Glaciers disappearing from Kilimanjaro

[Jason Harris]

Actually Josh to assert dogmatically there is "no way" to know the truth is begging the question and antithetical to the scientific method. A true skeptic demands evidence, and there's evidence galore, but as usual too many people seem to think they know better than the climatologists, those studying glaciers, etc.

Clearly, if you're talking about Mount Kilimanjaro in particular there's a lot of uncertainty about the exact cause and variability--the NY times article does a good job with that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/africa/03melt.html

However, the larger issue of global and especially arctic ice loss is far less ambiguous, unless one million years isn't long enough a period to consider:
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE59S3LT20091029?sp=true

"From a practical perspective, if you want to ship across the pole, you're concerned about multiyear sea ice. You're not concerned about this rotten stuff we were doing 13 knots through. It's easy to navigate through."

Scientists have fretted for decades about the pace at which the Arctic ice sheets are shrinking. U.S. data shows the 2009 ice cover was the third-lowest on record, after 2007 and 2008.

An increasing number of experts feel the North Pole will be ice free in summer by 2030 at the latest, for the first time in a million years.

"I would argue that, from a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now, because multiyear sea ice is the barrier to the use and development of the Arctic," said Barber.

While others fiddle, the shipping industry makes it plans for ice-free travel, and yes the albedo effect is part of that acceleration (how could it not be?):

Shipping companies are already looking to benefit from warming waters. This year two German cargo ships successfully navigated from South Korea along Russia's northern Siberia coast without the help of icebreakers.

The Arctic is warming up three times more quickly than the rest of the Earth, in part because of the reflectivity, or the albedo feedback effect, of ice.

As more and more ice melts, larger expanses of darker sea water are exposed. These absorb more sunlight than the ice and cause the water to heat up more quickly, thereby melting more ice.

Anyway, most people can probably agree that it's sad to see Mt. K's ice go, but heck, in India apparently there's somebody building glaciers:
--
http://blog.taragana.com/n/indian-engineer-builds-new-glaciers-to-halt-global-warming-209394/

A retired Indian engineer has claimed to have “built” 12 new glaciers, in an effort to stop global warming melting away the Himalayan glaciers.

According to a report in the Telegraph, Chewang Norphel, 76, has said that he “built” 12 new glaciers already and is racing to create five more before he dies.

Oh and there's NASA of course too (from July--same month that the ocean was declared warmest on record), in case anyone forgot from NOAA:

The planet’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for July, breaking the previous high mark established in 1998 according to an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 ranked fifth-warmest since world-wide records began in 1880.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090814_julyglobalstats.html

but I recall from previous threads how some folks think NASA is run by AL Gore or something like that:

NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) provides new clues about the presence of ice in the Arctic and you already know the picture isn’t pretty. Critical thick ice coverage has dropped by a staggering 595,000 square miles, more than the land size of the U.S.’ largest state - Alaska - in just four years.

&

NASA said that the amount of ice replaced in the winter has not been sufficient to offset summer ice losses. The result is more open water in summer, which then absorbs more heat, warming the ocean and further melting the ice.

http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/43168-arctic-thick-ice-disappearing-at-dramatic-pace-nasa-says

 

[Robert Edmonds]

If you consider globally ice is decreasing I wouldn't be suprised if there is a local and global change in temperature resulting from changes in albedo. My question is globally what percent of temperature increase be attributed to changes in increased absorption, and what percent can be attributed to changes in albedo?

Just to make sure there isn't any ambiguity in my post. I wasn't suggesting human forcing didn't cause the albedo change. I was merely asking if you were to prevent albedo changes, like in a Global Circulation Model (GCM), what would be the resulting temperature change just from the additional IR absorption caused by the additional CO2? I.e. just wondering the significance of this feedback effect is compared to just the additional CO2 IR absorption.

 

[MatthewCarman]

I still think this is a natural part of Earth's life cycle. We have had big global warm up's in the past including the one in the medieval period that was followed by the little ice age. I think if the planet did get to warm we would end up in another ice age but I don't think that will happen. I did read a story where people found a cave that had been covered in ice for the longest time and after the ice melted away they found mining tools. Also wasn't Greenland "green" at one time?

I also want to add many scientists believe we are entering global cooling. Just something to think about.

This is all pointless though. In the many threads we had on this topic in the past that became heated they proved only one thing. No matter how hard people tried very few people changed their minds on this topic.

 

[Darren Addy]

Also wasn't Greenland "green" at one time?

You don't have to do a lot of Googling to learn the history of Greenland's name. Let's just say that the vikings were not a lot different than realtors when it comes to naming things. Greenland = "nice starter home". Conversely, Iceland was named to discourage people from discovering it is one of the geothermal wonders of our planet.

 

[Joshua Nall]

Actually Josh to assert dogmatically there is "no way" to know the truth is begging the question and antithetical to the scientific method. A true skeptic demands evidence, and there's evidence galore, but as usual too many people seem to think they know better than the climatologists, those studying glaciers, etc.

