In Sign of Warming, 1,600 Years of Ice in Andes Melted in 25 Years

Anthropogenic global warming is rapidly melting most of the world's mountain glaciers. This threatens the water supplies for billions of people and also threatens the irrigation water supplies for large agricultural regions. The loss of these mountain glaciers will almost certainly result in great suffering and mass starvation within the next few decades. Regional conflicts over shrinking water supplies are probable in a number of areas around the world, as Pentagon reports have warned.

Here's the latest scientific study of just one of those disappearing glaciers that highlights just how fast these changes are occurring.

In Sign of Warming, 1,600 Years of Ice in Andes Melted in 25 Years
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: April 4, 2013
(excerpts)
Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists reported Thursday, the latest indication that the recent spike in global temperatures has thrown the natural world out of balance. The evidence comes from a remarkable find at the margins of the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru, the world’s largest tropical ice sheet. Rapid melting there in the modern era is uncovering plants that were locked in a deep freeze when the glacier advanced many thousands of years ago. Dating of those plants, using a radioactive form of carbon in the plant tissues that decays at a known rate, has given scientists an unusually precise method of determining the history of the ice sheet’s margins. Lonnie G. Thompson, the Ohio State University glaciologist whose team has worked intermittently on the Quelccaya ice cap for decades, reported the findings in a paper released online Thursday by the journal Science. Dr. Thompson and his team have expanded on previous research involving long-dead plants emerging from the melting ice at the edge of Quelccaya, a huge, flat ice cap sitting on a volcanic plain 18,000 feet above sea level.

Several years ago, the team reported on plants that had been exposed near a meltwater lake. Chemical analysis showed them to be about 4,700 years old, proving that the ice cap had reached its smallest extent in nearly five millenniums. In the new research, a thousand feet of additional melting has exposed plants that laboratory analysis shows to be about 6,300 years old. The simplest interpretation, Dr. Thompson said, is that ice that accumulated over approximately 1,600 years melted back in no more than 25 years. “If any time in the last 6,000 years these plants had been exposed for any five-year period, they would have decayed”, Dr. Thompson said. “That tells us the ice cap had to be there 6,000 years ago”. Global warming, which scientists say is being caused primarily by the human release of greenhouse gases, is having its largest effects at high latitudes and high altitudes. Sitting at high elevation in the tropics, the Quelccaya ice cap appears to be extremely sensitive to the temperature changes, several scientists said. Throughout the Andes, glaciers are now melting so rapidly that scientists have grown deeply concerned about water supplies for the people living there. Glacial meltwater is essential for helping Andean communities get through the dry season.

 

Will higher temperatures and higher levels of CO2 hurt biodiversity? No, just the opposite may be the case.

 

Anything dependent on the normal meltwater from Andean glaciers will die of thirst when they're gone. Plants animals, farmers, cities will all be affected.

 

And which of those pictured environments was friendly to homo sapiens?

 

oh well done anders....that's a depiction of life from the PT extinction event "The great Dying" caused by a CO2 increase, the biggest extinction event that wiped out 90% of all life....

 

Do you think so. It looks more like a depiction of the Burgess Shale biota, which (If I am not mistake) is several hundred million years before the great dying.

 

Of course, if you would rather that the earth be colder...

 

Sooooo....because the intelligent and aware people support taking steps to control greenhouse gas emissions in an attempt to limit the temperature increases and climate changes that are being caused by the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 levels over pre-industrial levels, you think that we must want the world to return to ice age conditions, eh???? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL....so you don't even consider the possibility that some people might want the world to keep something like its current climate patterns and not get hotter or colder??? Climate patterns like the patterns of regular rainfall and dry season, seasonal temperature extremes, timing of mountain snow and ice melt, etc., etc., that our agricultural systems are adapted to; the agricultural systems that are absolutely necessary in order to continuously feed seven billion humans; the agricultural systems that are so terribly vulnerable to serious climate changes and the loss of the storage of fresh water in mountain top glaciers and snow packs that feeds the rivers and irrigation systems in the summer months.

