Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
NOVEMBER 10, 2021
By Paul Homewood
A friend recently suggested that “melting glaciers” must surely prove “global warming is true”.
It is a common belief. After all, glaciers are a visible phenomenon and it all sounds logical.
As you know, I have written extensively about glaciers, (see the “glaciers” tab on the sidebar). But it is worth posting this potted history of them:
Middle Ages
As glaciers recede in Alaska, scientists are finding the remains of forests previously buried by the ice.
Above is an example at the Mendenhall Glacier, where carbon dating reveals the trees are between 1200 and 1400 years old. Other older trees have also been found.
Exactly the same is happening elsewhere in Alaska, at the famous Exit Glacier, below. The trees there are a similar age:
These are not just odd trees, but the remnants of great forests. It is clearly evident that the glaciers then were much smaller than they are now.
And it is not only Alaska. At the other end of the continent in Patagonia, more buried trees are turning up, though these are younger, between 250 and 460 years old (See here).
A similar pattern can be found around the world, as the next section illustrates.
Little Ice Age
Beginning in the 16thC, Alpine glaciers began to advance down the valleys. We know this because of thee wealth of historical accounts from the time. This was of course the beginning of the period known as the Little Ice Age.
Historian Brian Fagan described in his book, The Little Ice Age, just what a horrifying calamity this was for those who lived there:
In the 16th Century the occasional traveller would remark on the poverty and suffering of those who lived on the marginal lands in the glacier’s shadow. At that time Chamonix was an obscure poverty stricken parish in “a poor country of barren mountains never free of glaciers and frosts…half the year there is no sun…the corn is gathered in the snow…and is so mouldy it has to be heated in the oven”. Even animals were said to refuse bread made from Chamonix wheat. Avalanches caused by low temperatures and deep snowfall were a constant hazard. In 1575 a visitor described the village as “a place covered with glaciers…often the fields are entirely swept away and the wheat blown into the woods and onto the glaciers”.
In 1589 the Allalin glacier in Switzerland descended so low that it blocked the Saas valley, forming a lake. The moraine broke a few months later, sending floods downstream. Seven years later 70 people died when similar floods from the Gietroz glacier submerged the town of Martigny.
As the glaciers relentlessly pushed downslope thousands of acres of farm land were ruined and many villages were left uninhabitable such as La Bois where a government official noted “where there are still six houses. all uninhabited save two, in which live some wretched women and children…Above and adjoining the village there is a great and horrible glacier of great and incalculable volume which can promise nothing but the destruction of the houses and lands which still remain”. Eventually the village was completely abandoned.
The same official visited the hamlet of La Rosiere in 1616 and found” “The great glacier of La Rosiere every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending…There have been destroyed 43 journaux of land with nothing but stones and 8 houses, 7 barns and 5 little granges have been entirely ruined and destroyed”.
Alpine glaciers, which had already advanced steadily between 1546 and 1590, moved aggressively forward again between 1600 and 1616. Villages that had flourished since medieval times were in danger or already destroyed. During the long period of glacial retreat and relative quiet in earlier times, opportunistic farmers had cleared land within a kilometer of what seemed to them to be stationary ice sheets. Now their descendants paid the price with their villages and livelihoods threatened.
Between 1627 and 1633 Chamonix lost a third if its land through avalanches, snow, glaciers and flooding, and the remaining hectares were under constant threat. In 1642 the Des Bois glacier advanced “over a musket shot every day, even in August”.
By this time people near the ice front were planting only oats and a little barley in fields that were under snow for most of the year. Their forefathers had paid their tithes in wheat. Now they obtained but one harvest in three and even the grain rotted after harvesting. “The people here are so badly fed they are dark and wretched and seem only half alive”.
In 1715 the village of Le Pre-du-Bar vanished under a glacier caused landslide. The glacial high tide in the Alps came around 1750 and gradually the glaciers began their retreat, much to the relief of the people who lived there.
Glaciologists also know that similar advances were taking place on glaciers all around the world, including Alaska, Greenland, the Canadian Rockies, South America, the Caucasus, the Himalayas and China.
