Bishop Hill Glacial George
Oct 24, 2011 Climate: WG2 Media George Monbiot, Guardian 27 January 2000
The Himalayan glaciers are retreating so fast that the rivers may dry up in the summer by 2040. The results, if that happens, will be catastrophic.
Dr Bob Bradnock, geographer, Letter to the Guardian, 4 February 2000
Sadly, in seeking to make easy points about global warming [Monbiot] has got his "facts" wrong. Glaciers contribute virtually nothing to the flow of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers, which depend primarily on monsoon rain and to a much lesser extent on snow melt (not glacier melt).
There has been no long term decline in precipitation in the Himalaya. The idea that the glaciers are retreating so fast that the rivers may dry up by the summer of 2040 displays an embarrassing ignorance of the normal hydrological cycle of all these rivers, whose low flow period is in the winter, and which in summer continue to pour water down from the Himalaya.
George Monbiot, The Guardian, 29 July 2009
India is finally lumbering into action on climate change.
Though this country is likely to be hit harder than almost anywhere else by the climate crash, not least because its food production is largely dependent on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers, which are rapidly retreating, it has almost been a point of pride in India not to respond to the requests of richer nations to limit its emissions.
Scientific American today
A growing number of studies based on satellite data and stream chemistry analyses have found that far less surface water comes from glacier melt than previously assumed. In Peru's Rio Santa, which drains the Cordilleras Blanca mountain range, glacier contribution appears to be between 10 and 20 percent. In the eastern Himalayas, it is less than 5 percent.
...
"There has been a lot of misinformation and confusion about it," said Peter Gleick, co-director of the California-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. "
Yes, indeed.
Reader Comments (88)
Monbiot's ignorance is rather deeper. He like the IPCC authors seems ignorant of the fact Himalayan rivers are at high water in mid to late summer due to the monsoon, and this is when major floods occur.
The main consequence of reduced glacial melt (were it to occur) would be to reduce the volume of these floods. As floods are far and away the biggest natural disasters on the Indian subcontinent, less glacier melting would be a good thing.
Gotcha!
a gotcha for Gleick...is he tenured?
Nice post.
Struggle to see Monbiot's point. Even if glaciers do disappear, doesn't this mean that precipitation skips a step from cloud to river, so that it merely avoids a 10,000 year (or whatever) hold in a glacier and the neve above it? Even if glaciers were important to river volumes, it isn't clear why the elimination of an intermediate step, glaciation, should have a large effect either way on river flows.
Is Monbiot's view is that the the glaciers move precipitation to the other side of a divide which receives low rainfall? Hard to believe that could be true: presumably glaciers like rivers cannot generally cross divides.
So, would that be the same Peter Gleick quoted approvingly here, that just yesterday, was described by Andrew Montford as "poor old Peter Gleick"?
The inconsistency here is staggering. Any quote or soundbite is crowed about if it seems to agree with you, and abuse is heaped upon anyone with whom you don't agree, even if they're the same person.
Let's see some of the other things that were said about Peter Gleick yesterday, and see if people are as quick to dismiss him now that a quote has been mined that you think can support you:
"Gleick is a prime example - uninformed and biased to the max." Oct 23, 2011 at 12:08 PM | John Carter
"His a naughty child that been caught out lying and is to stubborn to admit to it" Oct 23, 2011 at 12:12 PM | KnR
"Gleick is one of those sad inadequates" Oct 23, 2011 at 12:34 PM | Rick Bradford
"What an embarrassment to science he really is!!!!!" Oct 23, 2011 at 1:08 PM | CinbadtheSailor
"Gleick seems to have a very bad case of tiny penis syndrome that causes him to be terminally angry and act stupidly." Oct 23, 2011 at 3:02 PM | Fred from Canuckistan
"An alarmist refusing to, or unable to, support anything they say with any facts and depending on rudeness and censorship." Oct 23, 2011 at 3:49 PM | Neil Craig
How much of the Stern report was based on now debunked IPCC/WWF mythology?
A glacier is just the contents of a dam in ice form, it just delays the water on its gravitation route, it can.t make or destroy water.