That's some pretty strange two-valued logic there - 'if we don't want it hotter, then we must want it colder'. Or perhaps it's just some of the usual denier cult distraction and misdirection. Pretty meaningless in any case.

 

Actually, humans thrive in tropical environments, more so than in any other. It is only the white race that has any difficulty living outside the temperate zones. (if you do not believe me, just look at the pattern of european settlement in the world)

ironic how the greenies want to keep everything in nature exactly the way it is, but are not the least bit concerned about the disappearance of human races. They are so busy worrying about "invassive species" that they cannot see the irreversible invassion right in front of their very eyes.

Yet another irony is that progressives spent so much energy to stamp out the belief that God created humans, and to replace it with evolutionary origins of the human species. And yet, in other situations, they seem to want to refuse to recognize that evolution applies as much to humans as it does to any other species in nature. If you want to preserve biodiversity, should this not also apply to humans?

I just could never understand the strange value system of so many of those on the left, whether it is environmentalism or abortion. It just seems so hypocritical to me when I closely examine it. Maybe the left is so busy trying to liberate and protect that they do not realize they are enslaving and destroying.

 

True enough. What about wheat? Corn? Cattle? Hogs? All of human agriculture has occurred in global temperatures equal to or below the current global temperature. About 90% of the stuff you eat evolved in a different climate than the one we're heading toward. The last time CO2 was as high as it is today was 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene, when global temps were 3° to 5°C higher than today (and sea levels were 100 feet higher than today). Fifteen million years ago was before grass evolved, and grass includes wheat, rye, barley, rice, and oats -- and pretty much every animal that eats grass. Then there's the little problem that photosynthesis doesn't operate at night, and also doesn't operate at temperatures above 95°F -- which will leave tropical agriculture more and more squeezed as time goes on and temperatures continue to rise.

So when the tropics no longer support agriculture, what will people who live in the tropics do? Will they just sit at home and allow their families to starve? Somehow I doubt it. In 1848, more than forty nations across Europe experienced simultaneous revolutions. It wasn't the internet or twitter that caused that. It was crop failure. Then in 2010 it happened again, but nobody noticed. The Russian heat wave of 2010 caused wheat production to plummet, and Russia responded by banning export of wheat. So the Russians didn't feel the pinch -- instead, the pinch was felt by those countries the Russians exported to. Among those were Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria, all of which experienced simultaneous revolutions starting the following spring. Hungry people are desperate people, and desperate people do desperate things.

So what happens the next time? What if the next time, the countries involved are India, or Pakistan, or China, or North Korea ... all of which have nuclear weapons? Hungry people are desperate people, and a desperate man with a nuclear bomb is a very bad idea. Perhaps now you can see why the Pentagon rates climate change as a greater threat to our national security than terrorism.

No, the impacts of climate change won't cause the extinction of the human race. Just, perhaps, the end of human civilization. Is that the future you want for your grandkids?

Utterly false drivel. That absurd fantasy lives only in your mind. Environmentalists are trying to save human civilization, and I would personally be very much obliged if conservatives would stop trying to prevent us from doing so.

 

it is Burgess Shale, 2hrs my home...the point being virtually none survived past the PT extinction...the last trilobites depicted the picture disappeared at the PT extinction event...

 

Yeah I was just trying to show off

 

livefree wrote: Anthropogenic global warming is rapidly melting most of the world's mountain glaciers.

Could it possibly be due to the solar cycle heating up...

... since temps on Mars are rising also?...

... not too many people there.

 

No.

1. Solar cycles last 11 years, which is a lot shorter than the 25 years it took to melt that glacier. A good deal of that glacial melting took place at the bottom of the solar cycle.

2. Mars seems to be warming at the south pole, but not the north pole. So it's not warming globally there.

3. If you smooth out the 11 year cycle, solar activity has been declining since 1958. Global temps have been rising during that time.

