The Glaciers ARE Melting and We ARE the Cause

More new studies show that our major glaciers — both inland and Greenland/Antarctica are melting faster thanks to human-cause global warming — with dire consequences for us all. Global warming deniers like Sen. Inhofe (R-OK) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

One recent survey shows accelerated glacial melting. Especially worrisome is the loss of the inland glaciers in South America and Asia, which will threaten the water supplies of millions of people within a few decades. “The glaciers are going to melt and melt until they are all gone. There are not any glaciers getting bigger any more,” said glaciologist Georg Kaser who led the research.

This research is further detailed in a Geophysical Research Letters paper led by Kaser (subs. req’d), which notes that the sea level rise from melting glaciers (as opposed to the ocean expanding as it gets warmer), more than doubled in the 2001-2004 period versus 1961-1990 period.

As for Greenland, an article in Nature (subs. req’d — news article here) reports an ice loss comparable to about 0.5 mm/year, which is pretty astonishing when you consider that the scientific consensus, the U.N.’s 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had projected little or no contribution from Greenland to sea level rise by 2100! The authors conclude ice sheet disintegration is accelerating: “The rate of ice loss increased by 250 per cent between the periods April 2002 to April 2004 and May 2004 to April 2006.”

And why is this all happening? Kaser’s GRL paper concludes:

The decrease of mass balance from near zero around 1970 gives confidence that late 20th century glacier wastage is essentially a response to post-1970 global warming, reinforced by feedbacks among which the most important are probably the balance-altitude feedback (net melting lowers the glacier surface to warmer altitudes, increasing net loss) and the albedo feedback (more darker ice exposed at the surface promotes further melting).

Only we can stop it.