Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Gotta say, the endless drumbeat of climate alarmism is pretty boring. The latest salvo is from the Associated Press, with the headline Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, with 7 trillion tons lost since 2000.”
Now that sounds like a seriously huge loss. I mean, it is TRILLIONS of tons lost in a quarter century.
Being a suspicious kind of fellow, I went to the underlying study in Nature magazine entitled Community estimate of global glacier mass changes from 2000 to 2023.
And in that study, I find the following:
Glaciers separate from the continental ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica covered a global area of approximately 706,000 km2 around the year 2000, with an estimated total volume of 158,170 ± 41,030 km3.
…
Here we show in an intercomparison exercise that glaciers worldwide lost 273 ± 16 gigatonnes in mass annually from 2000 to 2023.
So, first thing we have to do is convert the figures in cubic kilometers (km3) to metric tons. One cubic meter of glacial ice weighs 0.92 tonnes. One cubic kilometer of ice is 0.92 billion tonnes. So their total glacial ice volume of
158,170 ± 41,030 km3
converts to
146 ± 38 trillion tons
This means that the uncertainty of the estimated volume of glacial ice, not the volume itself but the uncertainty of the volume, is five times the calculated change in the last 23 years.
Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
It also means that by the year 2050, IF (and it’s a big if) glacial ice loss continues at the current rate, the glaciers will lose 3.5% to 6.7% of their volume … call me crazy, but I’m not seeing how a POSSIBLE predicted ~ 5% decline in glacier volume by the year 2050 is a big deal.
In closing, here’s your glacier story of the day.
In 1678, in the depths of the Little Ice Age, the good Swiss burghers in the villages of Fiesch and Fieschertal petitioned Pope Innocent XI to halt the advance of the Aletsch Glacier, fearing floods and destruction. The glacier was threatening to choke off the outflow of their lake, which would have caused the permanent inundation of their villages as the ice dam increased the lake level.
So the Pope prayed for the glacier to stop advancing … and miracolo di miracoli, as the world came out of the Little Ice Age, the Aletsch Glacier did stop advancing! Go figure.
Now fast forward to 2009, when glacier retreat due to post Little Ice Age warming was threatening the villagers’ revenue from the 400,000 tourists per year that came to see the Aletsch Glacier. The glacier was retreating by as much as 10 meters per year. YIKES! So they sought Vatican approval to reverse their prayer, asking Pope Benedict XVI to help stop the melting.
And in 2010, the Pope approved their petition.
To date the effect of the revised prayers is unclear … the Aletsch Glacier is still retreating. However, having said that, the Aletsch Glacier is 23,000 meters long. So if it continues losing 10 meters per year, by the year 2050 it will lose 1% of its length. Again, not seeing the huge downside here …
Now, there’s a curious hidden moral to this story. And it is one that has nothing to do with the fickleness of humans, or the warming since the Little Ice Age, or the prayers of the faithful.
Note that the advance of the glacier in 1678 would have meant the total destruction of the towns.
On the other hand, the retreat of the glacier in the 21st Century will only cost them some tourist bucks.
Here’s the moral I take from the story:
At any point in Earth’s geological history, glaciers are either a) advancing or b) retreating.
Given the known dangers and benefits of both advancing and retreating glaciers, I’ll take choice b), thanks, and over the long term, so would the Swiss people in the villages of Fiesch and Fieschertal …
My best to all, hug your kids, call your people, family is everything, vita brevis,
w.
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A good treatment of hype over a non-problem. Geologists think in somewhat longer time scales than even a few hundred years. Hands up all who are so ignorant as to believe that there is cause for alarm because some ice is melting today.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21469-w/figures/2
Note that the time scale for that graph is 80,000 years. That represents 0.002% of the planet’s history, which is roughly equivalent to one second in a day. If someone thinks that the change in ice volume over the last 5 years is a crisis, not to mention 80,000 years, they must be hand-wringing over the changes in nature that happened while I was typing one letter of this post.
Full Nature article–
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21469-w
So it doesn’t even rise to the level of needle chatter.
…and they’re ALWAYS doing BOTH. Melting at the fringes, and building up on top. You won’t get this year’s results from precipitation for a couple thousand years, at least. It’s a process, not a snapshot.
Another great piece, Willis!
