By Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D., Founder, Lysander Spooner University
www.lysanderspooneruniversity.com
Glacier National Park (GNP) straddles the continental divide along Montana’s border with Canada. Ever since Al Gore’s 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Park has been seen as ground zero in the international battle over manmade global warming. Almost every major figure promoting apocalyptic-manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 hysteria has made a publicized visit to the Park.
Today’s visitors to GNP are met with a steady stream of climate-change messaging. Official Park literature claims that all glaciers in GNP are predicted to melt away by the year 2030. (Some signs even tell visitors that the glaciers may be gone by 2020.)
A recurring trick by climate hysterics is to show an old photograph of one of GNP’s glaciers next to a more recent photo of the same glacier showing a massive decrease in size. Often the pictures do not precisely specify what calendar dates the photos were taken on. This is significant because the melting season is quite short and rapid, and an image from August can be starkly different from an image from just weeks earlier.
The average date of first freeze in East Glacier, Montana is September 13th. It is only then that one can assess whether the glaciers are getting bigger or smaller than in previous years.
In September 2015, Lysander Spooner University launched an annual research project aimed at visiting GNP’s glaciers every year at their lowest points. This year a small group of us opted to hike to the popular Grinnell Glacier and take a few snapshots on September 16. We hiked the 5.5 miles from the Many Glacier Hotel and arrived at glacier’s edge late in the afternoon.
The Grinnell is perhaps the most iconic of two dozen named glaciers in the Park. Untold thousands of people have hiked to it. Millions more have been exposed to government imagery of the Glacier melting away. The nearby Many Glacier Hotel features pictures on its walls showing the Grinnell’s decline from the 1880s to 2008. Numerous blog posts and magazine feature stories have also addressed this theme.
Upon our return to the Hotel after visiting the Glacier, we noticed that our brand-new photos appear to show that the Grinnell Glacier has grown slightly from the 2008 images that are displayed on the Hotel walls. There has been no reporting of this in any newspaper or broadcast that we know of. (In fact, all news coverage reports the precise opposite.) The smaller Gem Glacier—which is visible from the valley miles below—also appears to be slightly larger than it is shown in 2008 pictures on display.
We did not have enough people this year to trek to other glaciers. However we will return to GNP in September 2018 for more critical glacier research.
Contact Lysander Spooner University President Dr. Roger I. Roots with any questions or comments. [to obtain phone info use contact form] or rogerroots [at] msn.com.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
World is getting colder
I’m Dutch, and I live in the Netherlands. During the summer, that is. I’m lucky to live in Austria during the entire winter.
The north of the Netherlands was under the icecap during the last ice-age. The sea between England and the Netherlands, the Northsea did not exist during that time. You could walk from the Netherlands to England then. Foxes live in England. They did not swim across the sea, they walked to England.
In Austria in live in the Enns valley. At the end of the ice-age a glacier filled this valley upto about 1800 mtrs from sealevel. The valleyfloor is at 700 mtrs. A glacier of 1100 mtrs thick is now completly gone.
There were no cars 10.000 years ago. Nobody burned fossile fuels. And yet the climate warmed and now the icecap and glaciers are gone. Yes, we have the Dachstein glacier around the corner. A glacier on a 2600 mtrs high plateau. Were once the entire valley was fiĺed with ice.
Manmade global warming is a hoax. A total hoax. If you want to now who helped the story of manmade global warming into the world? You would not beleave it. Margareth Thatcher. Yes, the Iron Lady.
Why? Power. Political power. Destroying her eneny, the Labour party. And becomming a nuclear power. Nothing more. Read the paper The History of Global Warming Scare by Richard Courtney. Conttolable data and facts.
Google The History of Global Wrming Scare. Ill post a link in my next comment
please learn about
milakovitch cycles.
To think that Canada is moving to criminalize global warming aka climate change deniers. God help us.
Read this. It will open your eyes like it did mine. It’s the story how the fable of manmade global warming came to life.
No other than Margareth Thatcher, the Iron Lady made up manmade global warming?
Why? The destroy her political enemy, Labour, by making the coleminers unemployed and to become a nuclear power.
All verifiable facts and data. Unbeleavable but true.
https://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
rubbish. manmade global
warming has been known since
at least Arrhenius in 1896. president
johnson was warned about it in a report.
daniel moynihan warned nixon about it.