Even New Zealand did not escape, Brian Fagan writes:
In New Zealand the Franz Joseph glacier was “a mere pocket of ice on a frozen snowfield nine centuries ago”…. Then Little Ice Age cooling began and the glacier thrust downslope into the valley below smashing into the great rain forests that flourished there, felling giant trees like matchsticks. By the early 18th Century, Franz Joseph’s face was within 3 km of the Pacific Ocean .
The high tide of glacial advance at Franz Joseph came between the late 17th Century and early 19th Century, just as it did in the European Alps.
Modern Era
We all know that the same glaciers which grew massively a few centuries ago are now retreating. What many people don’t know is that this process began around the late 18th and early 19thC.
Surprising though it might sound, explorers were already mapping Alaskan glaciers in the 18thC. The map below shows how the glacier edge progressively retreated after 1760. Most of the glacier had disappeared even before 1900, whilst glacier loss has been relatively small in recent years.
In the Alps it was a similar story. The Rhone Glacier reached its maximum extent in the late 18thC, and, according to HH Lamb, had already receded half a mile by 1870. Most had disappeared by 1950:
HH Lamb: Climate History & The Modern World
Summary
The modern day retreat of glaciers is part of a much longer natural cycle. Indeed, we find evidence of that cycle going back long before the Middle Ages.
Lamb, for instance, claims that glaciers in the Alps and Norway were advancing between 800 and 400BC, reaching an extent almost as great as during the Little Ice Age. They advanced again around AD600 to a similar position as before.
In between times, of course, the same glaciers also retreated, both during the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warming Period.
Whether man-made warming has played any part in modern glacial retreat, we know that:
- Most of the retreat since the 18thC occurred before any possible impact from humans.
- Glaciers were smaller than now in the Middle Ages
- There is nothing unprecedented or alarming about the current state of the world’s glaciers
All of this is common knowledge amongst glaciologists. But for some reason the world of climate science does not want the public to know.
Glaciers melt even when the ambient temperature is below freezing because they are dirty. That changes the albedo. The dirt on and in the glaciers absorb the Sun’s heating radiation. And then the melting begins.
There was just some article about how the wild fires are contributing their soot to the poles.
Huh! But where does co2 come in?
Geologist Don Easterbrook’s book “A Walk Through Geologic Time From Mt. Baker to Bellingham Bay” also addresses remnants of forests on multiple Mt. Baker (Washington State) glaciers that radiocarbon dated to Little Ice Age inundation.
Book also shows retreat of glaciers up to 1947, then expanding up to 1979 before again retreating. NASA needs to homogonize glacier history.
No glaciers but an anthropology article a year or so ago on high altitude Colorado was about the discovery that rather large numbers of native Americans had often inhabited areas that are so inhospitable today that hardly no one ever goes there. Only quite recently had someone noticed there were remains of habitation and human activity.
At the end of the article one of the researchers casually mentioned that ‘up there’ 500 feet above today’s tree line, there are quite a few dead trees. Carbon dating has shown they grew in two separate periods, around 1000 and 2000 years ago.
Holocene Climatic Optimum: ~5000 Ka
Egyptian Warm Period: ~4000 Ka
Minoan WP: ~3000 Ka
Roman WP: ~2000 Ka
Medieval WP: ~1000 Ka
Modern WP: Now.
What Greta does not appear to know or ignores is that 4000 years ago the Scandinavian climate was considered to be at it’s optimum. According to museum information near Stockholm the climate then was similar to what the mediterranean is now.
Since there were no cars in those days, I keep asking people who was doing all the flatulence to have created the optimum then. Still waiting for answers.
Considering this for some insight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM_QS984JKI
Due to obliquity and precession, summer insolation in the far north was markedly greater than at present just a short (geological) time ago – during the Holocene.
Precession is the big factor in latitudinal variation in insolation. If you go back to 1585, the orbit perihelion was coincident with the austral summer solstice. Go back almost half a precession cycle to 10,000 years ago 55N was getting 40W/sq.m more insolation at the summer solstice than now. Northern Hemisphere insolation minimum was about 400 years ago.
The Northern Hemisphere will experience increasing summer sunlight for the next 10.000 years but the maximum at 55N will only be 20W/sq.m more than now because the orbital eccentricity is reducing.
