Our glaciers are growing, not melting - More
falsehoods from Al Gore By Robert Felix
8 Mar 10 - "Almost all of the ice-covered
regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising," said Al Gore -in
an op-ed piece in the New York Times on February 27.
Both parts of Gore's statement are false.
Never mind that Mr. Gore makes only passing reference to the IPCC's fraudulent
claims that the Himalayan glaciers will all melt by 2035. ("A flawed
overestimate," he explains.)
Never mind that Mr. Gore dismisses the IPCC's fraudulent claims that the oceans
are rising precipitously. ("Partly inaccurate," he huffs.)
Never mind that Mr. Gore completely ignores the admission by the CRU's
disgraced former director Phil Jones that global temperatures have essentially
remained unchanged for the past 15 years.
I'll let someone else dissect Gore's lawyering comments, and concentrate on
just the one sentence about melting ice, because neither part of that sentence
is true.
Contrary to Gore's assertions, almost all of the ice-covered regions of the
Earth are growing, not melting — and the seas are not rising.
Let's look at the facts.
If you click on the words "are melting" in Gore's article, you're
taken to a paper by Michael Zemp at the University of Zurich.
Mr. Zemp begins his paper by warning that "glaciers around the globe
continue to melt at high rates."
However, if you bother to actually read the paper, you learn that Zemp's
conclusion is based on measurements of "more than 80 glaciers."
Considering that the Himalayas boast more than
15,000 glaciers, a study of "more than 80 glaciers" hardly seems
sufficient to warrant such a catastrophic pronouncement.
Especially when you learn that of those 80 glaciers, several are growing.
Growing. Not melting.
"In Norway,
many maritime glaciers were able to gain mass," Zemp concedes. ("Able
to gain mass" means growing.)
In North America, Zemp also concedes, "some positive values were reported
from the North Cascade Mountains and the
Juneau Ice Field." ("Displaying positive values" means
growing.)
Remember, we're still coming out of the last ice age. Ice is supposed to melt
as we come out of an ice age. The ice has been melting for 11,000 years. Why
should today be any different? I'm guessing that most Canadians and Northern
Europeans are very happy that the ice has been melting.
Unfortunately, that millenniums-long melting trend now appears to be changing.
No matter how assiduously Mr. Gore tries to ignore it, almost all of the
ice-covered regions of the Earth are now gaining mass. (Or, displaying positive
values, if you will.)
For starters, let's look at those Himalayan glaciers. In a great article,
entitled "World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown," Jonathan
Leake and Chris Hastings show that the IPCC's fraudulent claims were based on
"speculation" and "not supported by any formal research."
As a matter of fact, many Himalayan glaciers are growing. In a defiant act of
political incorrectness, some 230 glaciers in the western Himalayas - including
Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat - are
actually growing.
"These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world," says John
Shroder of the University
of Nebraska-Omaha.
"And all of them are either holding still, or advancing."
And get this. Eighty seven of the glaciers have surged forward since the 1960s.
So much for Mr. Gore's "more than 80 glaciers."
(I don't know how many Himalayan glaciers are being monitored, but my guess
would be fewer than a thousand, so it's possible that hundreds more are
growing. There aren't enough glaciologists in the world to monitor them all.)
But we don't need to look to the Himalayas for
growing glaciers. Glaciers are growing in the United States.
Yes, glaciers are growing in the United States.
Look at WashingtonState. The Nisqually
Glacier on Mt.Rainier is growing. The Emmons Glacier
on Mt.Rainier is growing. Glaciers on Glacier
Peak in northern Washington
are growing. And Crater Glacier on Mt.Saint Helens is now
larger than it was before the 1980 eruption. (I don't think all of the glaciers
in Washington or Alaska are being monitored either.)
Or look at California.
All seven glaciers on California's Mount Shasta are growing. This includes three-mile-long
Whitney glacier, the state's largest. Three of Mount
Shasta's glaciers have doubled in size since 1950.
Or look at Alaska.
Glaciers are growing in Alaska
for the first time in 250 years. In May of last year, Alaska’s Hubbard Glacier was advancing at
the rate of seven feet (two meters) per day - more than half-a-mile per year.
And in IcyBay, at least three glaciers advanced a
third of a mile (one half kilometer) in one year.