Arrhenius 1906 paper is often ignored by warmists everywhere……., gee I wonder why……
So, let’s assume for a moment global warming is true. Who decided that the current average temperature is the optimum one, and the one that, if we want to stay at it, we have to spend trillions?
There is no such thing as optimum
However, if you adapt to an climate of X, and it changes to Y,
then the change may cost you.
Some change + or – may be benign
Some change + or – may be costly
Some change + or – may be dangerous
Some change + or – may be catastrophic
and finally some change may be an existential threat.
Simply because we find is difficult to assign a sure value to the range of benign climate change
doesnt negate the fact that some change could be existentially threatening.
Me: If the sun burns out the temperature change will destroy human kind
you: Ya but whats the optimum?
see your logical fail.
we also know that cooling could cause damage, and no one asks “what’s the optimum”
SO Steven give your estimation of what effect AGW is going to have moving forward is it Catastrophic? Stopping AGW in the way the alarmist are talking about is catastrophic, mostly to the poor and working class.
SO what should we do?
Is there a C in AGW or not?
no optimal temp.
the challenge, for all species,
is adapting to the changes. in the
past, many haven’t been able to
adapt, and now temperature is changing
very fast, and animals have ever less
wilderness to travel through north or
south
Crackers
“no optimal temp.
the challenge, for all species,
is adapting to the changes. in the
past, many haven’t been able to
adapt, and now temperature is changing
very fast, and animals have ever less
wilderness to travel through north or
south”
Evidence for any of this please. The planet is greening, The northern and southern latitudes are warming slightly, the tropics are not warming appreciably, trees are growing at higher elevations, seems to me that the planet is becoming more livable for almost every kind of life including man, farming output up dramatically.
If there is is AGW most of its effects have been Beneficial, maybe it should be called BAGW instead of CAGW since there is zero evidence of the C.
Show me one verifiable case of someone being damaged by increased CO2, I can show you 7 Billion people who are being help.
For 99.99% of the history of this planet, temperatures have been much warmer than they are today.
But of course, if we get even a few tenths of a degree of that missing warmth back, it’s going to end life on this planet.
Bob,
Right, and Crackers is also wrong that the planet is warming rapidly. It’s cooling at the moment. The more than 300-year warming trend from c. AD 1690 in the Maunder Minimum depths of the LIA so far has been hugely beneficial. The 3000-year long term cooling trend from the peak of the Minoan WP is however worrisome, extrapolated out to the next glacial advance in a further 3000 years or so.
If, according to the third photo, the glaciers formed 7000 years ago and are again reverting back to the state of no glaciers, how can this be anything other than natural, even IF we are assisting the process?
earlier this year some folks studied the field notes of arctic explorers around 1900 with current snow lines etc. Their findings? The ice fields and snow lines were about where they were 120 years ago.
And of course it won’t matter to the Global Warming alarmists… see, when the glaciers shrink, that’s irrefutable proof that the Earth is warming. But when they grow back, as they have for thousands of years, well, that proves nothing! No change in their position.
Uh huh.
Now fund my climate studies or else you’re a RACIST!!!!!!!!!!
Russia has 4 nuclear icebreakers operating and three more being built along with over a dozen converntional ones operating. It does not seem that the Arctic is running out of ice.
satellite based estimates of volume suggest otherwise.
No they don’t.
That’s part of a Russian strategic move into the Arctic, driven by their acceptance of the science which shows their Northern sea route will increasingly be open water for longer periods.
so why the ice breakers? to extend the period they can put heavier traffic through that opened up route.
Definitely NOT because they expect more ice.
https://psmag.com/news/is-climate-change-creating-another-arctic-shipping-route-in-russia
https://www.iceagenow.info/greenlands-petermann-glacier-advancing-ten-feet-per-day/
Alberto Gorez, the noted S. American Global Cooling Climatologist (and actual Thermodynamics Expert!)has been warning the world of the current Global Cooling trend for the last 20 years. He also predicted another Maunder Minimum and Little Ice Age.
without suckers born every second, life would be boring for con artists & rainmakers.
Oh no. THIS doesn’t fit the glo-bull warming narrative.