"How much of the Stern report was based on now debunked IPCC/WWF mythology?"
Oct 24, 2011 at 10:32 PM | golf charley
Very little indeed of IPCC reports has been in any way debunked. Apart from the glacier melt boob, could you provide maybe 3 or 4 examples? Also where/how they've been debunked.
Thanks.
Zed
That's for the discussion forum please.
So said Peter Gleick, senior unread book reviewer, at the California-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Climatological Intimidation and Mendacity..
Well then ZeDeBe, do you agree with Gleicks ludicrous Amazon book review? If not, what's the point of your trolling diatribe?
I'm a bit confused by your response here Zed. Peter said Donna was lying and when people asked for evidence he wouldn't respond. People quite rightly gave him a hard time about it (which is why I said "poor old Peter Gleick"). If he subsequently says something that is correct, should we continue to give him a hard time?
I think when the behaviour is inconsistent, a certain inconsistency in reaction is warranted.
Glacier melt affects the seasonal flow of rivers. Net melting obviously occurs in summer.
The IPCC seemed ignorant of the fact that the seasonal flow of Himalayan rivers is pretty much the reverse of temperate zone rivers. Their maximum flow is in the summer.
contrast Monbiot's 'rivers may dry up in the summer by 2040'
with
'During the monsoon season (June–October), floods are a common occurrence.'
from the Brahmaputra wikipedia entry
Andrew. Don't forget Gordon Brown....
At Copenhagen, in his 50 days speech..
"In 20 years the glaciers which 3/4 of a billion depend on for water, will have melted..."
I'be emailed a YouTube vid of Gordon....
A big disconnect... Minor typo in IPCC reports said the Ippc apologists in the media and environmentalists previously..............
Sorry Bish you are pushing an open door. George is a serial bedwetter always anxious to bruit the latest bedwetter theories. He's not big into science preferring to share with his fawning followers any news item that will make them sleepless with fear. It's nice to see him repudiated, but it won't stop him, unfortunately, he's a true believer and no amount of failure of the evidence to support his views will distract him from his quest to frighten himself silly.
glacial melt depends on precipitation. if the equilibrium line of a glacier is at x, precipitation will produce ice/snow across the firn limit at y. and you have glacial melt. proportional to precipitation. not ice extent.
I wonder if George is still tending his raised veg beds in Wales? They need a bit of work to get ready for winter.
the fact that Gleick seems to agree with this means that Z has to give it greater scrutiny, because we now know that Gleick only posts what he is told to by higher authorities and has no mind of his own.
That's 5 years after the Himalayan glaciers would have dissappeared (ipcc).
Runoff increases in a region of retreating glaciers (more stored water is released into the system)
A really worrying situation is advancing glaciers, as large amount of water may be subtracted from the system.
A system with no glaciers will release all precipitation, with some delay depending on the ground water hydrology, so it's very unlikely for the Himalayan rivers to go dry at any time of the year.
Current glacier fronts are about 5000m a.s.l. in the Himalayas, so for them to disappear completely, regional mean temperature should rise by 19.5C (environmental lapse rate = 0.0065C/m * 3000m)
It's very difficult to say that anything is impossible, but at least I would say this situation is highly unlikely.
As ever, Monbiot parrots green misinformation. But if he put his brain into gear first he could possibly avoid making a fool of himself.
If India were reliant on glacial melt (rather than precipitation) for water, then it must be a pretty good thing the glaciers are melting so fast otherwise they would have had no water for decades. It would also mean that if we could stop the glaciers melting so fast then we would cause massive water shortages and death in India.
Monbiot can't have his cake and eat it: if India has long been dependent on glacial melt then we had better make sure we don't enact policies that would slow the melt. The fact that the greenies want to stop the glaciers melting must mean that (a) they know that glacial melt has virtually no effect on water resources in India but they like to promote lies anyway, or (b) they mistakenly think it does have an effect and they want to see hundreds of millions die off through cutting the supply.
Could I make a point here that I'd tried to make with Richard Betts. A large number of the Himalayan glaciers are at altitudes where the temperature never rises above 0C. If they are turning to a liquid state it cannot be because they're melting, they must be ablating. If they are ablating it must be through lack of precipitation. But global warming should increase precipitation according to the science, so why are the glaciers retreating?
