it very difficult for all the ice to melt and lead to increased SST.
Geostatic rebound would raise the bedrock as ice comes off. The phenomenon has been noted here many times.
The ice accumulation zones for our West Coast glaciers recieve water-equivalent annual precipitation of around 4 metres to 16 metres depending on the location. Out at the coastline precipitation is around 2.5 to 3.5 metres. Overall it’s a fairly moist climate.
Looking at the map (greenland) provided by richard,it looks as though the central ice cannot escape at all easily .the glaciers can only descend from the ring of mountains.i am interested in the comment by Dixon that the area is geologically active..it looks as though it may be the crater or caldera of a volcano .iceland ,not far away is well known a s very volcanically active ,hot springs etc .some ice mass may also be lost due to adiabatic winds(chinook/foehn type ) .these are common on Greenland (see DMI) &are not considered as being due to general warming .average july temp, warmest month , for Nuuk(coastal ) is 8 c elsius .
Well, it is aberrant behaviour, isn’t it? And regional?
glaciers elsewhere in the world have been retreating (except for the very highest) at an increasing rate in the last 2 decades. That’s an absolute fact.
See my comment above that has been misplaced.
In Greenland, there has been a dramatic slow down in the rate of glacier retreat.
Griff
In addition to the Fernandez Fernandez 2017 paper, you should perhaps also read the Nesje et al 2008 paper on Norwegian Glaciers. http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/geofag/GEG2130/h09/Reading%20list/Norwegian%20mountain%20glaciers%20in%20the%20past,%20present%20and%20future.pdf
Rather like the position in Greenland, the substantial retreat took place by 1950, and since 1950 the rate of retreat has dramatically slowed (see Fig 4). In fact, there was hardly any retreat of the Hardangerjøkulen Glacier since 1960 to 2000.
Not simply has there been a dramatic slow down in the rate of retreat, some Glaciers have even advanced since 1970 through to 2008.
The position with Glaciers is far from straight forward, and is not as you are portraying.
Griff your wonderful, last two decades eh, sorry for the repeat on the same page,
“1939-
In Alaska glaciers had been retreating from 100 to 200 years, the average rate of recession being about 50 feet a year. The Antarctic ice-sheet also showed signs of recent retreat. “In fact,” said Professor Speight, “no case is recorded of a region of the world in which there are present signs of an advance. This is quite apart from the general retreat since the pleistocene age and may be merely a pacing phase. Its precise significance can only be determined by continued observation.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/17557868?searchTerm=NEW%20ZEALAND%20GLACIERS%20melting&searchLimits=
One of the few facts in this debate is an individual glacier’s extent. Their general recent retreat is made much of. What is rarely mentioned by those with money in the game is how variable glacial extents have been over recent times. Glacier extent is not simply a result of temperature, precipitation is also important. I certainly would rather live in a world 2C hotter than now, than one that had mountain valleys buried under 2-3km of ice, so if I had a choice between continuing the current warming trend and initiating an unpredictable cooling one, I’ll take the known entity of warming thanks.
As has been mentioned, Global Temperatures are nothing more than a statistical concoction. Climate is cyclical and brings winners and losers, those are also facts. The point is any problem so complicated it requires a global solution is – so far at least – impossible to solve. Adaptation to what actually eventuates is a far more useful and productive approach.
I found these interesting:
http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,867.100.html
https://www2.usgs.gov/climate_landuse/clu_rd/projects/geoheat.asp
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/6/e1500093.full
Not mentioned here is that there are many hot springs bubbling up all of the place at both locations, I have been to both when I lived in NZ. Hot water, hot rocks and geothermal activity would not have any effect, has to be CO2 induced warming eh?
These comments from the authors made me chuckle.
“The dramatic retreat of Fox and Franz Josef glaciers since 2011 may be the first sign of this rapid mass loss. Finally, we suggest that future warming of the Tasman Sea, such as that experienced in the austral summer of 2015/2016 (ref. 41), will lead to enhanced rates of ice loss, due to the close relationship between Tasman Sea surface temperature and New Zealand glacier mass balance demonstrated here.”
If you check out the Full Global SST Anomaly chart for now you can’t but help notice the large pool of dark blue surrounding New Zealand. Quite the opposite to last year, and by their own account ideal conditions for mass accumulation on our two famous glaciers. We’ve also been under the Zonal hammer of Jetstream winds from the west to south west over the spring and weak summer. More ideal glacier building conditions!
What sort of tedious accountant person decided that if was 20 degrees day and night all year, life would be super. The waves of weather chaos are the beating heart of the planet, ride them and smile. It snowed in summery Queenstown a few weeks ago. The adaptable kids next door put away their swimmers and went snowboarding.
