Humans greatest driving force behind glacier meltdown: study
Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press
Published Thursday, August 14, 2014 2:43PM EDT
Last Updated Thursday, August 14, 2014 5:00PM EDT
In this photo taken on July 31, 2014, Chip Martin looks over the Lemon Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. (AP /The Juneau Empire, Mary Catharine Martin)
WASHINGTON -- More than two-thirds of the recent rapid melting of the world's glaciers can be blamed on humans, a new study finds.
Scientists looking at glacier melt since 1851 didn't see a human fingerprint until about the middle of the 20th century. Even then only one-quarter of the warming wasn't from natural causes.
But since 1991, about 69 per cent of the rapidly increasing melt was man-made, said Ben Marzeion, a climate scientist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
"Glaciers are really shrinking rapidly now," he said. "I think it's fair to say most of it is man-made."
Scientists fault global warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas as well as changes in land use near glaciers and soot pollution. Glaciers in Alaska and the Alps in general have more human-caused melting than the global average, Marzeion said.
The study is published Thursday in the journal Science.
The research is the first to calculate just how much of the glacial melting can be attributed to people and "the jump from about a quarter to roughly 70 per cent of total glacier mass loss is significant and concerning," said University of Alaska Fairbanks geophysicist Regine Hock, who wasn't part of the study.
Over the last two decades, about 295 billion tons of ice is melting each year on average due to human causes and about 130 billion tons a year are melting because of natural causes, Marzeion calculated.
Glaciers alone add to about four-tenths of an inch of sea level rise every decade, along with even bigger increases from melting ice sheets -- which are different than glaciers -- and the expansion of water with warmer temperatures.
Marzeion and colleagues ran multiple computer simulations to see how much melting there would be from all causes and then did it again to see how much melting there would be if only natural causes were included. The difference is what was caused by humans.
Scientists aren't quite certain what natural causes started glaciers shrinking after the end of the Little Ice Age in the middle of the 19th century, but do know what are human-causes: climate change, soot, and local changes in land use.
There is a sizable margin of error so the 69 per cent human caused can be as low as 45 per cent or as high as 93 per cent, but likely in the middle.
"This study makes perfect sense," said Pennsylvania State University glacier expert Richard Alley, who wasn't part of the research. "The authors have quantified what I believe most scientists would have expected."
Full Article:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/humans-greatest-driving-force-behind-glacier-meltdown-study-1.1960030
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Time running out to find artifacts in glacial ice, Swiss say
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Exactly . Excellent observation . Now make a model for that [which ignores CO2 ] and you might have something of value .
Scientists aren't quite certain what natural causes started glaciers shrinking after the end of the Little Ice Age in the middle of the 19th century, but do know what are human-causes: climate change, soot, and local changes in land use.
That kind of defines things I think.
Pollution is still a man-made causative agent.
SOOT is "a black powdery or flaky substance consisting largely of amorphous carbon, produced by the incomplete burning of organic matter ."
I'm well aware of what soot is . Apparently you are not aware that soot is controllable from many industrial emissions sources [unlike CO2 ] .
Soot, as an airborne contaminant in the environment has many different sources but they are all the result of some form of pyrolysis. They include soot from coal burning, internal combustion engines, power plant boilers, hog-fuel boilers, ship boilers, central steam heat boilers, waste incineration , local field burning, house fires, forest fires, fireplaces, furnaces, etc. .
Human activity.
Not only that Royal but the burning off of large areas of the rain forests removes the very plants that scrub out the CO2 and produce oxygen in return in other words upsetting the natural balance.
I'll wait to read the actual study before making any comments.
I'll look forward to your input Steve.
I looked for it on the Science website, but I couldn't find it.
Here is one you can read:
Human contribution to glacier mass loss increasing
Cool. Thanks.
Receding Swiss glaciers reveal 4000 year old forests - Warmists try to suppress findings
Dr. Christian Schlchter's discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.
This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today, with "a wild landscape and wide flowing river."
Dr. Schlchter's report might have been more conveniently dismissed by the entrenched global warming establishment were it not for his distinguished reputation as a giant in the field of geology and paleoclimatology who has authored/coauthored more than 250 papers and is a professor emeritus at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
Then he made himself even more unpopular thanks to a recent interview titled "Our Society is Fundamentally Dishonest" which appeared in the Swiss publication Der Bund where he criticized the U.N.-dominated institutional climate science hierarchy for extreme tunnel vision and political contamination.
Following the ancient forest evidence discovery Schlchter became a target of scorn. As he observes in the interview, "I wasn't supposed to find that chunk of wood because I didn't belong to the close-knit circle of Holocene and climate researchers. My findings thus caught many experts off guard: Now an 'amateur' had found something that the [more recent time-focused] Holocene and climate experts should have found."
Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlchter points out that "the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned."