Correction, they can't be turning to a liquid state ablation process, I should have said retreating. It's late!
Geronimo,
While that's true for othr regions, on the lower part of Himalayan glaciers there is actual melting and liquid water. Diurnal temperatures can be quite high and insolatin is very intense
Zed
"Very little indeed of IPCC reports has been in any way debunked. Apart from the glacier melt boob, could you provide maybe 3 or 4 examples? Also where/how they've been debunked.
Thanks."
Happy to help.
1. Pachauri's claim for the whole report, in a statement to the North Carolina legislature in 2008: "Everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that."
The InterAcademy Council report found that "peer-reviewed journal articles comprised 84 percent of references in Working Group I, but comprised only 59 percent of references in Working Group II and 36 percent of references in Working Group III (Bjurström and Polk, 2010)."
In their assessment of AR4, acknowledging that non-peer reviewed information had a role in IPCC reports, they emphasised that the IPCC's own procedures were drafted to show clearly that "Non-peer-reviewed sources are to be listed in the reference sections of IPCC reports, followed by a statement that they are not peer-reviewed."
Their findings? "It is clear that these procedures are not always followed."
It is to this they point as a source of AR4's problems: "Some of the errors discovered in the Fourth Assessment Report had been attributed to poor handling of unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources
(Ravindranath, 2010)."
Ravindranath, no climate sceptic, notes some of those errors:
2. Melting of Himalayan Glaciers (already discussed)
3. Up to ‘40% of Amazonian rainforests could react drastically to even slight reduction in precipitation’. Again this was based on a report prepared by the WWF. However, NASA satellite data showed that
despite the worst drought of 2005, when all the lakes and rivers dried up in these forests, there were no
major changes in vegetation and forest cover.
4. WGII reported that ‘by 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. This was based on an International Institute for Sustainable Development 'study', with no basis in recorded or observable fact.
5. AR4 concluded that the world had ‘suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events since the 1990s’, reporting 'a small statistically significant trend... in annual catastrophe loss since1970 of 2% per year’. IPCC authors only partially quoted the study (MuirWood et al, Rev, 2006) that formed the basis of this conclusion and ignored the fact that the high losses, according to the same authors, were due to strong hurricane seasons in 2004–05. The study, when published in 2008, had a new caveat ‘we find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature
increase and catastrophe losses’.
6. '55 per cent of Netherlands below sea level'. Only 26 per cent is, the rest is a figure 'at risk from flooding'.
7. Reduction in mountain ice. The IPCC report stated that the observed reductions in mountain ice in Andes, Alps and Africa were caused by global warming. This information was based on an article published in a magazine for mountaineers, based on anecdotal evidence about changes observed by mountaineers during their climb.
I know that's rater more than 3 or 4, so I guess you wouldn't want me to go on about methane and rice production?
Ahh George, ya coulda been a contender until you went all Moonbat on us.
diogenes
Given that Muller did a similar sort of thing, are we now going to see a number of alarmists suddenly pretend to be skeptics? Is this the new "battle plan"?
Interesting. Perhaps Hengist and Zed should check in at AGW headquarters for reindoctrination. They may well be obsolete.
I might suggest that they buy the Kindle version of HSI and READ it.
Priceless.
If it wasn't before, I'm sure it is now -- it lends itself to silly headlines like "Skeptic now believes in global warming" so it is a useful new bit of agit-prop which pampered middle-class alarmists like Monbiot will be sure to pick up on at some stage.
check the signatories at bottom, including BBC Pension Trust, churches galore, etc...
2011 Global Investor statement on climate change
This Statement is supported by 285 investors that represent assets of more than US$20 trillion
http://www.ceres.org/files/press-files/2011-global-investor-statement-on-climate-change/official-2011-global-investor-statement-on-climate-change
now for the Beeb & The Guardian:
Beeb questions nothing about this "internet survey":
24 Oct: BBC: Mark Kinver: Public supports geo-engineering ideas, study suggests
The internet survey was commissioned by researchers from North America.