There is evidence galore that the earth is currently warming most definitely, and has been since at least the last 150 years. But I guess I'm failing to get my point across... whoopteedo, the earth is warming.... the earth warms, the earth cools, the sun has cycles, the earth's temperature follows these cycles, what's new? None of this matters unless someone can tell me what the temperature of the earth should be right now. This whole argument is based on a premise.... that the earth is hotter at present, than it would naturally be in the absence of human activity. It's a premise that can't be proven.

Yet there is no mention of these things from the experts "on TV". No... rather its always: The earth is getting hotter and we are causing it and we are all going to die if we do not drastically change our lifestyles. Something else they don't mention is that as the suns activity increases and the earth warms, C02 levels also increase. More C02 is given off by plants and the oceans, therefore, rising C02 levels are a result of a warming earth. Rising C02 levels are not solely do to human activity. But you won't hear that cause it does not fit the religious doctrine.

Greenland was green back around 1100, at least a larger portion of it, then the little ice age happened. Greenland has it's cycles, just like the earth has it's cycles, just like the sun has it's cycles.

 

[Jason Harris]

Not the solar canard again. No, it's not the sun--evidence is contrary. There is "less direct sunlight" on the Arctic. I guess some people must just tune this data out. Here are two reminders from 2009:

The Arctic is warmer than it's been in 2,000 years, according to a new study, even though it should be cooling because of changes in the Earth's orbit that cause the region to get less direct sunlight. Indeed, the Arctic had been cooling for nearly two millennia before reversing course in the last century and starting to warm as human activities added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

"If it hadn't been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century," said Bette Otto-Bliesner, a National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist and co-author of the study on Arctic temperatures that was being published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

from:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32675876/ns/us_news-environment/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32675876/ns/us_news-environment/

and:

April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.

2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.

Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).

It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

from:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm

 

[Robert Dewey]

In terms of AGW, I thought "reliable" data goes back to ~650,000 years (extracted from ice cores)? That's only 0.001% of the age of Earth. How are we able to attribute recent increase in CO2 to humans specifically? What instrumentation is being used to measure this increase, and what is the spatial / temporal resolution of the data? How is the data being gathered? How is the possible human-caused C02 increase differentiated from possible natural causes?

Anybody can look at a chart - I'd like to see where the data came from and how it was collected.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

In terms of AGW, I thought "reliable" data goes back to ~650,000 years (extracted from ice cores)? That's only 0.001% of the age of Earth. How are we able to attribute recent increase in CO2 to humans specifically? What instrumentation is being used to measure this increase, and what is the spatial / temporal resolution of the data? How is the data being gathered? How is the possible human-caused C02 increase differentiated from possible natural causes?

Robert,

I suggest looking through some of the Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Working Group 1) from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. You can quickly glance through the ~90 page Technical Summary (which highlights the "robust findings" and "key uncertainties" in various facets of global climate change), but there is a lot more detail included in the individual chapters. For example, Chapter 6: Paleoclimate may specifically answer some of your questions asked above. I can almost assure you that all of your questions can be answered in these WG1 documents; there are many hundreds of pages discussing past research and current understanding available for all to view.

Unfortunately, some folks probably won't look at these documents solely because they are from the UN IPCC, but the science is outlined rather nicely in there. Note that, as long as you stay in the WG1 area, you'll stay in the science and out of the majority of the policy recommendations, mitigation possibilities, etc. Honestly, I didn't read as much into the science as I should have up until about a year ago (as I'm not terribly interested in climate change), when I forced myself to read a lot of the WG1 work in preparation for a undergrad, non-major met class I taught last fall. However, there's a tremendous amount of data in there, and it helped me answer a slew of questions that I had as well.

 

[David Wolfson]

This is a handy link for many questions about atmospheric gases and their measurement: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

There's plenty of information out there about how the global CO2 budget is calculated and monitored. Ground truth agrees pretty well with calculated concentrations accounting for anthropogenic GG emission. Very telling, I think, is the fact that Southern Hemislphere CO2 lags the Northern Hemisphere by an amount expected by the relative production of the hemispheres and cross-equator mixing.

Also, atmospheric CO2 produced from fossil fuels has markedly different carbon isotope constituents from other natural sources and is, from what I read, rather easy to distinguish.

 

[Robert Dewey]

Thanks guys, I'm going to check those out in a bit.

 

[Robert Edmonds]

In terms of AGW, I thought "reliable" data goes back to ~650,000 years (extracted from ice cores)? That's only 0.001% of the age of Earth.

Your right, ice cores only give us a small picture of earth's atmospheric history, but you know what's even scarier?

Earth's surface temperature and atmospheric composition has changed significantly over it's 4 billion years, as determined from other geologic sources.

If you think this means that this is an argument that we can add gases to our atmosphere without worrying about the consequences, you're sorely mistaken.

For greater than 3 billion of those 4 billion years, it's likely you would have died within minutes of visiting earth's ancient atmosphere. Why? Little to no oxygen for you to breathe.

