From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Gotta say, the endless drumbeat of climate alarmism is pretty boring. The latest salvo is from the Associated Press, with the headline Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, with 7 trillion tons lost since 2000.”

Now that sounds like a seriously huge loss. I mean, it is TRILLIONS of tons lost in a quarter century.

Being a suspicious kind of fellow, I went to the underlying study in Nature magazine entitled Community estimate of global glacier mass changes from 2000 to 2023.

And in that study, I find the following:

Glaciers separate from the continental ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica covered a global area of approximately 706,000 km² around the year 2000, with an estimated total volume of 158,170 ± 41,030 km³.

…

Here we show in an intercomparison exercise that glaciers worldwide lost 273 ± 16 gigatonnes in mass annually from 2000 to 2023.

So, first thing we have to do is convert the figures in cubic kilometers (km³) to metric tons. One cubic meter of glacial ice weighs 0.92 tonnes. One cubic kilometer of ice is 0.92 billion tonnes. So their total glacial ice volume of

158,170 ± 41,030 km³

converts to

146  ± 38 trillion tons

This means that the uncertainty of the estimated volume of glacial ice, not the volume itself but the uncertainty of the volume, is five times the calculated change in the last 23 years.

Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

It also means that by the year 2050, IF (and it’s a big if) glacial ice loss continues at the current rate, the glaciers will lose 3.5% to 6.7% of their volume … call me crazy, but I’m not seeing how a POSSIBLE predicted ~ 5% decline in glacier volume by the year 2050 is a big deal.

In closing, here’s your glacier story of the day.

In 1678, in the depths of the Little Ice Age, the good Swiss burghers in the villages of Fiesch and Fieschertal petitioned Pope Innocent XI to halt the advance of the Aletsch Glacier, fearing floods and destruction. The glacier was threatening to choke off the outflow of their lake, which would have caused the permanent inundation of their villages as the ice dam increased the lake level.

So the Pope prayed for the glacier to stop advancing … and miracolo di miracoli, as the world came out of the Little Ice Age, the Aletsch Glacier did stop advancing! Go figure.

Now fast forward to 2009, when glacier retreat due to post Little Ice Age warming was threatening the villagers’ revenue from the 400,000 tourists per year that came to see the Aletsch Glacier. The glacier was retreating by as much as 10 meters per year. YIKES! So they sought Vatican approval to reverse their prayer, asking Pope Benedict XVI to help stop the melting.

And in 2010, the Pope approved their petition.

To date the effect of the revised prayers is unclear … the Aletsch Glacier is still retreating. However, having said that, the Aletsch Glacier is 23,000 meters long. So if it continues losing 10 meters per year, by the year 2050 it will lose 1% of its length. Again, not seeing the huge downside here …

Now, there’s a curious hidden moral to this story. And it is one that has nothing to do with the fickleness of humans, or the warming since the Little Ice Age, or the prayers of the faithful.

Note that the advance of the glacier in 1678 would have meant the total destruction of the towns.

On the other hand, the retreat of the glacier in the 21st Century will only cost them some tourist bucks.

Here’s the moral I take from the story:

At any point in Earth’s geological history, glaciers are either a) advancing or b) retreating.

Given the known dangers and benefits of both advancing and retreating glaciers, I’ll take choice b), thanks, and over the long term, so would the Swiss people in the villages of Fiesch and Fieschertal …

My best to all, hug your kids, call your people, family is everything, vita brevis,

w.