1. The host of it is an avowed ‘we’re headed for an ice age’. Question is when. Unless we’re at a cusp of history unknown for millions of years, there’s another one coming. It’s just when.
2. I’ve submitted some stuff to him for information and it’s clear that it’s edited with a global cooling aim in mind. Comment not judgement.
3. However: his theories are that ocean warming leads to increased precipitation as snow, leads to global cooling. Most of the time, that’s probably balances out over a century or so. His view, I think, is that occasionally epochal snowstorms+cold summers drive us into an ice age. He may be right, he may be wrong.
4. I’ve yet to find a single really neutral site on the web to discuss AGW. You’re either for or against. Nowhere is an interlinked climatic system discussed in terms of tangibles (changed weather patterns in US lead to changed weather patterns in Europe 1 week later etc etc). Nowhere are say 50 globally diverse sites monitored on an ongoing basis to determine a true picture of how glaciers are evolving. None that I’ve found anyway available to the public.
5. I neither agree with everything found on iceagenow.com nor do I agree with AGW.
6. In fact, I am currently of the opinion that oceanic modulation of the effects of multiple solar cycles on an interdecadal scale, allied to lunar influences probably has most effect, however carbon dioxide may also contribute. Not very popular, but it may be evidentially stronger than AGW…..
7. Glacier growth/retreat is a lagging indicator of climate – with a varying lag phase for different glaciers. It’s happened before and it will happen again. The world won’t die because of it.
8. Mount St Helens DOES have glaciers. Probably the most likely reason for current growth is that the eruption in the late 1970s wiped out ALL the glaciers in the crater, so to grow them again was probably pretty easy. Sooner or later it’ll return to steady state…..
9. Growth of glaciers requires:
a. Heavy late summer, autumn and winter snowfalls.
b. Regular mild freeze-thaw conditions to solidify the snow masses.
c. Cool summers with regular snowfall to prevent ice melt.

That happened in Alaska 2007/08. There’s been 275 inches of snow already at Alyeska by December 10th this year, so maybe it’ll happen again in 2008/09. Probably to do with PDO phase shift, since Alaska is very sensitive to that.

I think you’ll find similar things have happened in Europe 2007/08 too. Maybe less pronounced. But with 3m of snow already at 2500m in mid December, short of an unseasonable warm spell, this winter is shaping up similar to last.

I’d put a 50 year moratorium on CONCLUSIONS and a 50 year effort into DATA COLLECTION if I were you lot……..

RJ

The Swiss say this about Silvretta. If you think it’s advancing, contrary to what they say, you should tell them their website is incorrect. There’s a contact email on the website, and from past experience, they’re pretty responsive. The Swiss of course care about their glaciers and have numerous reasons to wish them to stay about where they are [water, hydropower, tourism] or even advance a bit.

That Swiss website is one of the best around, as it has fairly complete data, not even interrupted by WW I and II, and you can look at the detailed records for each glacier, and see:

a) That nearby glaciers can be going in opposite directions in the same year, as local configurations do matter.

b) That on any date, if you cherry-pick, you can find at least one glacier going the opposite direction from the majority.

The only way to assess the general trends in Swtizerland is to look at *all* the data, without cherry-picking ones that support what you believe. Here’s a good, simple data analysis exercise, from a graph created by people who *really* want their glaciers to be around in 2100:

1) Print Glacier length variation page, which runs from 1880 to 2007.

2) The second figure shows the percent of glaciers retreating (red), stationary (green), retreating (blue)
Suppose we draw a line through the middle of the green bars, i.e., splitting those in half, saying:
retreat = red + .5* green
advance = blue + .5*green

3) Draw a second line at 50%. If the first line is above that, more glaciers are advancing than retreating.
From 1880 to 2007, that is true for 11 years, i.e., about 9% of the years
1916, 1918, 1919, 1920
1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1985

For the other 91% of the years, more Swiss glaciers retreated than advanced.

4) This of course understates the degree of retreat of Swiss glaciers. If one takes the mean of “advance” as defined above, by eyeball, it looks like 20-25% average, i.e., most of the chart is red. I.e., most of the time, most of the glaciers are retreating, with occasional periods when slightly more glaciers advance than retreat.

Of course, in 2007, one glacier (Tseudat) advanced, so if someone wants to believe Swiss glaciers advanced in 2007, that’s the one to cite.

On the other hand, Silvretta has been shrinking regularly since ~1985.

5) Of course, none of this proves anything about glaciers anywhere else, but it is one of the most coherent and complete datasets, and is harder to cherry-pick than most.