One of the deliberate misconceptions behind cAGW is that there is such a thing as Global warming. Climate is regional, and so too is the nature of change.
Some areas of the globe are cooling (eg., the US has cooled since the highs of the late 1930s/early 1940s), Antarctica appears to have cooled these past 40 years (at any rate apart from one small coastal area), some parts of the globe there is no warming (eg., both Iceland and Greenland were as warm in the 1940s as they are today), some parts of the globe there is all but no warming, eg., the equatorial areas, some parts there is extremely modest warming, the mid latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, some area more noticeable warming, eg., the mid latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, and some areas where there may have been appreciable warming, eg the very high Northern latitudes (save other than around Iceland and Greenland).
cAGW cannot admit that Global warming does not exist, since to do so would invalidate the assertion that Global action is required. To admit this would inevitably lead each country to consider what impact warming has on it, and whether it would be beneficial for that country. Self interest would dominate, and the prospects of the hidden agenda behind the cAGW scare, ie, global government would be unattainable.
It is not only New Zealand where temperatures may have declined. The other day, NoTricksZone had an article on Germany’s tallest mountain, Zugspitze, which located in the Bavarian Alps near the Austrian border, which is far away from urbanization. It has cooled by about 3degC these past 30 years, viz:
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Zugspitze-temperatur-30J.png
Some areas of the globe are cooling (eg., the US has cooled since the highs of the late 1930s/early 1940s)
Apparently not. You can adjust the variables at that link if you think the period selection is wrong. I chose the warmest year in the 30s – 1934 – as a start point.
Or perhaps you are using a different dataset? it would be good to check the dataset that underlies your claim.
Antarctic shows slight warming since the 50s – verified by the skeptics that audited the Steig paper (they found half the warming Steig did).
There is an area of the North Atlantic that has been cooling long-term. [Anomaly map]
MODS
May I suggest that someone posts an article on the recent Fernandez Fernandez paper studying the Greenland Glaciers. This paper provides a useful perspective on Glacier retreat in High Northern Latitudes, and it makes clear that there are many glaciers that rather than retreating at an advancing rate, are in fact retreating at a very much slower rate than was observed up to 1946.
The paper can be found free (not paywalled) at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312185500_High_sensitivity_of_North_Iceland_Trollaskagi_debris-free_glaciers_to_climatic_change_from_the_%27Little_Ice_Age%27_to_the_present
If an article on this paper was posted, it might stop some well known warmists who (rightly) frequent this site from continuing to peddle misleading factual assertions that:
PS. I take it that the reference to “very highest” is a reference to altitude.
“While this sequence of climate variability and its effect on New Zealand glaciers is unusual on a global scale, it remains consistent with a climate system that is being modified by humans”
‘But where is the support for this claim ?’
Well you just read it in Nature Communications silly. Do they have to write it in bold type for you?
One must wonder what would or could possibly occur which would not be consistent with a climate system modified be humans? There is no conceivable scenario in which this claim can not be made. All change and even no change can be retro fitted into the human modification mold by simply modifying the model to fit. The only thing you need to remember is that humans are the cause, regardless of the change. It’s really just that simple.
“One must wonder what would or could possibly occur which would not be consistent with a climate system modified be humans?”
No need to wonder-
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
What about glaciers advancing in Scotland? That would be local, too, right?
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-28885119
They have advanced quite a bit since that report.
No they haven’t
In 2014, 21 snow patches survived the summer in the Scottish Highlands.
In 2015, 74 patches survived.
In 2016, only 6 patches survived
The main Scottish ski resorts were closed in January 2017 because of a lack of snow
Richard,
In 2013, 6 surviving patches were reported.
In 2012, 2
In 2011, 6
In 2010, the year I started paying attention, I saw snow in mid-summer on Cross Fell in Cumbria. I can’t find overall summaries for 2010 or earlier, but it appears to be the year when many others began wondering what was up with that snow. For decades prior to 2010 (since 1960s?) snow surviving summer was an extremely rare event, so we can confidently fill that range with zeros, or maybe ones, because Ben Nevis seems to have always had a minimal amount in a deep gully on the north slope. Now it has multi-year ice that is deep and well-exposed.
What window size for trend detection makes you comfortable given this series?
Yes, local. Globally…
http://www.grid.unep.ch/glaciers/pdfs/5.pdf
Hello Gene,
It’s a fascinating subject for many enthusiastic hill-walkers, skiers, and general lovers of snow, and receives an amazing amount of attention and analysis.
