Live near a water source fed by mountain glaciers? That could change.
Most of the world’s mountain glaciers, many of which feed major rivers and water supplies, are shrinking at an accelerating pace as the climate warms, according to a new report.
The report charts changes through 2006. It was issued Monday by the World Glacier Monitoring Service, which is based at the University of Zurich and supported by the United Nations Environment Program.
Dealing with global warming didn’t have to be painful, but that would have taken leadership. Instead we got eight years of ideological stonewalling. At this point, as advanced as the problem has become, I’m not even convinced that we can push climate back over the warming threshold. When summer ice in the Arctic is replaced with water and open ground, that part of the Earth will absorb far more solar radiation. Warming will eventually take on a life of its own. The longer we wait the steeper the cost of making a meaningful change will become. But then, at the rate that things are changing the cost of doing nothing will probably be even harsher. Take your pick.
quickdraw
Oh, Tim, Tim, Tim. Why must you scientists assume that the glaciers are shrinking due to global warming? Isn’t it equally as likely that the glaciers have developed osteoporosis in their old age? After all, that’s why my racist white grandmother is shrinking.
crayz
It’s far more important that we focus our meager resources on the existential threat of men with AK-47s in the caves of *stans
Zifnab
I refer you to the great Jimmy Carter.
This is, ultimately, everybody’s fault. Don’t try to just peg it on the Republicans. Detriot automakers’ unions and NAFTA backing DLCers share responsible for this clusterfuck with Inhofee the Senate Big Oil whore.
The true shame is that guys out in Africa and the Philippines get to indulge in misery with us as the entire planet pays the price for its lack of foresight.
ImJohnGalt
Completely off-topic, but equally infuriating:
Whistleblower exposes insider trading program at JP Morgan
Snail
Honestly, I don’t anyone is going to do anything meaningful on the global warming issue. The only way there is going to be serious reduction in fossil fuel use is when the prices of these fuels become prohibitive. With crude oil and natural gas, that may come sooner than most people think. But the ecomonic ramifications of those shortages are going to be so severe that everyone is going to be more concerned about feeding their families than worrying about climate change.
Hume's Ghost
Nice try, Tim. You’re not fooling me! Neal Boortz proved definitively that global warming was a hoax when he linked to an article that said ocean leves would be lower 8 million years from now.
http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2008/03/global-warming-alarmists-wrong-again.html
Hume's Ghost
er, “levels” not leves
TenguPhule
Rock. Hard Place. Where is a Republican head when you really need one?
Conservatively Liberal
Anyone who has had enough chemistry in school and learns about endothermic and exothermic reactions knows that global warming is a fact once the population reaches a certain mass. The ecosystem can only absorb so much abuse before it is saturated. We have been changing the state of carbon for so long that its reactants are screwing with the balance of nature.
Just keep shopping and damn Beauchamp. One day this planet is going to shake us off like a bad habit.
Bubblegum Tate
Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m sure Jebus will come to the rescue. Isn’t that the plan, anyway?
Tim H.
Couldn’t the mountains just be getting taller?
Punchy
Wake up you lazy, ignorant moonbat. This is 2008, not 2006, bitches, and I saw snow up in Canada in January this year. Cleary, nothing’s warming.
So take your years-old “report” and give it back to Michael Moore for better editing.
Dennis - SGMM
It’s not our fault that those guys didn’t discover sub-prime mortgages in time. Besides, soon enough we’ll all be brothers and sisters in the cooking up of house pets and aged relatives.
DBrown
As long as we deny GW it doesn’t exist and everything will be fine since we will not hurt our job production and increase company profits until the rapture … did I hit all the correct wing nut points?
LiberalTarian
Since I live in the Sacramento Valley, I personally worry about the ancient levees and unsustainable water distribution system.
What Katrina did to the New Orleans was bad, but what our crumbling levees could to the world’s 6th largest economy (or is it 7th now since it is on the skids?) … I shudder to think. The situation here, should we have a 200-year storm event or a major earthquake or rapid sea-level rise, is on the order of Katrina’s effects on the whole of the Gulf Coast.
And yet, it would take radical restructuring, and the inert managers of the system are not compelled to make the painful choices that must be made.
Is it too early in the day to drink??
4tehlulz
Obviously, this is a reference to Obama’s white grandmother.
jcricket
Of course Obama’s grandmother is white. All politicans have white relatives, because they’re all white. Wait… Obama might not be white?
Get Drudge on this!
Cain
You know.. maybe if we framed it like Noah’s Ark type thing. They told Noah he was crazy too.
cain
Gus
Yep, we’re fucked. If humanity lasts the century it will be as a much smaller population struggling to survive. Unfortunate that we have to take so many innocent species with us.
Z
Look people, the earth is only 6000 years old. It hasn’t been fully vetted yet.
/snark
Evinfuilt
Oceans reached saturation point on CO2
Summer Waters in the Arctic
Glacial Tap water shortage
Isn’t this gonna be great. The tipping point is probably past. But don’t worry we have plans
Start burning oil based on Oil Shale
Finish clear cutting the Amazon so we can have more beef and sugar cane
Convert our food supply into Ethanol
Incoming droughts, floods and more severe winters. I don’t want to be a pessimist, but goly gee… I live 12ft above sea level and kinda major’d in this crap (which explains why I program for a living.)