The findings appear in the Environmental Research Letters journal...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15399832
Guardian allows a question on David Keith, but doesn't follow up Pidgeon or funding:
24 Oct: Guardian: Hanna Gersmann: Public supports geoengineering research, survey finds
First international survey on the perception of geoengineering finds 72% of respondents approve of research
The British, American and Canadian public is largely in favour of research into engineering the planet's climate to combat global warming, according to a study published on Monday. But critics said the paper was "not exactly disinterested science" because one of the authors is the founder and president of a geoengineering company...
But Jim Thomas from the Ottawa-based technology watch ETC Group, that campaigns against geoengineering, said: "This commissioned survey by a commercial company is not exactly disinterested science - it's more like a marketing exercise by a high profile geoengineering advocate and his students."
Thomas said that Keith (Prof David Keith of Harvard University) was "consistently on the record as a supporter of real world geoengineering experiments". He added: "Keith has designed 'self levitating' nanoparticles to be released in the upper atmosphere and managed a multi-million dollar private fund from Bill Gates from which he distributed monies to technicians developing geoengineering hardware to be used by private companies in experiments."
Keith is also the founder and president of Carbon Engineering, a geoengineering company with 10 employees funded with around $6m by Gates and tar sands oil magnate Murray Edwards...
He said that ETC Group was "attacking the messenger, not the message".
"We are happy to make all the survey materials publicly available. If the survey is wrong then ETC should work with a survey firm or an academic to produce a survey that contradicts these results. Our survey was reviewed by Nick Pidgeon, a leading expert on studying public reception," he said.
Ashley Mercer, co-author of the study at the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy at the University of Calgary, said: "I can assure you the funding sources did not bias this research or its design. The goal was to simply assess current understanding and provide baseline data on emerging attitudes."...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/24/geoengineering-survey-public-support?newsfeed=true
"leading expert" nick pidgeon:
11 June 2010: Guardian: David Adam: Confidence in climate science remains strong, poll shows
Survey shows 71% of Britons are concerned about climate, despite hacked emails, failure at Copenhagen and cold weather
"By no means has there been a collapse in confidence in climate science," said Professor Nick Pidgeon, who led the study...
The results come as a similar survey in the US shows that public concern about global warming is on the rise. The research, from experts at Yale and George Mason universities, showed that belief among the US public that global warming is happening has risen 4% since January, to 61%. Those who accept it is caused by human activity rose 3% to 50%. And the number of US citizens who said that the issue is personally important to them rose 5%, to 63%...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/11/confidence-climate-science-poll
Cardiff University, School of Psychology: Professor Nick Pidgeon
I am Professor of Environmental Psychology and Director of the Understanding Risk Research Group within the School
http://psych.cf.ac.uk/contactsandpeople/academics/pidgeon.html
Public understanding of solar radiation management
This work was supported by the Center for Climate and Energy
Decision Making (SES-0949710), through a cooperative
agreement between the National Science Foundation and
Carnegie Mellon University and the Fund for Innovative
Climate and Energy Research.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044006/pdf/1748-9326_6_4_044006.pdf
damn the MSM.
I have long been amused by claims that this or that river will run dry when the glaciers that feed it melt. Just a little thought about rivers would reveal that glaciers have little effect on a river. To make the point, any river can be chosen. It is not necessary that the river actually start in a glacier. As my example, I will choose the Mississippi River. The river begins in Minnesota and flows into the Gulf of Mexico about 100 miles south of New Orleans. What is the size of the Mississippi in Minnesota and what is its size in New Orleans? The volume of water found in the river at New Orleans is about 1000 times greater than it is in Minnesota. Where does the river get its great volume at New Orleans? From the gazillion tributaries that flow into it along the way. The same is true of all rivers that feed great fertile areas. If the flow at the source of the river is stopped there is negligible effect at the mouth of the river. Yes, there are some exceptions because some great rivers flow through quite a bit of desert landscape.
So Monbiot is guilty of pulling a Gleick. :-)
Next time Monbiot might read the paper before commenting on it ....
Hang on. Didn't Monbiot get his logic all arseways to start with?
