Glacier melting hysteria

Been hiking in the Grand Teton for almost two weeks now and lots of those hikes have been to glaciers and glacier fed lakes. It got me wondering just how much these glaciers have melted as the climate warms and I found some pretty interesting stuff on this in my new campground where I actually have a weak signal to get online. Something I learned was Tetons glaciers actually grew for a brief period in the70s and 80s during the height of "man made warming". Kind of makes you wonder huh.


"Schoolroom Glacier lays sheltered below Hurricane Pass at the head of the South Fork of Cascade Canyon. This glacier formed during the Little Ice Age. The ice has retreated from the terminal moraine and glacial lake, but crevasses indicate active movement."


"All glaciers in the park have retreated since the late 1800s, although there have been brief periods of advance, most notably the mid-1970s to mid-1980s."

Oh and in case you think melting glaciers is something new,
Apparently most if not all the original glaciers are long gone in Teton and the ones melting now are remnants of the little ice age.

"The Teton Range owes much of its striking appearance to Pleistocene Ice Age glaciers that sculpted the high peaks and carved deep U-shaped canyons. However, these massive glaciers disappeared by 10,000 years ago. In the last few hundred years, smaller glaciers formed in high alpine cirques during a short cold period called the Little Ice Age (1400 –1850)."


https://www.nps.gov/grte/learn/nature/glacier-research.htm

 

Granny hopin' it don't go back to the Lil' Ice Age...

... she ain't got possum's wool leggin's knit yet.

 

I think the cult may be running from this fact that glaciers that are melting now may not even have been here before the little ice age or may be melting back to pre little ice age levels. The inconvenient truth.

 

That fits right in with AGW theory. In that time frame, precipitation was rising, due to warming temps, but temps hadn't warmed to the point of melting, so the glacier expanded.

 

Your insults mark you as desperate. You wouldn't have to constantly toss insults in every post if all the facts didn't contradict everything you say.

 

At least you admit these melting glaciers were formed during the little ice age period and are just returning to pre little ice age levels. That's a step towards reality.

 

What do you predict will happen to them in the future?

 

Odd question.How should I know? These glaciers have been advancing and retreating for an eternity and I suspect they will continue to do so.

 

You might want to source claims like these or some people might think you are just making stuff up.

 

It's the same concept that explains why you can get more snow at warmer temperatures. The higher the temperature the more moisture the air can hold. All other things being equal it will snow more at -5C than at -10C.

For regions that remain below freezing global warming will yield more snow.

For regions that remain above freezing global warming will yield no difference.

For regions that are borderline global warming will yield less snow.

 

I'm asking for the predictions that were made before glaciers expanded during the 70s and 80s that the previous poster said were made. Looking backwards and saying yeah that fits our predictions doesn't count.

 

And then there is this to consider. Some glaciers are actually growing and the much vaunted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to eat a lot of crow. Woops!

Troublesome Karakoram glaciers getting bigger, new study suggests

• 
  

"Despite the global temperature increase and the overall shrinking of the world's glaciers, some glaciers in the Karakoram mountains have actually grown over the past decade, according to a new study.


Channi Anand
US where, according to a 2011 Harris Poll,public belief in manmade warming dropped from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.

This research, led by glaciologist Julie Gardelle of the University of Grenoble, has confirmed suspicions about the massive glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains along the border of India, Pakistan and China. The researchers analyzed satellite images of a 2,168 square-mile area, and found that the glaciers are not losing ice, but probably gaining it. The study's results were recently published in Nature Geoscience.

For the past seven years, scientists have noted that the Karakoram glaciers have been spreading. Yet it was not clear whether the glaciers were merely becoming thinner, with the same amount of ice, or less, spread over a larger area, or if they were actually gaining mass.


To determine which, Gardelle and her team used data taken by instruments aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor and the French SPOT5 satellite, which collected the relevant data in late 1999 and 2008, respectively. The researchers estimated that, over this time period, the glaciers gained mass. On average, the glaciers developed a new patina of ice that, if melted, would amount to just over four inches of water."

I especially like this part. What does crow taste like I wonder. Chicken?

"Though scientifically intriguing, the scientists involved in this study are wary of the political impact of these results; especially in light of the 2007 snafu involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s mistaken assertion that the Himalayan glaciers would be eradicated by 2035, and the damage to the credibility of the IPCC’s otherwise robust body of research."

https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2...am-glaciers-getting-bigger-new-study-suggests

And here is some more glacier info to consider.

"At least 58 New Zealand glaciers advanced between 1983 and 2008, with Franz Josef Glacier (Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere) advancing nearly continuously during this time

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-zealand-unusual-glaciers.html#jCp


And you know all those "awful pictures" the cult likes to show of Hubbard glacier in Alaska calving into the ocean? Well here's the truth on that.

