One Blue Marble Blog

Another inactivist talking point has been annihilated, hopefully for the last time. Global warming skeptics like to claim that most glaciers are advancing, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.*

This story in The Guardian shows how frighteningly wrong they are.

Most of the world’s glaciers will disappear by 2050 — or well before — with horrible consequences for the planet, according to the director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS). Professor Wilfried Haeberli says the current mass of the world’s glaciers is at the lowest level seen in more than 5,000 years, and adds that further warming will lead to massive rock slides and leave more than 2 billion people in the world’s poorest regions without enough water to ensure their survival. It will also lead to rising sea levels that are far greater than even the most dire IPCC projections.

The WGMS, supported by the UN agencies and many scientific bodies, collects annual data for up to 100 glaciers around the world, including 30 reference glaciers in nine different mountain ranges on four continents. And while last year’s melt was less than occurred in 2005-06 — because of slight cooling conditions encouraged by La Niña — it was still the third worst ever recorded. With more dramatic warming expected over the next few years, the glaciers will simply “disintegrate.”

“The general trend to increased loss rates is continuing,” Haeberli said. “The year was a little bit less terrible than [the previous] year … but still a very heavy loss. It’s still two times the average loss rate of the 20th century.”

“Last year the UN environment program and the WGMS jointly published data for 1,800 glaciers on all seven continents, which warned losses had been accelerating globally since the mid-1980s, so that the annual average decline for 1996-2005 was double that of the previous decade, and four times that of the decade before. The glaciers that are melting on the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau feed all the main river systems in Asia, depended on by the estimated 40% of the world’s population.”

Retreat at Whitechuck Glacier

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* In cold winters, like the one we’re currently enjoying in North America, glaciers often regain a tiny fraction of the ice they lose over the summer. So many inactivists argue that the glaciers are advancing, and they would have you believe this means that global warming is a hoax. If the stakes weren’t so high, such naivete would almost be funny.