The dust-bowl years? So what is happening to the climate now is ok, right?

Does this mean that Sarah Palin is automatically President and 0bama has to go sit in a naval base off the coast of Greenland?

Interesting. I'm curious what the significance is between whether the glacier is land based or one that spills into the ocean. I was taught the water cycle made that sort of observation irrelevant.

Is there now more than 3/4 of the planet covered in water?

Sgygus: The dust-bowl years? So what is happening to the climate now is ok, right?

Right.

where's your unprecedence now?

Sgygus: The dust-bowl years? So what is happening to the climate now is ok, right?

I was going to say the 'coal age,' but your answer is good too

You know who else was drastic in the 1930's and caused a drastic retreat in 1940?

0Icky0: You know who else was drastic in the 1930's and caused a drastic retreat in 1940?

Hemlines.

Party Boy: Hemlines.

Heinrich Hemlines.

0Icky0: Party Boy: Hemlines.

Heinrich Hemlines.

Yep. did nazi that one coming.

But only French glaciers.

0Icky0: You know who else was drastic in the 1930's and caused a drastic retreat in 1940?

If you've never read "Mien Crampons", you've never read good technical ice climbing.

AGW THREAD!!!

Release the denier trolls!

I counter every peer-reviewed study of climate change with a flippant mention of an isolated correlation event with no evidence of causation! So there!

Looks like these old photographs have finally solved Greenland's biggest.... *puts on sunglasses* cold case.

YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

I expect the science experts at WND to pounce on this and explain to me what it means - since the person who wrote the article didn't bother to.

Nice job submittard! Everyone knows that it is presently as bad as it has EVER been, on every front, in every way measurable, or even imaginable. To suggest that things right now are anything less than complete and total OH NOEZ!!! PANIC!!!! is tantamount to being a flat-earther.

Go burn a Galileo in effigy as penance.

SevenizGud: Nice job submittard! Everyone knows that it is presently as bad as it has EVER been, on every front, in every way measurable, or even imaginable. To suggest that things right now are anything less than complete and total OH NOEZ!!! PANIC!!!! is tantamount to being a flat-earther.

Go burn a Galileo in effigy as penance.

Everyone?

Wha? You mean that 80 years ago the climate was warming just like it is now?
You mean that after 70 years of burning fossil fuels the effect was the same as it is now, 150 years later?
This simply does not hew to the party line on global warming and will not be allowed to be expressed without ad hom attacks, discrediting, mockery, and derision. Because that's how the AGWers roll.

/Because PEER REVIEW!
//Insert IRREFUTABLE rhetorical devices now!
///Quickly, quickly! Deploy the philosophers and career toadies!

CitizenTed: I counter every peer-reviewed study of climate change with a flippant mention of an isolated correlation event with no evidence of causation! So there!

Causation: 20,000 years ago, there was six thousand feet if ice above what is now Albany, New York. That was called the Laurentide Ice Sheet. For celestial and other reasons, the climate began to warm. It's still warming. The ice began to melt. That meltwater caused the sea levels to rise, creating the Chesapeake Bay and closing the Bering Strait land bridge, among other familiar landforms and features. The continental shelves were beachfront property until this melting took place. Seal levels have risen roughly 450 feet in the past 20,000 years. This interglacial warming continues and the sea levels continue to rise. Global warming is real and humans did not cause it.

/How do you like them causalities?
//There's nothing worse than watching otherwise sane academicians become deranged when you question their very reason for existing.
///So let's all run screaming in circles waving our hands in the air like our hair is on fire and pretend our exercise in extracting sunshine from cucumbers is relevant and try to convince everyone to give us more money to solve the nonexistent problem.
////If you AGWers lost me, there's no way you can convince the plutocrats, politicians, and muppets. Sorry guys. You lose.

Huck And Molly Ziegler: I expect the science experts at WND to pounce on this and explain to me what it means - since the person who wrote the article didn't bother to.

TFA only reported the discovery of the photos and some of what's been noted about them so far. It's not their job to interpret the meaning of them.

What you're suggesting is actually a huge problem in modern pop journalism, the habit of non-experts speculating on what something means that they're not themselves qualified to speculate on. It helps sell, but it's a stupid thing to do, and it only works because it appeals to large number of people, and a large number of people happen to be stupid. Nature deserves some credit for resisting that. I'm sure it's not good for their sales, but it's very good for their integrity.

Bob Dolemite: Interesting. I'm curious what the significance is between whether the glacier is land based or one that spills into the ocean. I was taught the water cycle made that sort of observation irrelevant.

Is there now more than 3/4 of the planet covered in water?

The cause of the melting is different : if the glacier spills, a warming sea will melt it. But if land-ending glaciers melt, it's due to warmer air or lower snowfalls (the glacier is melting at its normal pace, but it doesn't get refilled as much as it used to).

As oceans have more thermal inertia, if only land-ending glaciers melt, then it can be due to a temporary weather condition, while warming of the seas shows a longer term climate shift.

/just my guess

I'm still waiting for global climate change to destroy the earth. Any minute now right? Humans are just seconds from destroying the earth. Someone post the hockey stick. Go ahead. Let's see it again. I dare you.

HotIgneous Intruder: Seal levels have risen roughly 450 feet in the past 20,000 years.

Farking seals?!?! I knew it!! The Canadians were right all along, we need to club the shiat out of those bastards!

It's called 'planetary cycle'. Humans just have not been around long enough or never 'recorded' these cycles before.

Blame God for limiting our life-span.

ferretman: [www.youdontsay.org image 600x462]

It's called 'planetary cycle'. Humans just have not been around long enough or never 'recorded' these cycles before.

