SebastianJer

getting back to normal

Posted by: sebastianjer, 3:46 AM GMT on June 11, 2012

Since I received some complaints about "political" post, I thought I would post something not political :) Here is something I wrote about a year ago on a non political matter....right.

"...getting back to normal.”

Not being a scientist, or truth be told not even a great intellect, much of my education and knowledge is based upon common sense observation and instruction. When it comes to the topic of global warming aka "climate change" my skepticism has been a product of simple common sense rather than any great intellectual mastery of the subject. Early on in my study of the narrative of global warming one of the best lessons in common sense skepticism was hammered home to me when I read this article and interview of the late Reid Bryson.
In the article he recounts this simple tale:

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

The implications of this observation on the entire theory of man made global warming are immense if only common sense had anything to do with the discussion at all, but alas it does not. Everyone wants to be an intellectual but it is common sense which is discrediting the narrative more than scientific papers.

So it was with some interest and another "whoa Betsy" moment that I read this post over at the Inconvenient Skeptic site earlier. The entire post is well worth the read, the main focus being on a recent trip to Glacier National Park by the author and some pictures of glaciers he took comparing them to earlier pictures from the recent past. The pictures seem to indicate that the glaciers may be making a comeback despite the doomsday projections of warmist. But what really caught my attention was this comment:

One question I wanted to ask the rangers there was “How old are the glaciers there?” There is a very common misconception that the glaciers there exist from the last ice age. That of course is wrong, but I was curious what they would say. The answer I got from the ranger was 3,000 years old. That is a reasonable answer, but one I find unlikely. Glaciers farther north and higher than Glacier National Park are typically much younger than that. I have never been able to find an ice core from glacier national park that would answer this question. Certainly it is possible that some of the glaciers are 3,000 years old, but I suspect that 900-1,000 is more accurate. I have yet to find enough accurate information to answer this though.

This comment blew me away, I admit that it had never occurred to me to question how old these or any other glaciers might be. As the author notes if I had ever thought about it I would have assumed that these and most glaciers date back to the last ice age. However even taking the rangers answer at face value this would put the glaciers well within a human historic time frame rather than some prehistoric event explained away by planetary orbits or primordial volcanic eruptions. To put it simply during the rise of the Roman Empire (Roman Warming Period) there were no glaciers in Glacier National Park.

Being enthralled by this I did a quick search to see if there was any scientific literature about the age of the glaciers in Glacier National Park. It took me all of two clicks of my handy mouse to find this paper from the U.S. Geological Survey titled

Glaciers of North America—

GLACIERS OF THE CONTERMINOUS UNITED STATES

GLACIERS OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES

By ROBERT M. KRIMMEL

With a section on GLACIER RETREAT IN GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, MONTANA

By CARL H. KEY, DANIEL B. FAGRE, and RICHARD K. MENICKE

There is a very detailed account of previous studies of the glaciers in the park and the retreat of the glaciers over the past 150 years.

All named glaciers within the park are mountain glaciers that have retreated dramatically since the middle 19th-century end of the Little Ice Age in the Western United States.

Since the end of the Little Ice Age, small glaciers that were insulated or protected by the surrounding topography tended to lose proportionately less area to recession. Commonly, they changed rapidly to a stagnant condition. The larger glaciers generally experienced proportionately greater and more rapid reduction in area than the smaller glaciers, but they still continue to be active (ﬁg. 25A). During the last 150 years, the larger glaciers,which had descended below cirque margins into subalpine terrain, would have had the greatest exposure to solar radiation and warmer temperatures for longer periods of time. As these large glaciers retreated and shrank in area, they regularly separated into discrete ice masses.

As you can plainly see the glacier melt in the park is not a recent development, easily preceding the advent of the internal combustion engine.

On the subject of time lines I found this comment to be quite interesting:

In all cases, it must be noted that, although initially the distance of retreat was small, substantial thinning—and therefore appreciable volume loss—likely took place. This
preceded the eventual retreat of termini. From 1910 onward, recession rates increased (Dyson, 1948; Johnson, 1980). This corresponded to a period of increased scientiﬁc interest in Glacier National Park glaciers, and many of the early investigators bore witness to dramatic instances of glacier recession. Following the middle 1940’s, recession rates decreased, and glaciers became increasingly conﬁned within cirque margins

So it a pretty well established fact that the Glaciers in Glacier National Park have been receding for over 150 years and not some cataclysmic current event except in the minds of the ALGORES of the world.