If India does rely on "glacial melt" for water and food production, then "global warming" is essential for continued supply.
Any END to global warming and glacial melt would be the threat to water supply and food production wouldn't it?
So Monbiot is guilty of pulling a Gleick. :-)
"Next time Monbiot might read the paper before commenting on it ...."
Oct 25, 2011 at 5:05 AM | Ed Forbes
Nearly correct Ed. Rather than "Read the Paper" try "Read the press release before cutting and pasting".
Oct 24, 2011 at 10:51 PM | Bishop Hill
My point is that this place plays the man and not the ball. Look at the abuse heaped upon Peter Gleick - your comments were personal rather than dealing with the subject, and your commenters did this x10. This is a something I see constantly amongst people in your camp, and it reeks of an attempt at total credibility destruction.
However, the very next day, despite a happy 24 hours assassintating the guy's character, you spot a quote you can mine, and up it goes without a moment's acknowledgement.
It's inconsistent, and indicitative of your incoherant position.
OT For those inclined to give Muller and the BEST team the benefit of the doubt - Willis Eschenbach doesn't agree.
From WUWT:-
... the arrogance of Muller and his merry men knows no bounds. He got Anthony to lend him his Surfacestation data, and then broke a confidentiality agreement to traduce Anthony’s work in front of Congress, of all places. He knew it would get maximum media exposure there …
He also promised the most transparent, ethical, straightforward, purely scientific effort yet … then he goes and engages in shameless self-promotion prior to his work even passing peer review.
Me, I’ve had it up to here with being lied to by Muller, I’m fed up to my eye-teeth with his tricks and his whoring for the media. Sure, I could pretend Muller is an honest and honorable man like you recommend. But his actions have shown him to be a cunning snake. It is not my habit to address snakes as though they were honorable men.?
ZedsDeadBed
You just seem upset that when Gleick behaves ridiculously, childish and un-scientific, this gets pointed out here, yet when he also manages to act more grownup and scientific this gets pointed out here too. I don't see any incoherence in the Bish but I do in someone else ;)
The Bishop hits it on the nose! The last part of the second passage from Monbiot, from only two and a bit years ago, leaped out at me this morning as I read this for the first time.
One of the sayings of Jesus has to do with the evil things that flow out of the heart of man - finishing up with pride and foolishness. Those two always go together. And look, who were both proud and foolish here: George, the richer nations or poor little patronised India?
There is foolish pride and there's the other kind, when you stand up against the crowd, against the powerful and corrupt, and speak and act the truth. I'm sure it's not wrong to have a quiet sense of satisfaction at moments of vindication like this - what we also call in English a sense of pride. Such are the ambiguities of all human communication.
Whatever the linguistics, it's important to acknowledge that India has been leading the West in this area, both morally and scientifically - repudiating the railway engineer and his hangers on. Most critically it's been doing the right thing for its poorest. (The tragedy of the dalits being something to address another day.) It's time we all faced this fact, with true humility.
As for Monbiot, why the need to pile on? If he doesn't learn wisdom from this and many other incidents he will become a laughing stock. The Guardian will in turn lose readers if they persist with his ilk. The same with Gleick. He has shown sound judgment in this case. Good for him.
Patagon: "While that's true for othr regions, on the lower part of Himalayan glaciers there is actual melting and liquid water. Diurnal temperatures can be quite high and insolatin is very intense."
Thanks, it was late and I'd forgotten Lake Imja, which is at around 16,000 ft. Richard Betts has explained this to me before, but we couldn't engage long enough for me to get an explanation. This is my conundrum:
(1) Glaciers can retreat only by losing ice, there are two ways of doing this that I know of, one is ablation, and the other is melting.
(2) Loss of ice cannot take place through ablation if there is precipitation, I think, maybe I'm wrong so can be corrected.
(3) Ice cannot melt without insolation.
(4) Global warming will cause more moisture in the atmosphere.
5) Moisture will cause precipitation, so why are some glaciers retreating through ablation when there should be more precipitation?
(6) More moisture causes more clouds, so why aren't the clouds mitigating the insolation of the Himalayan glaciers? Where are they, or rather where's the forecast moisture?