4. If it's the Sun, then we're getting more heat during the day, and daytime temps should be rising fastest. If it's greenhouse, we're losing less heat at night, and nighttime temps should be rising fastest. In fact, nighttime temps have been rising twice as fast as daytime temps.

5. If it's the Sun, then the Earth is getting more energy and the entire atmosphere should be warming, top to bottom. If it's greenhouse then we're getting the same amount of energy, but the distribution has changed: more heat is trapped at the surface, and more of what reaches space comes from the stratosphere. So if it's the sun the stratosphere should be warming like everything else, but if it's greenhouse the stratosphere should be cooling. In fact, the stratosphere has been cooling for as far back as global records go (which is 1959).

6. If it's greenhouse, we should be seeing more downwelling IR at the surface in the greenhouse gas bands. This has been observed.

7. If it's greenhouse, we should be seeing less upwelling IR into space from the surface in the greenhouse gas bands. This has been observed.

Let's face facts: it's not the sun. It's greenhouse. And we're responsible for that.

 

Pot and stove bad science again. A pot that is warming to boiling that is moved from High to 7 does not start to cool down.

Hey we are doppelgangers

Ill remember that when warmmongers ignore our south pole.

Once again pot and stove. Why are you so anti-science?

Lots of different reasons the clearest being that if it is ocean currents we would also see the same thing as the ocean contributes more to the night heat than the day heat, and more to winter than summer. But there is also UHI which has a greater average effect at night than during the day. But we know UHI according to warmmongers doesn't exist.

Not so. As has been postulated the solar effect is an indirect effect. As even confirmed by our own IPCC.

http://www.stopgreensuicide.com/

Since the Svenmark hypothesis is about cloud formation then what you would see is a change in albedo which would cause a near surface warming that would not be seen in the upper atmosphere.

In fact you conveniently forget to mention in your diatribe that the AGW signature doesn't match the warming we have seen either. Near surface warming is supposed to be a secondary effect of AGW as the saturation point of CO2 is pushed down. The true fingerprint of CO2 is supposed to be the hot spot in the tropopause as it is here that spectral broadening allows the CO2 to absorb long wave radiation beyond its observed laboratory wavelengths.



No hot spot.

The absence of the hot spot has caused the warmmongers to try and call something that is totally not a result of AGW the fingerprint that being stratospheric cooling. Which you immediately go into it.

The stratosphere cools because CO2 increases the stratosphere's emissivity.

Your own William M. Connelly who you were parroting a week ago when you were lying about McIntyre actually sums up why the stratosphere cools quite well

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/09/04/why-does-the-stratosphere-cool/

Notice the two points

#1 Were it not for the nature of the stratosphere CO2 would cause warming up to the top of the atmosphere. This blasts your theory of trapped radiation not getting out of the troposphere apart. This makes perfect sense when you understand that temperature is just a reflection of the stored energy in the system which is actually very small compared to the total flux of the system and in always equals out.

Most all skeptics recognizes that there is a greenhouse gas effect. The question is to what extent. The increase in down welling radiation isn't a surprise. That doesn't mean that AGW was the primary driver of the late 20th century temperature rise. I saw was because we are now having a scientific argument over a historical not a current event. Much like scientists and historians argue over the nature of the black plague.

Nope



You need to quit reading SKS. When are you going to realize that a site that deletes responses in mass isn't legitimate?

 

Just more confused denier cult nonsense and pseudo-science and more denial of reality.

 

How have you not been banned yet???

 

Banned for what? Correctly labeling the worthless drivel you post is not the same thing as insulting a forum member, y'know. Debunking denier cult propaganda, pseudo-science and lies is part of normal debate. Too bad if you don't like getting your nonsense debunked. If you don't like it, don't post denier cult misinformation here.

 

But he has shiny pictures too!