Oh, by the way. The Juneau Icefield, with its "positive values,"
covers 1,505 square miles (3,900 sq km) and is the fifth-largest ice field in
the Western Hemisphere. Rather interesting to
know that Gore's own source admits that the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere is growing, don't you think?
But this mere handful of growing glaciers is just an anomaly, the erstwhile Mr.
Gore would have you believe.
Well, let's look at a few other countries.
Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest glacier in Argentina, is growing.
Pio XI Glacier, the largest glacier in Chile, is growing.
Glaciers are growing on Mt.Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada.
Glaciers are growing on Mt.Blanc, the tallest mountain in France.
Glaciers are growing in Norway,
says the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE).
And the last time I checked, all 50 glaciers in New Zealand were growing.
But this is nothing. These glaciers are babies when you look at our planet's
largest ice masses, namely, the Antarctic and Greenland
ice sheets.
Contrary to what you may have heard, both of those huge ice sheets are growing.
In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most
ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D'Aleo. While the Antarctic
Peninsula area has warmed in recent years, and ice near it diminished during
the summer, the interior of Antarctica has
been colder and the ice extent greater.
Antarctic sea ice is also increasing. According to Australian Antarctic
Division glaciology program head Ian Allison, sea ice losses in west Antarctica
over the past 30 years have been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea
region, just one sector of east Antarctica.
The Antarctic Peninsula, where the ice has been melting, is only about 1/50th
the size of east Antarctica, where the ice has
been growing. Saying that all of Antarctica is melting is like looking at the
climate of Oregon and saying that this applies
to the entire United States.
There was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in
east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting, says Dr.
Allison. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica
have been in the west." And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude
seen recently in west Antarctica might not be
unusual.
"A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the
journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past
30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded."
What about Greenland? Greenland's ice-cap has thickened slightly in
recent years despite wide predictions of a thaw triggered by global warming,
said a team of scientists in October 2005.
The 3,000-meter (9,842-feet) thick ice-cap is a key concern in debates about
climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7
meters.
But satellite measurements show that more snow is falling and thickening the
ice-cap, especially at high altitudes, according to the report in the journal
Science.
The overall ice thickness changes are approximately plus 5 cm (1.9 inches) per
year or 54 cm (21.26 inches) over 11 years, according to the experts at
Norwegian, Russian and U.S.
institutes led by Ola Johannessen at the Mohn Sverdrup center for Global Ocean
Studies and Operational Oceanography in Norway.
Not overwhelming growth, certainly, but a far cry from the catastrophic melting
that we've been lead to believe.
Think about that.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States.
Put the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets together, and they're one hundred
times bigger than all of the rest of the world's glaciers combined.
More than 90 percent of the world's glaciers are growing, in other words, and
all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.
But if so many of the world's glaciers are growing, how can sea levels remain
the same?
They can't. The sea level models are wrong.
During the last ice age, sea levels stood some 370 feet (100 meters) lower than
today. That's where all of the moisture came from to create those two-mile-high
sheets of ice that covered so much of the north.
And just as the ice has been melting for 11,000 years, so too were sea levels
rising during those same years.
But the rising has stopped.
Forget those IPCC claims. Sea levels are not rising, says Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner,
one-time expert reviewer for the IPCC.
Dr. Mörner, who received his PhD in geology in 1969, is one of the greatest -
if not the greatest - sea level experts in the world today. He has worked with
sea level problems for 40 years in areas scattered all over the globe.
"There is no change," says Mörner. "Sea level is not changing in
any way."
"There is absolutely no sea-level rise in Tuvalo," Mörner insists.
"There is no change here, and there is zero sea-level rise in Bangladesh.
If anything, sea levels have lowered in Bangladesh."
"We do not need to fear sea-level rise," says Mörner. "(But) we
should have a fear of those people who fooled us."
So there you have it. More falsehoods from Al Gore, the multimillionaire
businessman who some say is set to become the world's first carbon billionaire.
Our glaciers are growing, not melting — and the seas are not rising.
I agree with Dr. Mörner, but I'd make it a tad stronger. We should have a fear
of those people who have conned us.
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Robert W. Felix is author of Not by Fire but by Ice, and publisher of www.iceagenow.com.
