re: #479 Unakite

re: #463 lostlakehiker

Nicely reasoned essay. I would add that glaciers are naturally occurring averagers of temperatures. Their near-universal retreat says something.

Damn Kissy-fest. What the hell is an “averager” of temperature, and what the hell does the “near-universal retreat” of glaciers mean? If they’re retreating now, it means they had to advance at some time in the past. Global Cooling? Guess what! The natural cycles of the earth’s climate occur in periods far longer than one or two generations…oh, f*ck it.

The claim has been raised that we cannot discern any real evidence that it’s warmer now than it was a century ago, because the thermometers cannot be trusted or their placement cannot be trusted. Russian meteorological stations go off the air, cities grow up around stations, that sort of thing.

Well, a glacier is a naturally occurring thermometer that gives you not day by day readings, but decade by decade readings of the average temperature over the past decade. A glacier, through accumulating snow in winter, and losing it in hot summers and not so much losing it in cool summers, retreats or advances. It’s just like a thermometer in which a column of mercury advances or retreats, except that it gives you an average temperature over a span of time. And the beauty of using glaciers as thermometers is that you can’t argue that scientists made a mistake and put the glacier in an urban heat island, you can’t argue that the glacier is broken, and you can’t argue that the scientists is lying about what his glacier “reads”. The glacier is there for all to see, and we have documented records, with photos, of how it used to look.

Nowadays, and throughout the 20th century, glaciers are nearly all in retreat. Here and there, one runs into a glacier that bucks the trend, but the trend is there. It’s nearly universal. Very few exceptions. Got it?