But how old are they? (My emphasis)

Because of the apparently long and relatively stable climatic interval preceding the Little Ice Age, it is believed that most of the glacier ice remaining in Glacier National Park was formed during the Little Ice Age and is not a relic from the Pleistocene Epoch...

Interesting isn't it that they refer to the time prior to the formation of glaciers in the park as "relatively stable climatic interval " or as Reid Bryson might have said "back when it was normal."

Further we learn

The Little Ice Age comprised a several-hundred-year-long cool period(about 1400 to about 1850 in North America), during which Glacier National Park glaciers formed and expanded

So it seems that perhaps our ranger may be off a bit in his information. According to this paper the glaciers in the park are a product of the Little Ice Age. If this is indeed true and I have little reason to question the authors, they being scientist and all, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 the glaciers in Glacier National Park were just babies if they were there at all.

So for all the hysteria over melting glaciers in Glacier National Park, the facts seems to be that they are a product of an unstable and hostile period of "climate change" which disrupted the normal optimum which we ought to enjoy while we have it.

So as I have previously observed:

If for example as was proven before the AGW nonsense took hold of science that the Medieval Warming Period was warmer than today, as was accepted until these guys got their hands and agenda on the data and the process, why did we not have runaway warming? Where was the enhanced greenhouse effect while they were making wine in England?

Or when there were no glaciers in Glacier National Park.

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Romney Edges Obama in Battle for Middle-Income Voters
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CONSTITUTION 101

History in Pictures

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TODAY'S QUOTE

"What was once a common vision of the future — the 'liberal' utopia of the last fifty years — is behind us now. We need a new future because the old one has turned into the past."

Walter Russel Meade

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1. Ossqss 4:14 AM GMT on June 11, 2012
Obamacare, EPA, and on and on...... Many are waking up to the injustice. Out>>> Member Since: June 12, 2005 Posts: 6 Comments: 8154