But don’t worry, I hear there are plenty upsides. I mean the 19th Century warming period actually helped us start the Industrial Revolution by making us less dependent on farming. Imagine what our future holds when outdoor farming as a whole is useless.
Hydroponics anyone? Uses a lot less water than traditional farming, and can contain the chemical run-off. Mix this with some modern greenhouse techniques. Otherwise the Canadian Tundra will be the Bread Basket of North America (not that thats a bad thing.)
srv
Re global warming and water. Look, we can afford to lose FL, LA and Phoenix. They can all move up to Canada, which is pretty empty and should be much more temperate.
If Canada will take ppGaz and all the FL/LA riff-raft here, we can make a spot for Krista someplace nice.
Buck
it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming
Good news maybe??
Saul Goode
Whoa…hold on the, Skippy…the World Glacier Inventory (WGI) contains info on more than 100,000 glaciers around the world..
…the article you linked says their report has data on only 30…that’s less than 0.03%..
…but, hey, why should that matter? They have an agenda after all.
…oh…and BTW..the oceans are actually cooling http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
…but…but…the models say they shouldn’t be
Saul Goode
Whoa…hold on the, Skippy…the World Glacier Inventory (WGI) contains info on more than 100,000 glaciers around the world..
…the article you linked says their report has data on only 30…that’s less than 0.03%..
…but, hey, why should that matter? They have an agenda after all.
…oh…and BTW..the oceans are actually cooling http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
…but…but…the models say they shouldn’t be
Saul Goode
Whoa…hold on the, Skippy…the World Glacier Inventory (WGI) contains info on more than 100,000 glaciers around the world..
…the article you linked says their report has data on only 30…that’s less than 0.03%..
…but, hey, why should that matter? They have an agenda after all.
…oh…and BTW..the oceans are actually cooling http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
…but…but…the models say they shouldn’t be
TenguPhule
Shorter Saul Goode: I don’t fucking read my links.
Saul Goode
Where is the heat going?? DUH!! Who said it was there to begin with?? What if the radiated heat goes right back up through the atmosphere and back into space?
Either way…it disproves the freakin’ global warming hypotheses.
What’s more amazing to me is that the NYT will publish an astoundingly bad article as the one linked. Again, there are more than 100,000 glaciers that are monitored..and they cherry-pick 30 that may be growing and extrapolate that out to support the global warming hooey?
Saul Goode
Where is the heat going?? DUH!! Who said it was there to begin with?? What if the radiated heat goes right back up through the atmosphere and back into space?
Either way…it disproves the freakin’ global warming hypotheses.
What’s more amazing to me is that the NYT will publish an astoundingly bad article as the one linked. Again, there are more than 100,000 glaciers that are monitored..and they cherry-pick 30 that may be growing and extrapolate that out to support the global warming hooey?
Tim F.
Saul, you don’t seem to understand the concept of marginal zone glaciers. The world has many glaciers that are well above the freezing line and therefore won’t shrink at all unless warming goes completely crazy. In fact, due to more water in the air (warming) the precipitation on these glaciers will increase, causing them to grow.
Regarding the robots, four years is not a long enough measurement period to “disprove” anything. The stock market occasionally goes up during a recession and various aspects of the global temperature sometimes go down during a warming trend. Top scientists don’t yet know how to interpret the data, but clearly that isn’t a problem for a great sage like yourself.
DBrown
First, I’m a physicist, not a climatologist so I am no expert.
Went to Saul Goode link and it, like all science based research provided that that was not fitting an imaginary picture – yes, imaginary.
No one, and no model states that the oceans heat up in sync with the air. Yes, at some point the oceans must heat but not in lock step. Why?
From thermodynamics this is so elementary that it is high school. Water has the greatest heat capacity (a quality that tells how fast a substance increases in temperature for a fixed quantity of heat added) than most other materials. The last ten years of the thin layer of atmospheric surface heating (which has a trivially small heat capacity compared to the oceans) just can not put much hit into a body of water so vast and deep. Next ocean currents (vertical and horizontal) will quickly change things. While these facts do not necessarily explain the data, they are important. To claim that the oceans MUST heat up to some arbitrary value that can be measured above data noise without reference to an accurate (i.e. lots of supporting data) model is stupid and the writer (and I hope not the scientist) are failing to see this simple fact.
That does not mean that GW isn’t wrong or needs to be improved, only that this trivially small data set means little until far, far more data coupled to new good models show that current heavily proven models are wrong.
While it is good to check facts and worry about data, do not fall into the trap of using your preconceived (and often wrong) ideas to filter data sets that support you and then concluded everyone else is wrong. Good post but you jumped the gun by thinking this data proves GW wrong.
When ever you, (or myself) discovers that thousands of peer-reviewed experts in a science with years of adapt and models are wrong, either we are brilliant (buy a lottery ticket, fast!) or making a mistake that isn’t obvious due to lack of knowledge in the field. So, keep looking but try not to jump the shark and look foolish.
