Beam me to Planet Gore !
Remember, the Little Ice Age corresponded precisely with the lack of sunspots. GW proponents have stated there was no correlation between the sunspots and the Little Ice Age because they believed the Southern Hemisphere had no corresponding dip in temperatures.
They did.
Interestingly, the study's authors spin this to say that "If the current dramatic warming projections are correct, we have to face the possibility that the glaciers may soon disappear."
They've got to keep up the Global Warming end of things, right?
Ping of interest.
Ping of interest.
/mark
I'm convinced that funding for their work is contingent on their mentioning global warming in any of their reports.
In a peer-reviewed journal, you must take into account the biases of the review panel. If you go too far outside the reviewers frame of reference your work may be considered “too controversial” or “not well founded”. If your paper directly contradicts the work of one of the reviewers, it will be difficult for that reviewer to be objective (and some may spike it to protect their turf).
It's funding to a degree, but I think the personal dynamics of the review process play a large role too.
I have been on review panels before and I've seen otherwise good papers rejected because of one small thing that got a few reviewers upset.
So you see cases where a paper seems to refute AGW theory, but will have a sentence about the robustness of AGW.
What always baffles me is why saving glaciers is an important thing to worry about. Glaciers are just larger versions of the snow piles that melt at the end of a long winter. They don’t have a life to be saved. They are just collections of ice.
If all the glaciers melted and ceased to exist, how would we be worse off? Seems to me the net benefit would be more liquid water for the planet. Maybe coastal life would be affected, but from the estimates I’ve heard, water levels wouldn’t move much more than tidal changes.
So what’s the big deal about disappearing glaciers? Maybe we’ll find some more interesting bodies buried that will teach us something about our past.
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The study just published was not the study done by Shaefer; for Shaefer to now insert his opinion on the new work without being a contributor carries as much weight as your own.
The importance here, if any, is that this work gives a new geological opportunity to replace the terribly interpreted results from other, more widely publicized proxies that all seem to lead to support the warming theory that fits the current models.
The reporter is giving us his version of the released press report, if you want to read the whole thing, you must subscribe to Science.
Shaefer however gets credit for the berrylium dating and was puzzled by his earlier work reported on in April of this year; among some quotes from that work, I pulled these:
“The new chemical and analytical protocols developed in Schaefer’s cosmogenic dating lab is expected to allow scientists to accurately date glacier fluctuations throughout the Holocene, rounding out the climate picture on the continents.
“With this measure we can go to almost any mountain range on earth and date the moraines in front of the glaciers and produce a similar chronology,” said coauthor George Denton, a glaciologist who is a senior professor at the University of Maine and an adjunct scientist at Lamont-Doherty.
Overall, glaciers around the world have been declining since about 1860, with the exception of a brief advance in Switzerland in the 1980s, New Zealand in the late 1970s through today, and a few other places. Changes in wind and sea surface temperatures are thought to be causing these regional fluctuations. Currently in a wet phase, New Zealand is expected to swing back to a warmer, drier phase in the next few years, causing the glaciers to retreat once again.”
The result here of course is to bury the Little Ice Age so important to supporting the Mann ‘Hockey Stick” and New Zealand’s glaciers seem tailor made while this new work clearly shows that the new dating puts a good portion of the event in the southern hemisphere, after all.
Yup. I cancelled ny subscription to National Geographic because they're doing the same...I told them so too...
Sort of like the pagan Romans demanding a bit of incense tossed to the emperor (you didn't have to mean it, just do it!).
In any case, that's a big "if"! And what does he mean by "soon"? Tuesday? 10,000 years from now (which is soon in geologic terms)?
There’s a big conference set for December, and a big push to get legislation installed by then. I suspect there will be a cold winter.