A Global Warning

This is a copy of a Post.

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Compare the following photographs (in sets of two). Click to enlarge.

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And a side by side.

Do you notice anything … unusual? These are examples of Glacial Repeat Photography. In each case, someone took a picture of a glacier at a point in the early 19th or 20th century, generally in either August or September, because that’s when the best conditions to photograph glaciers are, then later, to illustrate the change in the size of the glacier, someone else stood on that exact spot, also in August or September (“the same time of year“), and repeated, or took another photo.

You can view more examples at the USGS Photographic Library. See also this link.

Ok, so what would logically cause the receding of glaciers worldwide? Kind of obvious isn’t it? Global warming. Now you may hear some naysayers say something to the effect that ‘While it’s true that some glaciers have been receding, others have been growing’. A blanket generalization at best. That’s because, while a relative few are advancing due to the non-perfectly linear nature of climate change* on a large planet, by far the great majority have been receding, since warming is the major feature of anthropogenic, or human caused, climate change due to our burning of fossil fuels.

As of 2005 this was the situation:

The red vertical lines represent receding, while the blue advancing glaciers.

A summation of the study and chart by Real Climate (“climate science from climate scientists”) states:

“In 2005 there were 442 glaciers examined, 26 advancing, 18 stationary and 398 retreating.”

Here’s another chart of the worldwide picture:

And now? As of 2021, the loss continues.

The average mass balance of the glaciers with available long-term observation series around the world continues to be negative. The latest data continues the global trend in strong ice loss over the past few decades and brings the cumulative average thickness loss of the reference glaciers since 1980 at almost 20 m w.e. The current status of glaciers worldwide is summarized here. All so far reported mass balance values, given in Table 2, are tentative. ~ World Glacier Monitoring Service

From the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a comparison picture of Arctic sea ice in 1980 and 2020. A 40 year time span. In fact compare every year since then to 1980 and you’ll see a significant reduction.

You might also hear the deflection, Ok, we acknowledge that the earth is warming, but it’s for some other reason, any other reason than our burning of fossil fuels (coal and oil formed from millions and millions of years of the decomposition of plants and animals that lived long ago) and the Co2 that results from it. Yet Co2 and temperatures extending all the way back 800,000 years are very well correlated.

So you decide. Is climate change real, and are we causing it, or not?

On the one hand, we can see how indescribably beautiful the planet that we have been is, but on the other hand, we can really, clearly see how fragile it is…. The atmosphere for instance…the atmosphere when viewed from space is paper thin, and to think that this paper thin layer is all that separates every living thing from the vacuum of space and all that protects us is really a sobering thought. ~ Ron Garan, Astronaut

For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance. ~ Ulf Merbold, Astronaut

More here, here and here.