by Robert Felix
Mar 8, 2010
from
IceageNow Website
"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 Washington State:
-
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
Icy Bay, 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 Nils-Axel Mörner Radio Interview
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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