"Hubbard Glacier is defying the global paradigm of valley or mountain glacier shrinkage and retreat in response to global climate warming. Hubbard Glacier is the largest of eight calving glaciers in Alaska that are currently increasing in total mass and advancing. All of these glaciers calve into the sea, are at the heads of long fiords, have undergone retreats during the last 1,000 years, calve over relatively shallow submarine moraines, and have unusually small ablation areas compared to their accumulation areas.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-001-03/

 

Here's something I didn't know and I bet you didn't either. All that talk about the world's glaciers melting (one hundred thousand of them) is based on just 40 glaciers that are actually measured.

"Scientists have described more than one hundred thousand glaciers in the World Glacier Inventory, but only a small fraction of these have been consistently monitored for long enough to measure climate-related changes in their size or mass. Scientists refer to this collection of about 40 glaciers as "reference" glaciers".

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-glacier-mass-balance

 

I'm actually not aware of any predictions of glacial retreats/advancements. I just don't immerse myself in that part of climate change to know either way.

Looking back and seeing how well a model matches reality is called a hindcast. The idea is that if a model can't hindcast adequately then it likely can't forecast adequately either. Also, looking back is called a postdiction. It is different than a prediction. The former is made after the fact while the later is made before the fact. You can certainly look back and explain why reality behaved the way it did using a model, but that's not a prediction.

 

I didn't know that either. I guess the question is how well do these 40 glaciers represent the rest?

 

That seems to be the standard reply of true believers. They look back and say yeah that fits our hypothesis. Meanwhile their actual predictions fail time after time like when the IPCC predicted all the glaciers in the Himalayan mountains would be gone by 2035. Now that they are growing instead they want to claim they postdicted this? Do you take us for fools?

 

That's the question. Did they throw darts at a map? Did they pick the easiest glaciers to study as in get to? Or maybe did they knowingly pick glaciers that were shrinking in order to "prove" and further their hypothesis? As I showed earlier in this thread many glaciers are growing including the ancient Alaskan glaciers that warmers love to show pictures of calving thinking that proves their sky is falling hypothesis. I even saw a warmer saying these glaciers are moving faster than ever in recorded history but he left out the reason why. The reason is they are growing and becoming heavier which makes them move faster but that's yet another inconvenient truth.

 

And what caused the little ice age?

Again the climate does not change by itself

 

Man didn't cause the little ice age to begin, to continue or to end. That's the issue here.

 

No he didn't so what did?

 

Climate has always changed and always will change. We don't know why some glaciers are growing while others are shrinking. We don't know why ancient calving glaciers are growing now but shrunk in the LIA period. We don't know why the LIA began or why it lasted four hundred years or why it is now ending. We don't know if fallout from distant stars going super nova will put us into another ice age. In short we don't know what we don't know. Man is just along for the ride. Adapt or perish.

 

None of the IPCC predictions are perfect. And there are several that I would call failures. But, it's definitely not true that they "fail time after time". It would be more correct to say that they are right time after time because that better represents the outcome of the credible set of hypothesis being analyzed. Also, you have to understand that a falsified hypothesis isn't the same concept as abject failure. The process of falsifying hypothesis is how theories evolve and become more right. So falsifying a hypothesis forces science to tweak the theory for better not worse.

Oh, and you can't falsify a hypothesis regarding the future until data is collected. We haven't collected data for 2035 yet...as far as I know anyway. So that hypothesis technically hasn't failed...yet. Though I do concede that it is likely to because it's a stupid hypothesis. I do have to ask the question...was that really the hypothesis of the IPCC? I ask because more often than not when I go and look these things up I end up finding out that the statements made in this forum have been severely misrepresented. That's why I'm asking...did the IPCC really hypothesize that "ALL Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035"? Again...just asking because I haven't looked it up yet.

 

I don't know. That's why I'm asking. Do you have reason to believe those 40 glaciers do not provide an adequate proxy? If not then can you quantify how much error might be introduced as the result of using those selected glaciers and not others?

I know you're incredulous about this, but using subsets as a proxy for an entire population is really common in all disciplines of science. Take the medical field for example. Their utilization of this idea is orders of magnitude more pervasive than anything climate scientists have done. Life altering diagnosis and even treatment regiments are developed pretty much on a daily basis now using the results of studies that sample infinitesimally small percentages of the population and assuming they are adequate proxies for everyone. It's likely that you are or will seek medical treatment at some point in your life based on a proxy study having a disturbingly low level of confidence. Just food for thought...

 

We didn't cause it. But believe it or not the consensus is that man probably contributed, albeit minimally, via land use changes. The prevailing thought is that a grand solar minimum and increased volcanism were the biggest contributors. But, they weren't the only contributors.

 

True. We also can't predict cataclysms like gamma ray bursts, supernova, asteroid strikes, mega volcanoes, etc. But, we can make predictions based scenarios that exclude those possibilities. Afterall, history tells us that cataclysms are pretty rare on a yearly or centennial basis so assuming that one won't occur is actually a pretty safe bet. But, I do concede that it isn't a guarantee.