The Greenland summit is gaining elevation of 17mm/yr according to NASA measurements. NASA also reports that Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier is advancing and thickening as you would expect with the summit gaining elevation.
The Southern Ocean is presently being cooled by a 1 trillion tonne iceberg. That will cause a slight reduction in snowfall over Antarctica.
P38 Glacier Girl force landed on Greenland (not the summit) if I recall correctly 1944. She was found and retrieved in 1992 from under 268feet of foehn and ice. Restored and first flew again in 2002. A lot more than 17mm/year accumulation because much nearer the coast.
Horizontal movement is difficult to predict, as well. Glaciers flow, not melt. The Camp Century base had to be relocated with deep penetrating radar and magnetic anomaly detection – despite pretty good mapping, it wasn’t quite where the Army left it.
Yes it was ~2miles near the coast.
You misread what I wrote. The summit is gaining ELEVATION. That means the snow is accumulating faster than it is flowing away.
Glaciers are always moving but they the input at the top has to exceed the loss at the sides for them to gain altitude.
This is a very important harbinger of the future. Glaciers grow from the top and lose from the sides. This is the first sign of the global shift toward ice accumulation again. The beginning of 100kyr of the current growth phase.
Can do better than that. – GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data
LAST UPDATE: 3/2004 (Original Receipt by WDC Paleo)
ABSTRACT:
Greenland ice-core records provide an exceptionally clear picture of many aspects of abrupt climate changes, and particularly of those associated with the Younger Dryas event, as reviewed here. Well-preserved annual layers can be counted confidently, with only 1%
errors for the age of the end of the Younger Dryas 11,500 years before present. Ice-flow corrections allow reconstruction of snow accumulation rates over tens of thousands of years with little additional uncertainty.
please see https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
About half way down the data is :
2. Accumulation rate in central Greenland
Column 1: Age (thousand years before present)
Column 2: Accumulation rate (m. ice/year)
Age Accumulation
1st 0.144043 0.244106
last 2
48.9746 0.091739
49.0034 0.091599
So 49,000 years and there are no negative numbers for Accumulation. Or every time period has increased volume. On the summit, Greenland over the last 49,000 years has only gained ice.
Where I live the ice was 1 mile thick at least. I try to remind people of that
I am currently sitting near the bottom of a vast glacier-fed lake that was some 1700 feet above my head at the surface. Those glaciers filled the canyons beyond to almost that height again!
Nice spot and post, WE. You highlight two things the alarmists always do:
This was on CBS last night. Pure alarmist propaganda.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/researcher-shows-dramatic-change-in-norway-glacier-ice-levels/
So 6 feet of snow melted in Svalbard between April and September 2023. Small potatoes compared to annual snow melt in the Upper Peninsula, upstate NY and the Rocky mountains.
Pat Frank’s climate model compounding problem was a result of him changing the figure reported by [Lauer & Hamilton 2013] from 4 W.m-2 (pg. 3833) to 4 W.m-2.year-1.model-1 in one case and 4 W.m-2.year-1 in another in [Frank 2019] on pg. 8 and pg. 12 respectively. More context is provided in the PubPeer comments as well. It is a painful read.
Furthermore Pat Frank’s understanding of uncertainty is grossly incorrect anyway. You can see here that he basis the entirety of his argument for a high uncertainty on the global average temperature on Bevington equation 4.22 which is the formula for the variance of the sample only. Bevington goes on to say that 4.22 is but an intermediate step whose result is used in 4.23 to calculate the variance of the mean (or square of the uncertainty of the mean). Even though Bevington clearly and unequivocally describes how to do the calculation Pat Frank somehow manages to butcher it so negligently it almost defies credulity that someone with a PhD could do so. Like how is it even possible someone doesn’t understand that the variance of a sample is not the same thing as the variance of the mean of that sample?
I encourage you and others to review JCGM 100:2008 and NIST Uncertainty Machine for the correct procedure for propagating uncertainty. I advised Pat Frank on multiple occasions to work through the math using the law of propagation of uncertainty and verify the results using the NIST calculator. He refused. Maybe hearing it from someone else would help steer him in the right direction.
You continue to ignore that the use of the uncertainty of the mean has very specific requirements, even in Bevington.
The largest requirement is measuring THE SAME MEASURAND multiple times under repeatable conditions. Measurements must be made in two implementatations, multiple measurements in the same day (repeatable) and multiple measurements over days (reproducibility).