3. sebastianjer 12:14 PM GMT on June 11, 2012
The Most Pathogenic Media in History By James Lewis For the fourth time since 1900, the West is trying to commit suicide. This time it's not training battalions of goose-stepping young men to put their bodies in the cold and soggy trenches of Germany, France, and Russia, as in World Wars I and II. But just like the Cold War, in which Soviet imperialism almost conquered the West, the old capitals of Paris, Berlin, and London are still spreading the political plague of Marxist totalitarianism, totally heedless of the historic catastrophes it brought to Russia, China, and all the rest. In a purely intellectual way, this fact is so idiotic, so self-destructive that no sane person expected it after the clean defeat of Soviet and Chinese communism twenty years ago. It is objectively insane. And yet, today's Western media have never stopped working to destroy the very societies they claim to serve. We have the most pathogenic media in history -- they create social divisions, ethnic hostilities, massive deliberate misunderstandings of the real causes of economic despair, and political "solutions" from the very people who created those problems in the first place. Our media are the worst plague virus in history because they spread falsehoods and block the truth. No society can solve problems if the media lie as a daily habit. Perverse and dysfunctional media can destroy working societies -- Joseph Goebbels' handiwork being a prime example. Today's euro crisis in Greece and the other dysfunctional Eurocolonies is a direct and predictable result of what Tony Blair called "Third Way Socialism" -- which turns out to be crony capitalism wearing a Groucho mustache. Tony Blair himself is now one of the chief Cronies. Blairite Socialism rejected Soviet Marxism and American capitalism equally; but capitalism is productive and Soviet socialism never was, so Third Way Socialism turns out to be parasitical on free market inventiveness and hard work. When all is said and done, Blairism becomes a kind of Brezhnev style of a corrupt, unaccountable ruling class. That's why George Soros and his ilk love crony capitalism; it puts them in the driver's seat. Eurosocialism today copies Barney Frank's compulsory sale of empty mortgages to American banks, under threat of direct action by ACORN and other gangsters, backed by media blackmail and an endless supply of inflated money from the Fed. Empty mortgages are toxic because they are lies, and everybody knows it. They are monopoly money, and there will always be a reckoning. So the banks that are forced to buy them put them in gaudy Xmas wrapping, and everybody passes that hot potato to the next sucker, hoping that they won't be the last one holding it when the bubble finally pops. After a completely predictable market crash, the socialist media start blaming capitalism again, millions of suckers believe it again, and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd pass another law forcing the banks to do the same thing again. It's systematic piracy, and you -- yes, you, reading these words -- are left holding the bag. If you're buying smaller meat packages today at the supermarket for a higher price, that's just one installment on the massive fraud by Barney and Chris during the Carter and Clinton years. Your retirement savings are another installment. If Obama has his way, your crumbling health care will be a third down payment on Florida swampland. Europe tried to violate the laws of economics by imposing a single high-value currency on the advanced and hardworking peoples of northern Europe, and then paying the lazy, corrupt, and self-indulgent masses of the south to use really expensive money that priced their goods and services out of the market. Worker by worker, Greece isn't very productive compared to Estonia. The Greeks have "a different value system," to quote the monocult of multicult. They'd rather go fishing. And who can blame them? When the European political class decided to shower gold on the southern rim via the eurozone, the Greeks took their long vacations, their welfare payments, and even their coerced immigrants from Albania and the Muslim world. They went on a glorious toot because they knew perfectly well that it wasn't going to last. Misgovernment is all they've ever known, after all, and tax-dodging, smuggling, over-regulation and political backscratching have been perfected ever since the Romans. The EU's boastful misgovernment was treated with the contempt it deserved. The Greeks knew that it was a scam, but they were happy to be paid off as long as it lasted. It was Barney Frank again, but now with a continental touch. Europe still wants to run the world, because self-glorification has been its only mode since Julius Caesar. But today Europe insists that Uncle Sam do most of the fighting, as in Afghanistan and the coming Iranian nuclear bomb. Europe has never lost the faith that it should run the world, and it is trying to do it via the United Nations, which is just the EU writ large. Europe still loves Obama, whose entire life has been steeped in socialism. Obama is totally incapable of thinking outside of that box. OK -- so he's not the messiah the Norwegians celebrated four years ago. No matter. Obama shares their basic beliefs, which is what matters. Obama was soaked in ideology under the name of "anti-colonialism," "black nationalism," and "Liberation Theology," but as Pope Benedict pointed out some years ago, it's just that smelly old Marxist orthodoxy again. We are therefore seeing the second Cold War, the second war of Marxist conquest, but now by "peaceful means" of mass indoctrination, penetration of the Organs of Propaganda (including the schools), ideological subversion, and most of all the destruction of the moral foundations of the West. Today's radical left applauds radical Muslims riding that scruffy old camel straight from 7th-century Arabia. But it's really the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938 giving the world an encore performance. "Les extrèmes se touchent," as the French said in 1938, and it still works, because Islam and the left have a common enemy. That would be you and me. It is the real West -- the West that invented the computer, biotechnology, and the United States Constitution, along with free porn on the web -- that is their common enemy. Simply by being ourselves we keep Ahmadinejad in a passionate embrace with Barack Hussein Obama, who is the spiritual son of Malcolm X and Saul Alinsky. The Tea Party is middle-class America. The Occupy mobs are the black-clad anarchists of the European left, going back to 1848. The Tea Party is American. The Occupishers are Eurosocialist parasites. That "99% slogan" is just Hitler's slogan of "100%" -- Ein Volk, Ein Fuehrer, Ein Deutschland. Ninety-nine percent is another synonym for everything -- totalitarianism. Anybody who disagrees with the phony mobs is just that 1%, and you know what you can do when the poopers take over. That's why the Occumobs are taught to hate capitalism, a word they can't define, much less understand -- because they are after all the products of our dysfunctional schools. The Occupoops are intellectual Androids. They have iPhones instead of brains, a free gift from Mom and Dad -- who have all their retirement money in the markets, so that capitalism pays for its own parasites, just as with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The second Cold War is here on your computer today, not as as some backdoor Chinese virus, but as wall-to-wall agitprop by the liberal media. As CBS's Les Moonves confessed the other day, "ultimately journalism has changed ... partisanship is very much a part of journalism now." Yes, we get that, Les. You and your Big Corp are professional liars and truth twisters, and you get paid gazillions by the huddled masses who are no longer yearning to breathe free. Moonves runs the CBS operation, including the "News" Division, more properly called the CBS Agitprop Division for the Propagation of Liberalism. Truth in labeling would kill CBS News. Our ancestors came to these shores to be free from oppression, and all their great-grandchildren got was CBS, NBC, and brains embalmed in high-fructose corn syrup. The media are the nervous system of our society. They are the means of communication and control, including control of your mind and those of your children. And just as the brain can get sick, so the media can, too. It's not hard to spot. We all feel it in our guts whenever we hear our country slammed again by that 24/7 android monster in a compulsive, obsessive, unstoppable way. Just ask your neighbors to name three good things about this country, and watch them flounder. It's the same thing with seriously depressed people: ask them to say three good things about themselves, and they can't think of a single one. Pathogenic, self-destructive beliefs have taken over their souls. Psychiatrists talk about pathogenic beliefs causing severe mental disorders. The liberal media never stop repeating false and self-destructive slogans about this country. That's why your children's heads are filled with endless tape loops of national self-loathing. Just ask 'em. Until the bubble pops. Empty mortgages popped four years ago. The phony Eurozone is quietly collapsing today. Those moments of truth are constantly covered up by a screaming liberal media. Human beings cannot stand too much reality, as T.S. Eliot said, but reality still has a way of popping our bubbles. I don't know how and when the liberal media will collapse, though the drooping balance sheets of TIME, Newsweek, and the New York Times suggest that the end is near. Power classes take a lot of time to die, even after they become public jokes. The talking heads of today's pop culture lost any rationale for existing a long time ago. They are now repackaging their empty souls, and tossing that smoking potato from CNN to CNBC to Facebook and Twitter. They have been tried and found wanting, and the handwriting is on the wall. It's just a matter of when. Don't forget to give them a little shove over the cliff. Every bit helps. Member Since: August 26, 2005 Posts: 1030 Comments: 11197

