Total meltdown!
The UN warned today that the world’s glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. Immediate action is needed to prevent ”millions if not billions of people” to suffer from acute water shortage. Something that would affect not only the availability of drinking water, but also agriculture, industry and power generation.
The culprit is of course the usual suspect - global warming – according to data from the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. WGMS gets its data from nearly 30 glaciers in nine mountain ranges. In 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 the average melting rate more than doubled.
“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,” said Wilfried Haeberli, director of WGMS.
The only problem is that the majority of the glaciers included in the so-called Glacier Mass Balance Bulletin (GMBB) are found in Europe. In the 2002-2003 report (the latest available on the WGMS website), data from 85 glaciers are presented. 49 of those are located in Europe. Now how is that for a bias?
We do know that the “global” warming is generally only perceptible in the northern hemisphere and mostly in Europe. So Mr Haeberli, who are you trying to fool?
Read more about this in The Guardian or at AFP.
3 comments
Dr. Lonnie Thompson ( http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/vitae/lgt_cv.pdf ) reported on Southern Hemisphere glacier sublimation in the Andes at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA) last year. He told of carbon dating a plant uncovered by the sublimation retreat of the glacier. The plant dated to about 5200 years ago which is the same date as “OTZI,” the frozen man uncovered in the Alps, and other recently uncovered Alpine artifacts. Dr. Thompson took his carbon dating evidence to mean our present global warming is man-made, very dangerous, and must be stopped. However, the lesson I took from the evidence is that the earth, without benefit of fossil fuel combustion, was made just as warm or warmer 5200 years ago as it is today totally by natural processes.
Anybody ever hear of a reservior?
2 things are also interesting: one is that the analysis is only based on nearly 30 glaciers (what is nearly 29, 28, 27,…) over a total of 85. Why not on the 85 glaciers?
second is that it is estimate that there are more than 100,000 (Alaska alone is claiming to have tens of thousands of them) glaciers in the world, so what does a study, even without geographical bias, over nearly 30 glaciers represent? nothing. it is insignificant and statistically cant show anything…. but hey all the media around the world is mentioning it and we have all to fill culprit of this, nearly as if glaciers were alive.
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