JCGM 100:2008 Section H.5.1 says:
You have also missed the derivation of the use of the experimnentalin Dr. Taylor’s book.
As a consequence, all the partial derivatives for each experiment are the same. So
σₓ̅ = √[n(σₓ²/n²) = σₓ/√n
Dr. Taylor especially shows you the necessary assumptions that must be made in order to use the uncertainty of the mean as an indication of measurement uncertainty.
NIST TN 1900 says:
which leaves only the variance of daily measurements discussed in JCGM 100:2008 Section H.5.1. As a consequence the uncertainty of multiple measurements made on the same day under repeatable conditions is not computed (nor are they even available).
Lastly, I’ll show a section from an online measurement uncertainty class for analytic chemistry. Ask yourself if temperature measurements are more like single measurements or multiple measurements of the same quantity.
https://sisu.ut.ee/measurement/33-standard-deviation-mean/
These references show that you have misinterpreted how measurement uncertainty is evaluated and which standard deviation should be quoted..
If you want to be an expert in measurement uncertainty capable of criticizing a published Professor in Analytic Chemistry, you really need to show appropriate assumptions for the uncertainties and how they are met in the situation you are discussing.
Here is a question neither you nor others will address.
Assume a monthly average temperature with 30 independent measurements. Do you have 30 samples of size 1 or do you have 1 sample of size 30?
This is an important distinction when dealing with with the CLT. Try showing how each choice is handled by the CLT.
Did the good Swiss burghers get friars with that?
Indubitably.
They did, but they drowned them in mayonnaise instead of ketchup.
Yes “patatje met” is very good. The real treat however is a “kapsalon”!
The good Swiss burghers and fraus (und frauleins auch) might do well having to walk a few extra 10s of meters when accompanying tourists to the glaciers. I like Swiss on my bacon, green chile cheeseburgers, but mostly I go Dutch with a little creamy Havarti!
Mmmmm…green chile.
Alarm inflation?
One hundred million dollars, er, one hundred billion dollars etc
So the Pope (Pope Innocent XI) prayed for the glacier to stop advancing … and miracolo di miracoli, as the world came out of the Little Ice Age, the Aletsch Glacier did stop advancing!
Pope Benedict XVI prayed to help stop the melting… but the Aletsch Glacier is still retreating.
Is this empirical proof that 17th-century popes had a better line in prayer than 21st-century popes ???
No. It proves that prayer is confirmation bias.
In 1970 I visited the Athabasca Glacier. It was “discovered” by European explores in the 1700s and documented in the late 1800s. A sign claimed the ice came across the valley and pushed up on the far side, now occupied by Hwy#93. Not so in 1970. Parking (¼ mi from the highway) was available within two hundred yards of the toe, with a low wooden bridge on the trail. That is to the south of the road. We crossed the bridge and walked on the ice – it looked more like asphalt with all the rocky debris. When we returned to cross the bridge, it was covered with 2 inches of melt water. In 2022 the ice had melted up slope about 1,200 yards and had an 8 acre lake at its front.
In 1970, there wasn’t a mention of CO2 but our own eyes noted the “retreat” of the glacier.
Thanks Willis. As usual you bring balance and perspective to an alarmist topic. Something the MSM will never do. To their shame.
Everything in the universe cycles and changes constantly. It’s called “entropy”. So what else is new?
And it’s not as if glaciers are a net positive of our natural world, in that only a few microbes, if anything, can exist within or under or over any glacier.
If one is a fan of life, then glaciers are the bad guys of this planet, and therefore good riddance. I happen to live thousands of miles from the nearest glacier and I do not miss them at all. The last time glaciers dominated the land surface of the world about 16 thousand years ago, most of the most habitable and productive (for life forms) areas we have today were uninhabitable.
Why do we keep granting the warmunists the high moral ground when they actually inhabit the low ground of being anti-life? We need not be defensive.
Glaciers are a fetish.
There is no life on ice. Ice = death. Life is preferable to death. Therefore, Warmer Is Better. Fight the Ice.
Save the glaciers?
Willis,
Glaciers are either a) advancing or b) retreating.
Ambient temperatures are either a) warming or b) cooling.
Hurricanes are either a) more frequent or b) less frequent
Rainfall is either a) increasing or b) decreasing
Make a choice then emphasise alarm about it.