4. latitude25 12:42 PM GMT on June 11, 2012
"Since I received some complaints about "political" post,"..... What are you going to do if the rest of us get drunk and complain about non-political posts?? ........LOL Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

5. latitude25 2:30 PM GMT on June 11, 2012
Playing The Glacial Fraud Game June 6, 2012 Don’t show the map which tells us that two thirds of the glacier’s retreat occurred before 1880 Link Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

6. latitude25 7:44 PM GMT on June 11, 2012
anyone remember this one.... This was the Obama hopey changey 2009 version... Solandra, "we have to hurry up and pass it, so you can see what's in it", lobbyists, pay as you go plan, ... ....I'm all warm and fuzzy inside http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detai lpage&v=-NPQpiSqAAs Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

7. latitude25 9:27 PM GMT on June 11, 2012
Yes. Yes, They Really Are That Dumb! Posted on February 8, 2012 A new study is just out!! Turns out the Himalayans aren’t melting after all! Well, they are, but……. (sigh) I’ll try to explain if I can devolve low enough to think like a climatologist, but, I’m not sure I can get down to that level of stupid with only a 12 pack to drink. The study, Recent contributions of glaciers and ice caps to sea level rise , actually states, “The high mountains of Asia, in particular, show a mass loss of only 4 ± 20 Gt yr−1 for 2003–2010″ …..whatever that means. Obviously, with new publishing comes vapid interviews and heralding from periodicals. Apparently, they’ve decided to use the Grace tandem to measure the icecaps and glaciers and whatnot. Of course, this can’t be replicated because Grace is about to come down. We’ve promised to send a new one up in 2016. But, still 4 +/-20Gt is equal to just about nothing. This leads me to one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever read…….. ================== The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the “third pole” – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate. =============================== You see, the Himalayans are really melting, but that silly snow keeps putting the stuff back!!! Sadly, the massive bit of stupidity doesn’t end there. This will lead to a reappraisal of the estimated future sea-level. No one had done the measurements by satellite before. How did they do it in the past, you ask? I’m glad you asked, but I’d best let the smart sciency guys explain this……. ============================================== The reason for the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia is the different ways in which the current and previous studies were conducted. Until now, estimates of meltwater loss for all the world’s 200,000 glaciers were based on extrapolations of data from a few hundred monitored on the ground. Those glaciers at lower altitudes are much easier for scientists to get to and so were more frequently included, but they were also more prone to melting. The bias was particularly strong in Asia, said Wahr: “There extrapolation is really tough as only a handful of lower-altitude glaciers are monitored and there are thousands there very high up.” So, lower level glaciers are more prone to melting? ……. .YA THINK!!!!!??? It’s “tough” when one tries to extrapolate from one unlike thing to another. No, no, I got that wrong, it’s “really tough“. So, all of these dire predictions of mass drowning and cities underwater and all came from extrapolating melting glaciers to glaciers which aren’t prone to melt. Link Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