/ Turing word “Alan Turing”

Since I’ve been sifting through the net for all things glacial, I noticed that mountaineers appear to give the most up-to-date information. They give directions for the easier routes up the mountain, what kind of ice is up there, how much crevassing, if crevasses are hidden or exposed, snowlevels and accumulations, how much snow survived the summer, where avalanches are occuring, lots of good stuff.

They are actually interfacing with the test subject, which brings up a quantum mechanic type question.

The climbers seem to prefer climbing ice features. Their crampons, boot spikes, ice axes, practically all of their equipment is designed for diggin in footholds, drilling in spikes, carving out handholds, inducing avalanches (for safety reasons) and basicly doing violence to remote ice fields which in bygone days would have seen nothing more menacing then a mountain goat’s hoof.

Quantum theory says that the observer will always change the system.
I wonder how much of modern glacial retreat is a reaction to the observer?

I studied electronics engineering 30 years ago, and it had a lot to do with quantum theory. Semiconductor devices couldn’t work without it.

It was nicer for me back in the days when I accepted atomic theory as it came. You know, the nucleus packed with neutrons and protons with electrons orbiting them in discrete energy bands. That theory has served me well in my practice of electronics but it makes little sense overall.

More than 20 years ago, when I studied electrical engineering for a couple of years, no one spoke about quantum theory. It was not mentioned in text books nor was it very well known. Suddenly we are inundated with this theory, with it’s spins and probabilities. I was reading the other day that the notion of spin was introduced to account for certain things that did not make sense, so they fudged the science a bit to introduce it. Where have I heard that before? It seems no one knows if electrons and protons really spin, nor does it matter.

What we have here, as far as I’m concerned, is mathematicians adjusting equations to make sense of reality. In fact, that’s what the theoretical physicist David Bohm suggested about quantum mechanics, and he was an expert in the field. He portrayed QM and Newtonian mechanics as having traveled parallel paths with both of them having reached the ends of those paths. He put that down to a lack of understanding of what was actually happening, blaming part of it on the introduction of artificial parameters such as time.

I just hope that in my lifetime, they discover what an electron or proton actually is. I’m deeply curious and dissatisfied with the current theories. I would also like to see scientists getting back to being observational scientists rather than ego-trippers, politicians and overall jerks.

Glaciers growing all over the world. Yet another official report in, this time from the NorwegianWater Resources and Energy Directorate, (NVE).
http://www.dailytech.com/Glaciers+in+Norway+Growing+Again/article13540.htm

There are literally thousands of glaciers worldwide and less than 10% have been studied, even less on a “climatic” timescale. Making predictions on singular studies on one or two particular glaciers in tropical Peru or Africa are irrelevant to the big picture, which the IPCC “assures” us it is looking at. The facts are they have continued to uses selective data from questionable sources over increasingly shorter climatic time frames because the “big picture” continually thwarts their best efforts to conjure up “Day After Tomorrow” scenarios.

For those interested in a bigger picture I suggest you GOOGLE Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski, an internationally recognised Glaciologist. He has studied glaciers over a long period of time throughout the world and has some interesting insights into the “real” situation concerning not only glacier movements but also how the analysis of gas bubble readings within them has been grossly abused to fit preconceived ideas on CO2 levels in the past.

Droll – :-)

It’s the start of the wet season here in Halls Creek, WA, and the changing weather is truly amazing visually. Usually you are focussed on what job you might be involved in and take little notice of what is happening in the sky – the thunderstorm cloud formations are spectacular and take quite unexpected forms. This leads to the next question of what might be producing these unusual cloud morphologies.

I might take the AGW stance and lump it together as due to GLOBAL WARMING, or if you are an idiot, climate change. Personally these cloud formations share many similarities to the unusual astronomical pictures which the mainstream are puzzled with. From the electric plasma POV, not so puzzling.

Harking to my original post, IF the earth’s rotation is powered by a Faraday motor, then surely we should be able to come up with some way of tapping into this energy source?

It’s the equivalent of your indigent next-door neighbor surreptitiously wiring his home into your utility provided electricity.

I would have thought that this idea would appeal to the Lukes, NTs, SJTs, and other Barry Brook boofheads reading this – free energy without actually needing to create it.

If you need a reason why I think along this line, put it down to field experience with proton precession magnetometers that rely on spinning protons to precess to the orientation of the geomagnetic field at a location; my interest started from wondering why protons spin in the first place.

Enough – I think I might have overloaded SJT, Luke and NT past their limits.