A guy called P.C. Spink used to write an article each year for the magazine “Weather”, in the 1970s and 80s, . detailing which snow patches had survived where, and it was a rare year when there were no survivals. There was obviously far less coverage from phones, drones and internet in those days, and one could get the impression that he’d visited every patch himself.
For the last 20-odd years, Iain Cameron ha co-ordinated the task, and his efforts were supported by a multitude of observers, originally on the website winterhighland, and more recently on Facebook.
Snow patch survivals for the last 21 years have ranged between zero (3 times) and 6, with the exception of 5 years, namely
2000 (41)
2007 (9)
2008 (12)
2014 (21)
2015 (74), which was the highest since 1994.
I was really trying to point out that the remarkable summer snow survivals of 2014 and 2015 were rather rare, In 2015, the winter was quite mild, but extremely wet, so there was very little snow below 600 metres, but huge amounts above that level. Most of it was driven on strong south-westerly winds, which caused it to accumulate to large depths in north-east facing gullies, thereby being well-protected from summertime melting.
Point taken, Richard.
My sample is clearly smaller than your sample (even though I tried hard), and even your sample is probably just a subsample. But I still find it unbelievable that a resampled trend would look drastically different. There are other things beyond snow survival that are kind of asking to be linked to glacier formation, like, for instance, the death of palm trees almost everywhere north of London. Even on the west coast. Again, I may have been very unlucky to have mostly seen the dead ones after 2010, while having no recollection of any sort of massive die-off prior to that. Another possibly related metric was how many times and for how long I could go swimming every year.
Curiously, I have visited old homes in Yorkshire that had skis and sleds stored in the attic. I wonder whether their proprietors were compulsive hoarders or simply had foresight about the fragility of future trends.
Most of the world’s glaciers are advancing.
Before you reflexively contradict this, consider that most of the world’s glaciers are probably in Antarctica. 1619 of them to be (approximately) precise:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/igsoc/agl/2013/00000054/00000063/art00021
And the majority of them are most likely advancing.
Especially if you exclude those retreating due to local volcanism i.e. the western peninsula.
Bipolar seesaw means that glaciers are retreating in the NH and advancing in the SH.
And the SH has more of them – most, of course, in Antarctica.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service is a database of 100,000 glaciers worldwide, 85% of which have retreated. Even if every glacier in Antarctica (per the study you cited) was advancing, this would still mean that most glaciers in the world are in retreat.
But not all glaciers in Antarctica are in retreat. The Antarctic Peninsula, which protrudes from the Antarctic ocean and wind gyres that keep the Antarctic (relatively) thermally isolated from the rest of the world, has about 87% of glaciers in retreat.
It may well be that glaciers elsewhere in Antarctica are mostly advancing, but that would not change the conclusion that most in the world are in retreat.
That the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed strongly – with concurrent glacier retreat – is evidence the bi-polar see-saw is not much in effect in modern times.
http://www.grid.unep.ch/glaciers/pdfs/5.pdf
(The chart therein is of 30,000 glaciers worldwide with long-term records)
http://www.grid.unep.ch/glaciers/pdfs/6_8.pdf
(Antarctica and glaciers)
Laperouse13@icloud.com
Sent from my ASUS Pad
Watts Up With That? wrote:
> a:hover { color: red; } a { text-decoration: none; color: #0088cc; } a.primaryactionlink:link, a.primaryactionlink:visited { background-color: #2585B2; color: #fff; } a.primaryactionlink:hover, a.primaryactionlink:active { background-color: #11729E !important; color: #fff !important; } /* @media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) { .post { min-width: 700px !important; } } */ WordPress.com Anthony Watts posted: ” Reader Phil Hutchings writes via email: This article in Nature Communications caught my eye! This is a beauty. This week, Nature Communications published an explanation as to why (at least) 58 New Zealand glaciers grew in the twenty-five years “
Its a local reward for the Kiwis being so green, and hydro-ey and thermaly n stuff. This is why more windmills in Australia will save the Barrier Reef. Its obvious really.
I didn’t know the Greenies had put put windmills on the reef but I’m always learning new things about this sustainability stuff.
This is bad for the more extreme claimed warming trends — any regional cooling trend should strongly limit how much the overall globe could have warmed during that period, not so much because of the effect on the average as because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This isn’t an area that just warmed slower, this region actually got colder while everything around it got warmer.
At the very least, there must be some explanation for the changing equilibrium conditions at the boundaries.
Ice is nasty cold barren stuff
We’ll all be a lot better off once its all gone.
There must have been weather down there in New Zealand. Glaciers moved forward some, moved back some.
That’s consistent with global warming. That’s also consistent with global cooling. That’s also consistent with global not much is really changing.