8. spathy 9:34 PM GMT on June 11, 2012
Just being an arse! Snicker snort. Member Since: June 8, 2008 Posts: 65 Comments: 10487

9. latitude25 9:38 PM GMT on June 11, 2012
rotfl..... testing testing http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detai lpage&v=-NPQpiSqAAs edit...now figure that one out! I posted the same link...I think I did anyway...and no video! Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

10. spathy 12:05 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Lat if its Youtube click share then click embedded(it will then be blue),then copy(blue embedded), AND DIRECTLY PASTE in Jers blog. No link! No Image just directly paste. Member Since: June 8, 2008 Posts: 65 Comments: 10487

11. spathy 12:10 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Lat Now the only question is..... Are you going to remind me how to do that when I forget a few weeks from now? Now if It says embedded disabled then forget it you gotta search forever to find one that isnt disabled. Member Since: June 8, 2008 Posts: 65 Comments: 10487

12. latitude25 12:36 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
....I have to figure it out first...then I can remind you ;-D I'll test that after dinner..... Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

13. RobDaHood 12:41 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Quoting spathy: Lat if its Youtube click share then click embedded(it will then be blue),then copy(blue embedded), AND DIRECTLY PASTE in Jers blog. No link! No Image just directly paste. Be sure to check use old embed code Member Since: September 2, 2008 Posts: 78 Comments: 25933

14. spathy 12:56 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Be sure to check use old embed code Oh yes that too! Member Since: June 8, 2008 Posts: 65 Comments: 10487

15. spathy 12:58 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Yup I am off to a fantastic dinner as well. See ya later. Member Since: June 8, 2008 Posts: 65 Comments: 10487

16. latitude25 1:08 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
testing testing Here's our great leader again.... edit: good grief....I finally got one to work Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

17. auburn (Mod) 1:12 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
yep..non political for sure! :) Member Since: August 27, 2006 Posts: 539 Comments: 46688

18. spathy 1:48 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Whooo Hoooo! Good Job Lat. But a food coma is setting in. So I must say a non Political MMGW good evening to you my favorite Comrades.; Food comas are an inconvenient reality. Oh and a good sunset to my Fave Occupishers and Eurosocialist parasites. Member Since: June 8, 2008 Posts: 65 Comments: 10487

19. latitude25 1:56 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
#18 and #13 Thanks guys!!! Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

20. NumberWise 1:59 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
There you go, Lat! Now there will be no stopping you! Member Since: October 22, 2005 Posts: 0 Comments: 1566

21. CosmicEvents 2:02 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Quoting auburn: yep..non political for sure! :) baby steps Aub....at least so far he hasn't called the President of the United States an illegal alien commie to the core thug! . It would be nice to hear something positive that makes a voter think Romney might be all that much different than President Obama. I know it's tough though....Romney was everybody's least desired choice. Member Since: August 3, 2005 Posts: 10 Comments: 5099

22. sebastianjer 4:46 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Quoting CosmicEvents: baby steps Aub....at least so far he hasn't called the President of the United States an illegal alien commie to the core thug! . It would be nice to hear something positive that makes a voter think Romney might be all that much different than President Obama. I know it's tough though....Romney was everybody's least desired choice. Funny I do believe I have basically called him that on numerous occasions. However unlike you I have supported my observations with facts, something that you and those of your ilk simply ignore. A man with closed eyes sees what he wants to see. Member Since: August 26, 2005 Posts: 1030 Comments: 11197

23. latitude25 11:58 AM GMT on June 12, 2012
Quoting NumberWise: There you go, Lat! Now there will be no stopping you! Now I have to remember which blog this was on.....because I'm going to forget....and so will Spathy!! Member Since: August 24, 2007 Posts: 0 Comments: 3654

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