Red
Once New York City is flooded and all the scientists are vindicated, does that mean we can start hanging the bastards who are trying to convince us global warming doesn’t exist?
Grumpy Code Monkey
We can try, but they’ll manage to convince the rubes that it’s all the scientists’ fault for not sounding the alarm sooner.
From the link:
It’s a sure bet that our climate models are incomplete, so it’s not surprising that the data don’t always fit. Incomplete does not necessarily equate to completely wrong, however.
LiberalTarian
Shorter Saul Goode:
WTF?
Shorter Saul Goode’s kids:
Daa aaa aaa dy.
bud
That spiel reminds me of the church scene in Blazing Saddles,”authentic (scientific) gibberish”. I expect that many of the readers here were sagely nodding their heads while reading this crap, too. Even the most rabid of the AGW proponents don’t claim that any sort of exothermic chemical reaction contributes enough heat to the earth to cause any discernible temperature rise.
AGW is not proven. Glaciers have been “retreating” in the papers since the 1920’s.
It doesn’t need to prove “GW” “wrong”. It’s a counterfactual to the everpresent idea that AGW (which is vastly different from “GW”) is “right”.
There have been “thousands” of peer-reviewed articles on climate change, but certainly no where near that number claiming to show an anthropogenic cause of warming. The vast majority of signers of the IPCC report were politicians, not hard scientists.
I’ll say it: the models are wrong, and the proof is in the pudding. When compared to reality (data acquired AFTER the model was submitted) the models used to tout for AGW have been wrong, consistantly predicting higher temperatures than what subsequently happened.
LiberalTarian
bu uu uu uud? your da aaa aaa aaad is calling.
Saul Goode
…but gosh…what about the rest of them glaciers below your feezing line that are expanding?
This great sage thinks that maybe the robots are being paid off by the oil companies. What else could it possibly be? Certainly not that the whole global warming hypothesis is bunk…could it? :)
Tim F.
I assume that eventually you will cite some actual examples.
You’re not responding to what I said, so it’s safe to assume that you can’t. If you feel bored for whatever reason and need something else to respond to, think about whether you are committing the common denier mistake of focusing on one preliminary study at the expense of all the rest.
Saul Goode
yep..eventually: http://www.skepticalscience.com/himalayan-glaciers-growing.htm
..but…but…the models…they…they simply cannot be wrong, could they? That would invalidate our entire
hoax, er…I mean argumentSorta like how global temps do also, right? You were aware that global temps were higher in the past right? Cuz if you dint, that would make you look kinda uniformed
Saul Goode
Uh…yeah…it actually does. It sorta destroys the whole hypothesis …don’t it?
Saul Goode
Uh…yeah…it actually does. It sorta destroys the whole hypothesis …don’t it?
TenguPhule
Hello DugJ.
Tim F.
From the link:
Hahahahahaha ha ha ha. You had me going for a while. Back under the bridge with you.
DBrown
A few points to correct
First, Saul Goode most certainly stated that the WGI data did prove GW was wrong and I answered that in my limited way.
Saul Goode Says: Either way…it disproves the freakin’ global warming hypotheses.
So ‘bud’ try reading a post and retrace its origins before you make look self look stupid.
Next please link to any peer reviewed model that requires glaciers to always shrink during GW.
If you understood even middle school science, you would know that to argue scientific facts based on opinion is not just incorrect but shows that you are either too lazy to do the work to learn a minimum amount of information on a subject or that you prefer ignorance.
For example: Increased temperatures can and will by some models lead to greater snow fall in areas that are below freezing and cause snow packs on glaciers to increase; hence, it would not be important that many such glaciers grew; the issue comes only when such a situation occurs and all the major models predict that the WGI must all shrink, not grown. Please link to models that fit this criteria and I will agree that these models are either wrong or need better data (again, you will need to learn about a subject, so be careful.)
As for human induced GW, I never said anything about that in my post you cited and you need to read posts before making unsupported comments and again, making yourself look foolish.
However, by experts in the field, they (again, see real climate for a good back ground read on this subject) believe that the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is the only major factor in the models that account for GW and this is increasing and this factor is traced mostly to human activities.
As for the models being wrong for the reasons you state, your concept of scientific proof is so wrong that it is ludicrous – no model of a complex system can give exact answers; if that is your criteria for science, fine; but that is not what society, scientist, engineers and anyone of modest intellect believes and you would be a laughing stock at any site that practices science. You are welcome to live in your own world and remain stupid but do not continue to humiliate yourself by acting as if you understand even a trivial amount of technical information or scientific method (most people in the world may not either but I believe most don’t publish their lack of knowledge like you seem to need to do.)
Birdzilla
More tlies more junk science more fabrications from the IPCC and the UN and the various green radicals and AL GORE especialy AL GORE
dbrown
bud,
first, always question people who claim they know what they are talking about; since stupid is as stupid says, that makes me the stupid one.
Saul Goode
You’re an angry little feller, aren’t you?
Umm..you may just wanna read up on other factors that should be in your little model, but are not.
Garbage in…garbage out.
But, hey…why apply real science when it doesn’t fit your agenda?