Modus operandi.
Geoff S
I like Ice in my drinks. On the ground, not so much. Staying south of 38 degrees north latitude works fine for me.
The only reason I could grow up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is because the glaciers retreated. Swimming in Lake Superior made us think there was still ice somewhere close.
Fun fact. My Wisconsin dairy farm is located in the SW Uplands, a steeply hilled limestone area that was NEVER scoured by any Quaternary glacier. Go 100 miles due east and everything is very flat, scoured. Go 40 miles south of there and you arrive at gravelly hills that are actually terminal glacier morraines. All the lakes in that area are actually pothole lakes in the morraines, created by big chunks of terminus sluffed ‘icebergs’. The biggest and deepest is Lake Geneva, a very popular resort area.
So did the glaciers just flow around the SW Uplands?
Always good to see your name in the comments,
w.
Different times, different directions, different glaciers.
Not around, just flowed east. 40 miles west is the Mississippi River valley, also never scoured, and beyond that Iowa. As far as I know, nobody knows exactly why. Not just one miss, but all of the Quaternary. Maybe something up on the Canadian Shield?
Thanks.
w.
As one of the few in this country who grew up north of the Mississippi River, I’m surprised to hear that at least in Wisconsin, the river valley had no glacial scoring. It’s the first I’ve heard this. Where I lived, glacial re-start attempts regularly lasted well into May and occasionally made it into July. Do you know how far north from your farm the valley was glacier free? I’ll do some searches on more information about this.
Thanks.
It’s called the “driftless area” where I also live. This from Wikipedia.
The Driftless area is a large peninsula of land, mostly located in Southwest Wisconsin, that went unglaciated throughout the last glacial period, which occurred 10,000 years ago. The word “driftless’ simply refers to the fact that this area lacks glacial drifts.
The term for that area is the Driftless Area. Outstanding fly fishing for native brook trout throughout. Extends into MN and IA as well. I’ve fished there many times.
My farm is 10 miles from a big complex of class four fly fishing only trout streams. Otter Creek and all its tributaries south of the Indian Mounds. Been there, done that, for now over 40 years.
That is interesting – what town is your farm by? The geomorphology of that area remines me of the Ozark Plateau (also limestone).
Closest ‘town’ is Spring Green just north of the Wisconsin river about 10 miles east. Closest south of river landmark is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taleisin, about 10 miles east of my farm on the intersection of 130 South and County C west just south of Spring Green. My farm is about 1.5 miles south and west of where County C intersects CT 130 west, up about 1.5 mile on Penn Hollow road County NN.
Know the area well. Visitors should check out “The House on the Rock” – a truly remarkable (and bizarre) attraction. Far more interesting than Taliesin IMHO.
Up Penn Hollow Rd, a bit before Leaches Crossing? Looks very nice from space. Very convoluted, I bet one could get turned around there. In 1980 I spent 10 weeks at the US Navy Training Center (NTC) Great Lakes. When I got the chance, I’d bicycle north or south for about 100 miles total, usually not far from the lake. I had a vague plan to ride up to Devil’s Lake to see the climbing area, but I couldn’t seem to swing consecutive days of leave with an overnight pass. I was in and out of NTC quick. I regret not seeing that country. I spent the first 5 years of my life in the wild hills of the Ozarks. I’ve vivid memories of that time.
https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/parks/chipmoraine
There is also a Moraine State Park in Pennsylvania.
Mark Twain writes about riding a glacier in Tramps Abroad that is very humorous.
Willis,
I sure hope that there is someone of your caliber to teach all the poor, frightened children the truth about the Climate Change Hoax; at least the ones who realize that they need an education retread!
Sadly, they will probably go to their graves believing most of what they have been told, and never look for themselves! If only mass delusions were as easy to erase as they are to obtain!
Oh no, not him again. As soon as I saw AP, I knew it was gonna be Seth Goebbelstein. I thought the guy had FODd, but I guess not. Soon though for these cretins.
Dyscalculia is the term for difficulty learning or comprehending arithmetic, such as difficulty in understanding numbers, numeracy, learning how to manipulate numbers, performing mathematical calculations, and learning facts in mathematics.
It is a plague among climate journalists.
Remember, math is hard. And for alarmists and libs, even arithmetic is hard. The relevant meme is, 47 was criticized for saying 2+2=4—but NOT if your counting gender is base 3, in which case it is 11.
