Tag Archives: Glacier

Recognizing The Major Problems In The Environmental Movement

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On Wednesday, Stream posted an article by a former environmentalist listing five reasons why he gave up “green policies.”

Here is the list:

Failed Climate Change Predictions

Science is about accurate prediction. If Newton’s theory had failed to predict how apples fall, then it would be useless.

Few scientists have been as bad at this (basic) job as climate scientists. In one of the most comical episodes I’ve ever seen, climate scientists erected signs in Glacier National Park predicting its glaciers would be gone in 2020 — only to be forced to leave the signs after the predictions proved false. For a year, tourists to the park were met with a monument to the legacy of climate science: They stood looking simultaneously at glaciers … and the sign that promised, on the good authority of climate science, that the glaciers were not there.

Where Did the Wild Spaces Go?

Thoreau said of nature: “We need the tonic of wildness.” Thoreau was right about me at least. One of my primary motives for being an environmentalist was that I believed natural wild spaces were good for the soul.

…And that brings us to wind farms. I hate wind farms. They kill birds and destroy forest habitats. The blades are made of materials that fill waste dumps and can’t be recycled. They require lithium batteries that have to be mined with methods that create the very kinds of problems the “clean energy” movement is supposed to solve.

Politics Over Facts

Speaking of facts: The relationship between science and politics only works when the causal arrow between them goes from scientific facts to politics.

Bullying Over Debate

One of the clear signs that a movement is rotten is when it resorts to silencing its opponents rather than debating them. The modern “green” movement contains the worst set of bullies I’ve ever seen; indeed, they serve as primary fodder for my forthcoming book called Liberal Bullies.

Lack of a Cost/Benefit Analysis

Even at the height of my pro-environmentalist sentiment, I wasn’t opposed to all oil drilling. I know we need energy; I use it every day. I just wanted moderation that purposefully preserved a significant amount of wild nature. Well, across the board, the green movement increasingly just bludgeons us with simple-minded ideas that ignore the obvious costs of their policies.

Keep in mind that list comes from someone who at one time supported the green energy movement. It’s time for the rest of the supporters of the movement to wake up.

 

I Guess This Is Not A New Problem

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In April 2015 TruthorFiction posted an article stating the following:

It’s true that newspapers across the country published a story about climate change in the Arctic Ocean in 1922.

The article appeared on page 2 of the Washington Post on November 2, 1922, under the headline, “Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.” The text of the article reads:

“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

“Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

“Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.”

The article, which was written by the Associated Press, appeared in scores of newspapers around the country in November of 1922. A researcher named John Lockwood found the article archived at the Library of Congress in 2007.
The article was based on a report that appeared in the November 1922 edition of the Monthly Weather Review. The original report says an expedition was sent by the Norwegian Department of Commerce to the Arctic Circle to survey land and to make “oceanographic investigations.” According to excerpts from the report:

“Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted … This is the farthest north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus.”

“…It is of interest to note the unusually warm summer in Arctic Norway and the observations of Capt. MartinIngebrigstaen, who has sailed the eastern Arctic for 54 years past. He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, that since that time it has steadily gotten warmer, and that to-day the Arctic of that region is not recognizable as the same region of 1868 to 1917.”

The article notes that this article does not prove that climate change is a hoax. It notes that changes in temperature from year to year can result in significant changes in ice levels. I posted this article to prove that we really don’t know as much as we like to think we do about how climate works. I suspect that the amount of carbon emissions flowing into the atmosphere in 1922 was considerably less than it is today. We can therefore conclude that there might be other factors involved in our changing climate. Put simply, man is not important enough to control the climate.

I Guess We Really Don’t Have All The Answers

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A website called The Watchers posted an article yesterday about the Jakobshavn Glacier in western Greenland, Greenland’s largest glacier.

The article reports:

Data collected in March 2019 confirm that the glacier has grown for the third year in a row, and scientists attribute the change to cool ocean waters, Kathryn Hansen of NASA’s Earth Observatory reports.

“The third straight year of thickening of Greenland’s biggest glacier supports our conclusion that the ocean is the culprit,” said Josh Willis, an ocean scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator of the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission.

The maps below show how the glacier’s height changed between March 2016 and 2017 (top); March 2017 and 2018 (middle); and March 2018 and 2019 (bottom). The elevation data come from a radar altimeter that has been flown on research airplanes each spring as part of OMG. Blue areas represent where the glacier’s height has increased, in some areas by as much as 30 m (98 feet) per year.

These are the maps:

The article concludes:

The change is particularly striking at the glacier’s front (solid blue area on the left) between 2016 and 2017. That’s when the glacier advanced the most, replacing open water and sea ice with towering glacial ice. The glacier has not advanced as much since then, but it continues to slow and thicken.