I’ve noticed that too, Louis. If you put water in an electric kettle, you can make coffee with it. :-) BTW…I was reading a text book on the Sun. It’s amazing how many free electrons are spat out by Old Sol, and swarm past Earth. What we should do is stick up arrays of conductors and see if we can pick up some induced current to run our power projects.

In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable.” Doctor Braithwaite’s unequivocal conclusion:

“There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”

“By some estimates, 160,000 glaciers exist on Earth. Only 63,000 have been inventoried, and only a few hundred have been studied in the detail described by Braithwaite” (”It Would Be Nice to Know More about Ice,” Jay Lehr).

On the basis of the fallacy of insufficient evidence, all glacier fears are stopped cold right there.

But in fact that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Keith Echelmeyer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, says this:

“To make a case that glaciers are retreating, and that the problem is global warming, is very hard to do… The physics are very complex. There is much more involved than just the climate response.”

Mr. Echelmeyer goes on to tell us that in Alaska there are large glaciers advancing in the very same areas where others are retreating.

Quoting Doctor Martin Beniston, of the Institute of Geography at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland:

“Numerous climatological details of mountains are overlooked by the climate models, which thus makes it difficult to estimate the exact response of glaciers to global warming, because glacier dynamics are influenced by numerous factors other than climate, even though temperature and cloudiness may be the dominant controlling factors. According to the size, exposure and altitude of glaciers, different response times can be expected for the same climatic forcing.”

Of course, as Doctor Beniston intimates, the paramount thing to consider in any discussion of glacial melt is the sheer size of these suckers, which because of their size do not respond to heat and cold like the snow in your backyard. According to the excellent glacier program at Rice University, those response times run something like this:

Ice sheet: 100,000 to 10,000 years

Large valley glacier: 10,000 to 1,000 years

Small valley glacier: 1,000 to 100 years

“Glaciers are influenced by a variety of local and regional natural phenomena that scientists do not fully comprehend. Besides temperature changes, glaciers also respond to changes in the amount and type of precipitation, changes in sea level and changes in ocean circulation patterns. As a result, glaciers do not necessarily advance during colder weather and retreat during warmer weather” (John Carlisle, National Center for Public Policy).

“Glaciers are in world-wide retreat” — read one New York Times headline recently.

Well, they were anyway, starting decades before industrialization (i.e. increased CO2 output). As IPCC AR4 reports:

“Most mountain glaciers and ice caps have been shrinking, with the retreat probably having started about 1850 [NB: the end of the 'little ice age']. Although many Northern Hemisphere glaciers had a few years of near balance around 1970, this was followed by increased shrinkage.”

Research published by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the much-touted Peruvian glacier (on p. 53-53) disappeared a few thousand years ago.

There are, moreover, glaciers forming across the globe, in both hemispheres. Here’s a very partial list:

In Norway: Alfotbreen Glacier, Briksdalsbreen Glacier, Nigardsbreen Glacier, Hardangerjøkulen Glacier, Hansebreen Glacier, Jostefonn Glacier, Engabreen Glacier, Helm Glacier, Place Glacier. Indeed, a great number of Scandinavia’s glaciers are exploding.

In France, the Mount Blanc Glacier.

In Ecuador, Antizana 15 Alpha Glacier.

In Argentine, Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest in all of Patagonia, was recently observed to be advancing at about 6 feet per day.

Chile’s Pio XI Glacier, the largest in the southern hemisphere, is also growing.

In Switzerland, Silvretta Glacier.

In Kirghiztan, Abramov Glacier.

In Russian, Malli Glacier is growing and surging.

In New Zealand, as of 2003, all 48 glaciers in the Southern Alps were observed to have grown.

In the United States: Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Shuksan, Mount Shasta, Mount McKinley, Mount Hubbard, and Rocky Mountain National Park have all shown recent glacier growth.

There’s also this article from the Associated Press, which I quote only in part:

Geologists exploring Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Park say that they
discovered more than 100 additional glaciers here in a single summer,
said Mark Verrengia.

“We’re not running quite in sync with global warming here,” park
spokeswoman Judy Visty said.

Not, of course, that it really matters much either way, since the entire climate change issue is predicated upon a stupendously fraudulent premise: specifically, a corrupt epistemology.

To say nothing of the fact that, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, the free market is far better equipped to deal with environmental issues than the proposed “interventionist” (i.e. socialist) policies — for the simple reason that free markets generate astronomically more capital with which to deal with such issues.

The wealthier the country, the cleaner the country.