Schlchter criticizes his critics for focusing on a time period which is "indeed too short." His studies and analyses of a Rhone glacier area reveal that "the rock surface had [previously] been ice-free 5,800 of the last 10,000 years."
Such changes can occur very rapidly. His research team was stunned to find trunks of huge trees near the edge of Mont Min Glacier which had all died in just a single year. They determined that time to be 8,200 years ago based upon oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice which showed marked cooling.
Casting serious doubt upon alarmist U.N.-IPCC projections that the Alps will be nearly glacier-free by 2100, Schlchter poses several challenging questions: "Why did the glaciers retreat in the middle of the 19th century, although the large CO2 increase in the atmosphere came later? Why did the Earth 'tip' in such a short time into a warming phase? Why did glaciers again advance in the 1880s, 1920s, and 1980s? . . . Sooner or later climate science will have to answer the question why the retreat of the glacier at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 was so rapid."
Although we witness ongoing IPCC attempts to blame such developments upon evil fossil-fueled CO2 emissions, that notion fails to answer these questions. Instead, Schlchter believes that the sun is the principal long-term driver of climate change, with tectonics and volcanoes acting as significant contributors.
Regarding IPCC integrity with strong suspicion, Schlchter recounts a meeting in England that he was "accidentally" invited to which was led by "someone of the East Anglia Climate Center who had come under fire in the wake of the Climategate e-mails."
As he describes it: "The leader of the meeting spoke like some kind of Father. He was seated at a table in front of those gathered and he took messages. He commented on them either benevolently or dismissively."
Schlchter's view of the proceeding took a final nosedive towards the end of the discussion. As he noted: "Lastly it was about tips on research funding proposals and where to submit them best. For me it was impressive to see how the leader of the meeting collected and selected information."
As a number of other prominent climate scientists I know will attest, there's one broadly recognized universal tip for those seeking government funding. All proposals with any real prospects for success should somehow link climate change with human activities rather than to natural causes. Even better, those human influences should intone dangerous consequences.
Schlchter warns that the reputation of science is becoming more and more damaged as politics and money gain influence. He concludes, "For me it also gets down to the credibility of science . . . Today many natural scientists are helping hands of politicians, and are no longer scientists who occupy themselves with new knowledge and data. And that worries me."
Yes. That should worry everyone.
Six,
The article comes from the CCD; if you check their mission statement you'll find, among other things
Trillions of dollars?
Do the energy companies have any money at stake?
A Mac I see there is a lot of money at stake here. I'm all for working on renewable energy. There was an article that even Dowser said could explain the glacier melting from heat within the earth, but there is a lot of money to be made either way....
BREAKING: Senate report exposes the climate-environmental movement as being a cash machine controlling theEPA
How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obamas EPA
A new report was released today by the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, and it is damning. All this time that climate skeptics are accused of being in the employ of big oil is nothing more than a projection of their own greed.
Some excerpts:
Over 7.9 BILLION in funding between these groups.
Bill McKibben caught in a lie, he might be scruffy be he isnt nearly broke as he once claimed:
The epicenter of funding disclosed:
The NRDC mafia
Josh wasnt far off the mark:
Schluchter is connected to Climate Depot
United States Senate
Committee on Environment and Public Works
Minority Staff Report
The Chain of Environmental Command:
~~Link~~
From SOTT.net's about page. Well, um, uh. Not sure what to make of that statement really.
They kind of defined themselves in the last sentence:
In short, SOTT.net is an experiment.
While I'm still waiting to read the actual math behind this study, I decided I wanted to make this statement.
People always like to say that the climate has always changed, and it has, studies confirm that. That statement, in and of itself does not make false the statement that climatechangeis accelerating because of man made influences. That is only something which can be proven or dis-proven by climatologicalstudies.
So, just to make things more fun, I'm going to throw in another subject: Chaos Theory.
For references to this theory and area of study concerning weather and climate you can start here:
Now why would I bring in the idea of Chaos Theory? Because a small change in any factor that contributes to weather and climate can have profound, unexpected consequences in the future. It is very difficult to predict weather any more than 24 hours ahead. But, can we predict climate change better? Climate has a much longer periodicity. Therefore, we should be able to predict farther out, though not to the very end.
So now we circle back around to the question of human influenced climate change. We already know that our humanity influences the weather vis a vis our large cities. Why can humans not affect the climate in similar ways?
To my way of thinking it is more important to determine exactly what factors of human activity have the claimed effects . Wasting resources trying to stop the unstoppable [CO2 emissions ] is fruitless . Focusing on controllable things like soot is much more practical .
I majored in math and chemistry in college, so I have no problem with experiments per se. They do not necessarily prove nor disprove anything until further study and outside confirmation.
Oh I don't know, shooting Al Gore into space might stop the production of some bilious gas.
Fortunately Al Gore is getting his just deserts from another Al :
So I read, and commented. Poor little guy, how is he going to pay for his carbon footprint now?
That was a terrific link you put up there !