Willis and colleagues think the glacier is reacting to a shift in a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation, which has brought cold water northward along Greenland’s west coast. Measurements of the temperatures collected by the OMG team show that the cold water has persisted.

The team will go back to Greenland in August.

Obviously we do not understand as much about how earth works as we think we do.

Whoops!

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The Daily Caller posted an article on Friday about some signs that were quietly removed from Glacier National Park. It seems that those in charge of the park had bought into the extreme reports of imminent global warming.

The article reports:

The National Park Service (NPS) quietly removed a visitor center sign saying the glaciers at Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020 due to climate change.

As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projections from the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers “will all be gone by the year 2020,” federal officials said.

The article explains:

“Glacier retreat in Glacier National Park speeds up and slows down with fluctuations in the local climate,” the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which monitors Glacier National Park, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Those signs were based on the observation prior to 2010 that glaciers were shrinking more quickly than a computer model predicted they would,” USGS said. “Subsequently, larger than average snowfall over several winters slowed down that retreat rate and the 2020 date used in the NPS display does not apply anymore.”

NPS updated signs at the St. Mary Visitor Center glacier exhibit over the winter. Sign changes meant the display warning glaciers would all disappear by 2020 now says: “When they completely disappear, however, will depend on how and when we act.”

Get over it, people. We do not control the climate. The computer models were wrong because the data put into the computers was either wrong or incomplete. We are not in charge. We do have an obligation to do everything we can to keep the air and water as clean as possible, but we do not have a major impact on the climate. One major volcanic eruption puts more junk in the air than a million people driving around for years. I was living in New England when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991. We didn’t really have a summer that year.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported on the impact of that eruption:

Nearly 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide were injected into the stratosphere in Pinatubo’s 1991 eruptions, and dispersal of this gas cloud around the world caused global temperatures to drop temporarily (1991 through 1993) by about 1°F (0.5°C). The eruptions have dramatically changed the face of central Luzon, home to about 3 million people. About 20,000 indigenous Aeta highlanders, who had lived on the slopes of the volcano, were completely displaced, and most still wait in resettlement camps for the day when they can return home. About 200,000 people who evacuated from the lowlands surrounding Pinatubo before and during the eruptions have returned home but face continuing threats from lahars that have already buried numerous towns and villages. Rice paddies and sugar-cane fields that have not been buried by lahars have recovered; those buried by lahars will be out of use for years to come.

As people, we really don’t have the power to impact the climate to that degree.

Whoops!

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Wattsupwiththat is reporting today that glaciers are appearing in Scotland.

The article quotes the BBC:

“Hazards common in arctic and alpine areas but described as “extremely unusual” in the UK during the summer have been found on Ben Nevis.

A team of climbers and scientists investigating the mountain’s North Face said snowfields remained in many gullies and upper scree slopes.

On these fields, they have come across compacted, dense, ice hard snow call neve.

Neve is the first stage in the formation of glaciers, the team said.”

The team has also encountered sheets of snow weighing hundreds of tonnes and tunnels and fissures known as bergschrunds.

This is how ice ages start–the snow does not melt in the summer, and the growing ice sheet reflects more sunlight back into space instead of absorbing it. As the cycle continues, the earth gets colder. So much for global warming.

They Really Aren’t Melting

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On Saturday, WattsUpWithThat posted an article about the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers were supposed to melt by 2035 according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Well, the glaciers are simply not cooperating.

Here is the picture:

himalayan_glaciers_stable

Please follow the link to the article to read the details–I myself have a very unscientific brain, and the picture works better.

Global warming (and cooling) are a natural process is the history of the earth. During the warming period in the Middle Ages, there were not a lot of SUV‘s around to create the problem. The current panic over global warming is simply a tool to take money away from people who have earned it in free societies and give the money to people who have not earned it in dictatorships and tyrannies.

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Whoops! We’re Not Melting!

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Investors.com posted an article yesterday stating that new data shows that the Himalayan ice caps are not melting and the polar ice caps are melting much more slowly than previously thought. Whoops!

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite, is a joint project between NASA and Germany launched in 2002. The satellite sees everything from the highest peaks down to the mouths of glaciers.

According to the article:

Before the amazing GRACE data, teams of researchers had to measure ice loss at a few easily accessible glaciers and then extrapolate it to the 200,000 glaciers worldwide. Measuring mountain snow packs, glacier mass and the thickness of polar ice was an inexact science prone to overhyping by climate-change enthusiasts with an agenda.

Now we have the technology to get it right. The new technology reports:

The new study, the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers made possible by the use of satellite data, acknowledges some glacial melting at lower altitudes. But it also says that over the study period enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate — meaning no net loss of ice.

We need to limit air pollution. We need to keep our oceans and rivers clean. We need to do it in a way that respects people, industry, and wildlife. A little balance is in order.

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