Free Republic

The world's glaciers are losing ice at a faster pace so far this century than at any time since record-keeping began more than 120 years ago, according to a new study that says glacial melt is a worldwide phenomenon and will continue even if the world stopped warming any further than it already has. In the study, published last month in the Journal of Glaciology and conducted by the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich, scientists compared observations of tens of thousands of glaciers around the world with all other data available on the world's glaciers. They...

Geo-engineering has become a buzzword again, thanks to a recent two-volume report of the US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council [NAS-NRC 2015; http://bit.ly/EOSNRC]. Driven by exaggerated concerns about greenhouse (GH) warming catastrophes, the reports pursued mainly two project ideas:

CAPE LEGOUPIL, Antarctica (AP) - From the ground of this extreme northern part of Antarctica, a spectacular white and blinding ice seemingly extends forever. What can't be seen is the battle raging below to reshape Earth. Water is eating away at the Antarctic ice, melting it where it hits the oceans. As the ice sheets slowly thaw, water pours into the sea, 130 billion tons of ice (118 billion metric tons) per year for the past decade, according to NASA satellite calculations. That's enough ice melt to fill more than 1.3 million Olympic swimming pools. And the melting is accelerating....

In our information age, we’re bombarded with statistics on every danger the number crunchers can conjure — people struck by lightning, airplane vs. automotive deaths, and even drownings in bathtubs. But one statistic is curiously missing from the list. Even though President Obama and other global-warming alarmists warn of a looming climate apocalypse, they avoid giving a metric to prove their claims. They blame man-made climate change for a vast array of ills, including floods, droughts, wildfires, and tornados. But they never quantify what they say is the driving force behind it all: temperature.They have a very good reason. Actual...

Antarctica's ice paradox has yet another puzzling layer. Not only is the amount of sea ice increasing each year, but an underwater robot now shows the ice is also much thicker than was previously thought, a new study reports. The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica's expanding sea ice. According to climate models, the region's sea ice should be shrinking each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations show the ice is expanding, and the continent's sea ice has set new records for the past three winters. At the same time, Antarctica's ice sheet (the glacial ice...

Antarctica is a land of ice. But dive below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and you'll find fire as well, in the form of subglacial volcanoes. Now, a new study finds that these subglacial volcanoes and other geothermal "hotspots" are contributing to the melting of Thwaites Glacier, a major river of ice that flows into Antarctica's Pine Island Bay. Areas of the glacier that sit near geologic features thought to be volcanic are melting faster than regions farther away from hotspots, said Dustin Schroeder, the study's lead author and a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin. This melting...

Nearly 87 percent of Himalayan glaciers are currently “stable,” neither melting nor advancing, according to a new study that cast further doubt on claims that melting glacial ice will help cause a dramatic rise in sea levels this century. Often referred to as the “Third Pole,” the Himalayans contain “one of the largest concentrations of glaciers outside the polar regions,” according to the study by a group of Indian researchers that was published in the April 2014 edition of “Current Science.” …

A slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun, and could cause sea levels to rise across the planet by another 4 feet within 200 years, scientists concluded in two studies released Monday. Researchers had previously estimated that the cluster in the Amundsen Sea region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would last for thousands of years despite global climate change. But the new studies found that the loss is underway now as warming ocean water melts away the base of the ice shelf, and is occurring far more rapidly than scientists expected.

Speedy Glaciers Trample Multiple Ice-Age Theories by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * From satellite images, researchers have concluded that the Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier in Greenland has set a new speed record for glacial flow.1 The ice stream’s calculated average speed for summer 2012 was 46 meters per day—more than 6 feet per hour. While that may not sound very fast, it is the fastest recorded speed for any Antarctica or Greenland ice stream. This news should interest Christians because rapid glacial flow helps to answer secular claims that certain geological features prove that many “Pleistocene” ice ages occurred over millions of...

News that will no doubt spark global warming debates, an ancient forest floor has surfaced thanks to an Alaska glacier thawing. According to Live Science, trees in the forest are at least 1,000 years old. Stumps and logs coming from the thawing glacier were first noticed 50 years ago, but the forest has begun to emerge only recently. Scientists from University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau noticed more trees popping up while studying the thawing Mendenhall Glacier. Many of the trees on the Alaska glacier, which is a 36.8-square-mile river of ice flowing into a lake near Juneau, are reportedly...

Having tired of writing in blogs and having lost the support of a blog that carried my work, I now have my own web page. I opened my own web site on climate change. I wrote it for the average person. sunspotshurricanesandglaciers.com It is not a blog. It is information in nature. If you wish to comment, my email is on my work or you can use the message traffic here. I open my free republic about once a week to see what is happening. I open my web site about the same to proof-read each page. I always find...

The relatively small glaciers that drape the planet's mountains will play an important role in future sea level rise, according to a new study that estimated glaciers' collective size. Researchers calculated the ice thickness for 171,000 glaciers worldwide, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold the bulk of Earth's frozen water. Through a combination of direct satellite observations and modeling, they determined the total volume of ice tied up in the glaciers is nearly 41,000 cubic miles (170,000 cubic kilometers), plus or minus 5,000 cubic miles (21,000 cubic km). If all the glaciers were to melt, global sea...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

Greenland's glaciers are not speeding up as much as previously thought, researchers have estimated. As a result, the ice rivers may be contributing "significantly less" to sea-level rise than had been thought. Previous studies had estimated that the nation's glaciers would double their flow by 2010 and continue to maintain that speed, they explained. But the team, writing in Science, said the glaciers could eventually flow faster than earlier studies estimated. The team of US researchers based their findings on data stretching back to 2000-2001, collected from more than 200 outlet glaciers. "So far, on average, we are seeing about...

A massive crack in a huge sheet of Antarctic ice discovered in mid-October last year is steadily growing, as seen in recently released satellite images... The recent discovery that the glacier has markedly sped up over the last decade has provoked a flurry of research interest in Pine Island Glacier and its ice shelf, whose sudden changes are almost undoubtedly caused by climate change and warming oceans in the region.

Over at Real Science they have pulled back the curtain on another of the global warmists’ deceptive tactics. We will republish here what they have to say, which is so revealing of the way the warmists work:

Leading UK polar scientists say the Times Atlas of the World was wrong to assert that it has had to re-draw its map of Greenland due to climate change. Publicity for the latest edition of the atlas, launched last week, said warming had turned 15% of Greenland's former ice-covered land "green and ice-free". But scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute say the figures are wrong; the ice has not shrunk so much. The Atlas costs £150 ($237) and claims to be the world's "most authoritative". The 13th edition of the "comprehensive" version of the atlas included a number of...

Hoaxes: As the nation digs itself out, the grand wizard of global warming comes out of hiding and blames it all on that SUV stuck in your driveway. A blizzard is a terrible thing to waste. What has been dubbed the Groundhog Day Blizzard has caused Al Gore to poke his head out of his massive carbon-generating mansion in Nashville, Tenn., to blame the 2,000-mile storm on our alleged obsession with fossil fuels. Sorry, Al, but in Chicago the solar panels were buried under upward of two feet of snow as citizens cranked up those polluting snow blowers, a scene...

Excerpt only website: Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century. Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking. The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover. It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that...

Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century. Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking. The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover. It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would...