Something few people realise is that the South Pole currently gets the peak daily average sunshine of any place on Earth – the sun is not intense but it shines all day to average 560W/sq.m. The North Pole currently peaks around 540W/sq.m. The precession cycle will cause those values to equalise in about 5,000 years and then the North Pole getting more sunlight till it reaches 560W/sq.m.
I have heard it posited that Hannibal’s invasion of Italy by marching over the Alps (218 B.C.) might have come at a time when the alps were virtually free of glaciers. Does anyone here have and data of that place and time? Thanks in advance.
Roman warm period
Warm being good meaning times of plenty but also open invasion routes for elephants.
Into each period some rain must fall.
Say a recent Secrets of the Dead on this that let slip there was little ice then
Surely PBS has now defunded that particular producer.
Mikey Mann to perform the exorcism
Ahhh, Chamonix. As a teenager, I recall camping below the Bossons glacier in Chamonix.
The showers piped the water straight off the glacier. In a very Kafkaesque form of torture, you had to continuously pull down on a chain to inflict the pain on yourself.
It was only matched by the hotness of the daughter of the French family camping next to us.
Catastrophic global-greening is a thing.
And if you look, the world’s glaciers have shown ACCELERATED retreat in all areas in the last 30 to 50 years, with marked acceleration since 1990.
A great summary – but you missed off the end.
As a retired structural engineer of many years experience I advise that making observations is one thing, interpreting those observation is a whole different ball-game!!! Jumping to conclusions is a common fault of the inexperienced IMHO!!!
Just plain false. For example, the map above is from 2001. In the top left, you’ll see no retreat at all in the last 100 years, and none showing acceleration of retreat in the 10 to 30 years of claimed acceleration from the start of your time frame to when the map was made.
Denier!!!
I suggest the you actually take the time to look, because you are wrong! You can start here:
https://scitechdaily.com/climate-change-reveals-military-history-melting-glaciers-recently-exposed-artifacts-of-war-in-the-alps/
Note my comment at the end of the article.
Have you no shame? Most people would be embarrassed by being shown to be wrong as often as you are!
A few months ago, I posted a link to the article on the forest being revealed by the Mendenhall Glacier on Facebook. They removed it.
“All of this is common knowledge amongst glaciologists. But for some reason the world of climate science does not want the public to know.” – article
The World of Climate Pseudo Science (fixed it for you!) does not want the public to know that the planet’s climate is beyond their control and the planet has a mind and a will of its own.
The state of Minnesota yesterday had a blizzard warning. Snowing up there now, if the weather radar is accurate, and we down here in the hinterlands will also get snow, plus nasty cold stuff, and I will have to put food out for the birds.
It is what it is, and we mere mortals have ZERO control over it. Eventually, the poor souls blinded by the brilliance of controlling the planet (followers of so-called climate science) will find that they were delivered a sucker punch and that we Mere Mortals have no control – ZERO control – over what this planet does. If we had any control, why aren’t we stopping those nasty gas-spouting volcanoes from erupting and adding nasty gases to the atmosphere???
Thanks for the article.
For a long time the Jakobshavn glacier, the biggest one in Greenland, was the poster child of catastrophists due to its impressive melt and retreat.
In 2016 however it’s retreat abruptly stopped and changed to advance.
At the time this was reported to be connected with local oceanography, specifically a cooling of the water in Disko Bay.
Is Jakobshavn glacier still advancing and growing?
There now seems to be a chilling silence on the internet about the current status of Jakobshavn glacier.
Only out of date news of its earlier retreat in past decades being endlessly recycled.
Can anyone give a recent update on the status of Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier?
When i got it right, the picture shows a extended forest just below the glacier. So could someone elaborate why the picture shows ‘clearly evident that the glaciers then were much smaller than they are now’.
There are other places in the wolrd where we see this. but not in the picture withthe forest above.
“Glaciers were smaller than now in the Middle Ages”
this depends on the location. For teh european Alps i have here reasonalble doubts.
See papers from Patzelt and Nicolussi on the Treeline in Austria: even in 2003 the treeline was higher than in the middle ages. So why shlould ELA have been higher in the middle ages than today?