Blame God for limiting our life-span.

Yeah, let's see the last 100 years.

machoprogrammer: Yeah, let's see the last 100 years.

Was that wrong? Should I not have cut that important part off? I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to plead ignorance on this thing, because if I had known that sort of thing was frowned upon...

Greenland's glacier history: Ice retreat was as drastic in the 1930s as it is today

That's obscuring more than elucidating.

The 1930s were a period of warming for Greenland and some other parts of the world (e.g. the American midwest).



This is a plot of temperature anomalies relative to a 1951-1980 baseline. As you can see, it was warmer than the 1951-1980 reference period in Greenland and other places (e.g. the American midwest), though globally it was slightly cooler. Today, it's warmer almost everywhere, although the warming in the part of Greenland studied is not that much higher.

While there are similarities in the melt rate on Greenland during the 30s vs. the present, there are significant differences:



The rapid retreat in glaciers during the 30s in Greenland was more significant in land-terminating glaciers. Today's warming is more significant in marine-terminating glaciers. That's worse in terms of sea level rise in the present.

During the 30s there were many glaciers showing significant advance. Today, there are far fewer.

The overall distance of retreat was less during the 30s than today.

And of course, we're driving the warming of the present, and unless we stabilize GHG emissions, the present melt is going to continue to worsen.

I suggest anyone interested in the issue read the paper itself:

Bjørk, A. A., K. H. Kjær, N. J. Korsgaard, S. A. Khan, K. K. Kjeldsen, C. S. Andresen, J. E. Box, N. K. Larsen, and S. Funder (2012), An aerial view of 80 years of climate-related glacier fluctuations in southeast Greenland, Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/ngeo1481.

HotIgneous Intruder: Wha? You mean that 80 years ago the climate was warming just like it is now?

No, not really.

You mean that after 70 years of burning fossil fuels the effect was the same as it is now, 150 years later?

No, not really.

This simply does not hew to the party line on global warming

It simply does not bear any resemblance to objective reality, and is easily refuted by looking at the actual evidence.

and will not be allowed to be expressed without ad hom attacks, discrediting, mockery, and derision.

Or, you know, a dispassionate explanation of the facts. Whichever.

HotIgneous Intruder: Causation: 20,000 years ago...

This interglacial warming continues and the sea levels continue to rise.

This is simply untrue, and has been pointed out to you repeatedly. Sea level rise associated with melting out of the LGM effectively ended millennia ago.



Yes, orbitally-driven climatic change melted us out of the previous glacial maximum, but that doesn't mean that we've been getting increasingly warmer since then.

The relative maximum warming came ~9-6 kya (there is significant spatial variability in the exact timing)[1]. We had been cooling, especially in the Northern Hemisphere high latitude summertime, since- as two of the three drivers of orbital forcing are in the direction of cooling[2]. This longterm cooling overtaken sharply by modern warming can be seen in Arctic lake sediments[3]:



Global warming is real and humans did not cause it.

This is flatly false. The warming of the last several decades is more than 100% attributable to anthropogenic GHGs[4][5]. Natural forcings over that period have been essentially a wash- solar, volcanic eruptions, changes in stratospheric water vapor, etc. have had a net impact of almost zero over that period. Long-lived GHGs (mainly CO2, also CH4, NO2, some HCFCs) and other anthro forcings like black carbon, etc. are a net large positive forcing. Direct and indirect effects from anthropogenic aerosols have canceled out some of the warming we would otherwise be seeing.





This increase in radiative forcing has resulted in an energy imbalance. In response, the planet will warm until it reaches a higher equilibrium. As long as we keep the planetary energy budget out of balance, we will be driving further warming.



[1] Renssen, H., H. Sepp|[auml]|, O. Heiri, D. M. Roche, H. Goosse, and T. Fichefet (2009), The spatial and temporal complexity of the Holocene thermal maximum, Nature Geoscience, 2(6), 411-414, doi:10.1038/ngeo513.
[2] Berger, A., and M. F. Loutre (1991), Insolation values for the climate of the last 10 million years, Quaternary Science Reviews, 10(4), 297-317, doi:10.1016/0277-3791(91)90033-Q.
[3] Kaufman, D. S., D. P. Schneider, N. P. McKay, C. M. Ammann, R. S. Bradley, K. R. Briffa, G. H. Miller, B. L. Otto-Bliesner, J. T. Overpeck, and B. M. Vinther (2009), Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling, Science, 325(5945), 1236-1239, doi:10.1126/science.1173983.
[4] Lean, J. L., and D. H. Rind (2008), How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, 6 PP., doi:200810.1029/2008GL034864.
[5] Huber, M., and R. Knutti (2011), Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth's energy balance, Nature Geoscience, 5(1), 31-36, doi:10.1038/ngeo1327.

Carbon dioxide is so powerful that the planet warms after its level rises.
Oh, wait. I have that backwards.

WelldeadLink: Carbon dioxide is so powerful that the planet warms after its level rises.
Oh, wait. I have that backwards.

You've certainly tricked yourself into believing that short term variability associated with ENSO, volcanism, seasonality, etc. somehow invalidate the physics of the greenhouse effect.

When you deliberately remove long term trends, all you will be left with is short term variance. If you'd care to explain why you think that CO2 should be driving temperature variability on annual timescales rather than such temperature variability changing the amount of CO2 uptaken by natural sinks, I would be glad to help you see where you're going wrong.

I am touched by the extensive efforts to educate demonstrated here. Global warming crusaders, I tip my hat to you.



/TL/DR