I am a Red Bus driver (Jammer) in Glacier National Park. This article was sent to me by another Jammer. We have been instructed to present the “demise” of the glaciers as an almost absolute certainty and that it is caused by “human activities” (NPS Climate Change brochure). My tour presents a balanced argument for and against human beings’ controlling the environment. I refuse to present it as a given, especially when the scientific method has not been used. If it had been then the theory could be proved or disproved through experimentation and data collection. That hasn’t happened here. The “experts” twist everything as proof of human responsibility. There is no way to disproved the theory as presented!
if you provide a 2nd Earth, set to 1850 & that
doesn’t use any fossil fuels, same sun and all,
then
scientists can do an experiment. it
will take at least 170 years to get results
as of the present.
I’m guessing that crackup actually believes that it has presented a killer argument here.
Alternatively look at palaeo data which show no relationship between historic CO2 levels and temperature or even glaciation.
The past is another country.
This warmist argument about the “second earth” is bogus, and is based on their denia1 of palaeo data like 6-day creationists.
Hint: the earth was not created in 1850.
Of the 130 glaciers that “they” are monitoring, How many are the big tidewater glaciers?
Hubbard glacier, the largest NH tidewater glacier outside of Greenland….Advancing
Taku Glacier… the largest glacier of the Juneau ice field. A tidewater glacier which is advancing/growing – the largest glacier in the Juneau Ice field.
Same thing with the largest tidewater glacier in the SH outside of Antarctica… is advancing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%BCggen_Glacier
Are these glaciers of the 130 being monitored? Probably not …
No, only tiny little cirque “glaciers” count. Because there are more of them than the gigantic down to the sea glaciers which are retreating.
Lysander Spooner University does not exist. It is fake. It is simply a web site created by two right wing loonies that offers no courses, and has two staff members.
So some guy makes a phony web page, calls himself a professor of a university when he is not a professor, and the university he identifies does not exist.
He then compares a smart phone photograph with the outline of a glacier shown on a park garbage can and procliams that to him, the picture shows more ice, so the glacier must be advancing.
LOL. You can’t get any more dishonest and Mentally ill than that.
When you can’t refute the data, attack the messenger.
How original.
Scientists used to tell us that the glaciers were 10,000 years old, but new data says they formed in a few years. Let’s see what happens….
This is good news only in a political sense. Given that the earth may be becoming due to return to a period of continental glaciation, any sign of glacier growing is actually a sobering reality.
I would assume that a quick scan of archival satellite imagery could assess the situation easy enough. Anyone know a link to such archives?
you can’t do changes in
glacial mass just by satellite
imagery, as far as I know. it’s a labor intensive
process that has to be done locally
True enough. But documenting that the front edge of the glacier had ADVANCED rather than retreated in recent years CAN be done remotely and would be an interesting observation to raise. And I’d conjecture an increased length would likely be a fairly good proxy for increased mass over a short time span (that’s just a guess though).
Ice mass is a red herring.
During glaciation snow accumulation rate declines due to aridity.
Does this spell warming? No.
Some commentators here (you know who you are) have been deriding Dr Roger Roots, the author of this article, and dismissing his university as a scam. One person may even have been laughing at him.
That is unfair. The Lysander Spooner University website looks like the genuine article. In 2017 the university is offering courses in important subjects such as The Evils of Social Security and the Evils of the Minimum Wage, both highly relevant to people trapped in the socialist hell-hole that is the modern welfare state.
Admittedly, the offering of 10 courses is a little thin, and some seem to be of fairly short duration – one day or less. But the course on government regulations features a 50-question exam, quite demanding for today’s attention-deficit youth. The glacier trip is a solid three days, with bonus photos. And the Stone Masonry course is pitch-perfect for the ex-cons who can get a discount for time served.
All worthwhile endeavours begin small and build from there. Amazon began in a garage and look at it now.
There’s one aspect of the glacier expedition that concerns me, though. While the glaciers are arguably shrinking, at least one of the participants is not. No more Oreos for that man. Let’s hope Dr Roots’ first aid skills match his astute observational powers.
Most of the glacier melt occurred in the 1920-1940 time frame –
Are the glaciers at glacier national park growing?
To quote Dr Ivana Root, Founder, Knifey-Spooney University, “no”.
Some were in November 2011:
https://nextgrandminimum.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/glaciers-growing-in-the-rocky-mountains/
After another big snowfall year, they probably are again or still are, although a drought intervened.
The same speculative propaganda placards are in the parking lot of the science center at RMNP. A better place for would such advocacy question mark science would be in the out house or on the power poles with the anti Exxon stickers.
Let’s hope that the Trump administration takes those down even before it defunds GISS.