I think this should be a warning about how sensitive our atmosphere is. There is no atmospheric composition that was designed to be just right for us. There's either an atmosphere that's habitable, or one that will likely try to remove us from Earth's surface.

 

[Clarence Bennett]

Your right, ice cores only give us a small picture of earth's atmospheric history, but you know what's even scarier?

Earth's surface temperature and atmospheric composition has changed significantly over it's 4 billion years, as determined from other geologic sources.

If you think this means that this is an argument that we can add gases to our atmosphere without worrying about the consequences, you're sorely mistaken.

For greater than 3 billion of those 4 billion years, it's likely you would have died within minutes of visiting earth's ancient atmosphere. Why? Little to no oxygen for you to breathe.

I think this should be a warning about how sensitive our atmosphere is. There is no atmospheric composition that was designed to be just right for us. There's either an atmosphere that's habitable, or one that will likely try to remove us from Earth's surface.

What happens if you consider the earth's age to be only roughly 6,000 years old? Does it make it even more ominous or no?

 

[Joshua Nall]

Does anyone really believe that NASA does not fudge numbers? Is the IPCC going to publish data that would lead to questions about the need for it's existence? Has anyone looked into the cow problem? I mean seems to me that is much more serious than CO2 emissions. Let's ban cows, haha.

This article, about NASA from the journal "Science" May 2008:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/

Here is the concluding paragraph: "Bottom Line.....Both of the satellite data sources, as well as Had-Crut, show worldwide temperatures falling below the IPCC estimates. Satellite data shows temperatures near or below the 30 year average - but NASA data has somehow managed to stay on track towards climate Armageddon. You can draw your own conclusions, but I see a pattern that is troublesome. In science, as with any other endeavor, it is always a good idea to have some separation between the people generating the data and the people interpreting it."

The mentioned article goes into detail about how NASA has been fudging numbers and that looking at other global temperature monitoring systems, it appears the earth has been cooling in recent years. I'm just a skeptic I guess, but I have a hard time excepting conclusions drawn by folks who's career and lively hood depend on what sort of conclusions they come to.... I mean come on! And there are plenty of other truth finding endeavors, studies, articles out there...

How many organizations that have anything to do with the study of climate change, do you think would come out and say, "anthropogenic global warming is no big deal".... even if the numbers pointed to that?

Maybe we need a federal agency who's sole purpose is to expose bias in federal agencies, and organizations that receive grant money. lol

 

[Jeff Snyder]

How many organizations that have anything to do with the study of climate change, do you think would come out and say, "anthropogenic global warming is no big deal".... even if the numbers pointed to that?

Maybe we need a federal agency who's sole purpose is to expose bias in federal agencies, and organizations that receive grant money. lol

How many political action organizations? Probably very, very few. How many legitimate, honest scientific organizations? Most, hopefully. If I want to know how to treat cancer in my body, do I seek the expertise of an oncologist, a librarian, or an auto mechanic? If I need to redo some of the plumbing in my house, do I contact a plumber or a psychologist? Of course, those who are often most familiar with a given problem or industry also tend to be those who have the 'most to gain' in their answers to related problems or inquiries. At some point, you have to assume that the experts, on the whole, are honest folks who work with dignity.

I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of the research and data to say for sure that global warming is occurring with 100% certainty. However, the data support global climate change (including global warming, but also including precipitation pattern changes, sea level changes, polar ice coverage changes, glacier changes, etc) considerably more than the alternative. As lot much of science, we can't say, with 100% certainty, that it is occurring, obviously. However, we CAN look at the data, and assign what's probably a "most likely" observation. Sure, global warming may be forced entirely by natural processes, but, on the whole, what we have no supports at least some anthropogenic influences. However, it seems that you are suggesting that even "global warming" may not be occurring, much less whether humans are having any impact on its occurrence. Remember we are talking about extracting a signal from the noise; I don't think anyone is saying that we won't have record cold, or that next year must be hotter than this year. On the scale of GLOBAL (worldwide) CLIMATE (multi-year and longer) change, the mean signal has been for warming temperatures, rising sea levels, and decreasing arctic ice coverage.

Josh, I think it's worthwhile to sit down and at least read the Technical Summary that I linked to in a previous post. There are a lot more observations than just satellite temp obs that provide evidence of global climate change, including sea level gauge observations, automated and "manual" surface observations, etc.

As with many parts of life, it is prudent to be skeptical. Heck, good scientists are skeptics by their very nature, since skepticism can help one investigate all facets of a particular scientific problem much more thoroughly than would occur if everyone accepted an idea as "truth". Of course, scientists are humans too, and scientific pride can blind some people to observations that are contrary to their previously-held positions. I'm not suggesting that there isn't a motivation to obscure the truth, but I think most of the data support the current stance of the AMS, NOAA, and many other meteorological and climate organizations.

 

[Dave Gallaher]

Maybe we need a federal agency who's sole purpose is to expose bias in federal agencies, and organizations that receive grant money. lol

Once upon a time, we had journalism to take care of this issue.