 

No because all you ever post in your own is insults. You then link some wikis stubs to add some body and fool moderation that you are doing anything more than hurling insults. The fact that you are not banned is a testement to how far this forum has fallen.

 

More of your delusions. You just can't stand getting your denier cult lies and misinformation debunked so thoroughly.

 

This idiocy again. You were wrong two years ago when you said it the first time, and you're still wrong. The pot is not in thermal equilibrium, and the Earth is.

Gee, a denier doesn't know the difference between global temps and local temps. What a surprise. Just like you didn't know that same difference last month when you said δ18O was a global temperature proxy. Want to try to defend that nonsense again? Go right ahead, and I'll be happy to rub your nose in it again.

So you're saying that global temps can rise when the Sun's output is declining and the Earth is in thermal equilibrium. Brilliant. Of course, you won't be able to find a single reference that supports that, so I can feel rightly superior in asking you for three or four. All you're doing is proving that you don't have the slightest notion of how the world works. Shall we go through the most recent public humiliation of the self-proclaimed radiation transfer expert, in which he claims that increasing CO2 lowers atmospheric emissivity? The exact opposite of what really happens?

How odd then that this effect is strongest over the continents. {Looooong slow whistle as Windigo's ad hoc hypothesis meets reality and explodes ... BOOOM!}

On the contrary, real scientists know the UHI exists and routinely correct for it. And then the deniers whine and cry and stamp their feet like two-year-olds, because the data has been corrected. In fact, the same same effect can be found in the CRN data, which are all rural stations. {BOOM!}

Oh great. A guy who can't read, posting a link to a page written by another guy who can't read. The page's author, Alec Rawls, think's he's found some kind of smoking gun in the draft IPCC AR5, because of the following sentence (emphasis in Rawls):

Too bad Rawls didn't actually read the following two pages, in which IPCC AR5 totally tears down the GCR hypothesis based on actual science. And too bad Rawls didn't see this conclusion, from IPCC AR5 page 7-44 (and it goes without saying that Windy just took what Rawls says on faith, without checking Rawls' sources):

Gee. Windigo's source is saying exactly what I'm saying, and contradicting Windigo's position entirely. How'd that happen, Windy?

Utterly, totally, completely false. (This kind of crap is what you get when you read WUWT instead of real science.) The so-called tropospheric hotspot would also occur during solar forcing. As the IPCC makes clear in AR4:



The so-called hotspot isn't a fingerprint of any particular type of forcing, but stratospheric cooling certainly is.

Can't read graphs either, I see. The hotspot is right there, just below the stratospheric cooling that really is a fingerprint of greenhouse:

Hm. That's not what you were saying just a couple of weeks ago:

When you two guys are finished arguing that one out, maybe we can get the winner to answer the question I've been asking these many months:
If the stratosphere is emitting more IR to space, what is emitting less IR to space?
{UPDATE: I see that the moderators have finally banned Windigo, so I'm not going to get him to answer the question above. The answer, of course, is the surface (although I would have accepted the troposphere). Which is why the surface and troposphere get warmer as CO2 increases.}

You mean, if the atmosphere were different that it really is, then the temperature would be different that it really is? That's a shocker.

No it doesn't. The surface still warms because of increasing greenhouse in Connelly's model. And his reason for stratospheric cooling in the real atmosphere -- increasing CO2 -- is exactly what I've been saying, and what you've been denying, for months now. (See Windigo vs. Windigo argument above.)

When WUWT stops deleting responses in mass, I will on that day admit you have a point. Until then, you don't have a leg to stand on.

 

Nobody cares.

Only the US met its goals under Kyoto.

Nobody else lifted a finger to meet their goals. From that we can deduce that they don't care.

If nobody else cares, why should the US?

 

Oh right. The "only" nation, if you don't count Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...rom_fuel_combustion_between_1990_and_2009.png

Where do you get your information, Taxcutter? Fox News? That would explain a lot.

 

Not from the UN, that's for sure.