Something Maine Gov Janet Mills apparently relates to, as last years guy in polevault took 5 while this year as a new trans at same high school took 1 and stole the state track&field meet from the best Maine girls team by 1 point. DoE is now investigating that clear Title 9 violation, and Maine will shortly lose all federal Ed funding as 47 promised. And then when she goes to court, will discover Title IX meant sex=gender when passed and she loses. 47 set it all up beautifully at the WH Gov conference on Friday.
They should also loose any possibility of participating in inter-state competitions of either gender, while-ever there are “men-pretending-to-be-females” competing in women’s sports within the state.
All ““men-pretending-to-be-females” records set in the USA should also be expunges from the record books.
Given the 273 ± 16 Gt change and 146000 ± 38000 Gt total the percentage change using the linear approximation is 0.2 ± 0.1 %. However, this is a non-linear measurement model (because of the division) so using the more accurate monte carlo technique we see that the uncertainty is asymmetric with a longer right tail. So the 95% confidence interval is actually 0.1 to 0.4 %. Given that this occurred in only 23 years I would not consider this an insignificant change even if it is on the lower end of the envelope.
bdgwx,
Read Nature, not regressions.
Geoff S
What regressions are you referring to?
What is it about nature I should be reading?
Nope. That is 273 ± 16 Gt.year-1; not 273 ± 16 Gt over 23 years. That makes the 95% confidence interval 3% to 9%. Sorry about that.
Anyway, that is most definitely a big deal. I mean even my botched calculation of 0.1 to 0.4% change would be a big deal given that we are only talking about 23 years.
Presumably, you are trying to imply that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter.
Or are you just making completely pointless mathematical calculations for the fun of it?
Surely you don’t believe that you can predict the future by dissecting the past!
“. . . so using the more accurate monte carlo technique we see that the uncertainty is asymmetric with a longer right tail . . . “
Meaningless (and useless) word salad. Is this somehow related to the misguided belief that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter?
The atmosphere behaves chaotically, and predicting its future states is not possible. If you reject chaos, the physicist Richard Feynman comes to precisely the same conclusion using quantum electrodynamics – the most rigorously tested theory in history.
Monte Carlo that all you want.
Monte Carlo is so random !! 🙂
The statement, “the more accurate monte carlo” is a load of totally meaningless gibberish.
You can program a Monte Carlo simulation to give whatever you want it to produce..
The Swiss must be grateful for CO2 to change the climate and landscape?
Recently Switzerland and Italy redrew their border to account for the change in the landscape due to retreat of the glaciers.
A ~5% decline in 25 years is the epitome of “a big deal”.
Did you know that many glaciers did not even exist before the LIA !!
Many places now with glaciers had no glaciers during most of the Holocene.
Trees and human artefacts found under retreating glacier (reducing to more normal long-term extent) prove that.
”Ancient tree stumps found under Breiðamerkurjökull glacier in Southeast Iceland are confirmed to be roughly 3,000 years old. RÚV reports.”
And life is always better when theclimate is warmer…
Well, if it’s the epitome of a big deal, I’m sure you can come up with at least 5 bullet points as to why it’s a big deal, as opposed to what that voice in your head is telling you. You can pretend it’s a proxy for global temperature if you want to and waste two bullet points but come on, this is important for planet earth, some more please:
Space reserved for 5 bullet points:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
It’s the epitome of a big deal because that rate of decline is absurd. It is so absurd I actually thought the 276 Gt for the whole 23 year period at first which itself would still be a big deal.
As Trump said in the debate with Biden “I’ve no idea what he just said there”.
Or, something in between resulting in terminal and recessional moraines.
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacial-geology/glacial-landforms/glacial-depositional-landforms/moraine-types/
Awwww can’t I feel a wee bit doomed occasionally?
If these “scientists” do not factor in precipitation changes and the causes for that, they are wilfully spreading fake news.
I can’t see a downside to this. More water that was once barren ice released into rivers, lakes and seas. Land once cover by ice available for trees, plants and animals. Glacial Valleys available for reservoirs.
Another wonderfully entertaining post Willis. Thanks for the smiles.
My family springs from Swiss farmers near Lausanne. During the LIA many farmers starved to death and committed suicide as glaciers covered their pastures. So pleased it’s so warm