Clearly I don't have a grasp of all this but it seems counter-intuitive to me that global warming would cause glacial recession unless the temperatures rose considerably more than they have at present.
Clearly there must be some mechanism in play here because the glaciers advance and recede on a regular basis, but global warming? Not sure.
Tx again.
I think your being a little hard on Monboit , does after all with his 30 year old 2:1 in Zoology represent CIF environmental TOTAL scientific qualifications. So his a lot of ground to cover and can't be expected to read all the things he comments on .
The insanity continues:
"Renewables could be UK's major power source by 2030: WWF
Report says up to 90% of electricity could come from wind, solar, tidal and other sustainable sources - without the need for nuclear"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/25/uk-renewables-2030-wwf
If the Himalayan glaciers did not do a bit of melting, their encroachment onto the playing fields of cricket and polo would cause havoc for the lawmakers. Duckworth-Lewis would seem like a picnic
It is typical of Monbiiot to overlook this important point in his zealous drive to support that which appears white, in the belief it may be green
We have here in microcosm what may well be a crucially important part of the big picture of alarmism over CO2. An emotionally highly-strung but very articulate commentator picks up a simple model (the Ganges comes from glaciers) and runs with it, emoting over all the direc consequences. The experts point out the errors or wild speculations, but who do they reach? How melodramatic is their writing, how good are their links within the mass media? On the big picture, how many otherwise decent and intelligent souls have been carried away starting from realising that yes, indeed, greenhouse do get very hot in the sun and gosh, CO2 makes the atmosphere act like a greenhouse, and the levels are rising, and, and, and...they soon talk themselves from a little piece of nonsense into massive extrapolations of dire consequences. But, and here's the rub, many find others are captivated by the alarm they bring and so they are encouraged to bring more.
geronimo,
A warmer atmosphere should cause a more intense monsoon and higher himalayan precipitation.
However, India monsoonal rainfall peaked in the 1940s and has declined since, which indicates decreased precip is as much the cause of glacier retreat as GW.
Zed
You said:
"My point is that this place plays the man and not the ball. Look at the abuse heaped upon Peter Gleick - your comments were personal rather than dealing with the subject, and your commenters did this x10. This is a something I see constantly amongst people in your camp, and it reeks of an attempt at total credibility destruction"
But you moved away from that point to state, "Very little indeed of IPCC reports has been in any way debunked." You even asked for any examples beyond the 'glacier boob' - "maybe 3 or 4?"
I gave you seven, all cited and all of which appeared in the InterAcademy Council Report. And that's before you get into any wider analysis of the failings or shortcomings in the papers relied upon in the report. Some of those have subsequently been 'debunked' (or, to get away from silly undergrad sniping, the findings have been rendered obsolete by later studies and review). Have you read HSI, by the way?
I hope you appreciate this is not 'playing the man', Zed. You've been fairly tackled and lost the ball.
Dis you get my advice on checking your email ID, BTW? Or was your 'finger up the bum' opus the usual case of leaving the computer logged in when juveniles are about?
(1) Glaciers can retreat only by losing ice, there are two ways of doing this that I know of, one is ablation, and the other is melting.
Sublimation and melting, ablation is just general loss of mass. For tidewater glaciers there is also calving, which can be the main mechanism for ablation.
(2) Loss of ice cannot take place through ablation if there is precipitation, I think, maybe I'm wrong so can be corrected.
Sublimation requires rather dry air, so it should be insignificant while precipitation is occurring
(3) Ice cannot melt without insolation.
It can if air teperature is high or through long wave radiation input from clouds. Whenever the energy balance is positive and surface temperature is already at melting point there should be melting
(4) Global warming will cause more moisture in the atmosphere.
That is the disputed simplistic hypothesis, see for example
Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data
Garth Paltridge & Albert Arking & Michael Pook
5) Moisture will cause precipitation, so why are some glaciers retreating through ablation when there should be more precipitation?
It changes from place to place, Kilimanjaro, for example is believed to be due to land use changes (deforestation), which caused decreased precipitation
(6) More moisture causes more clouds, so why aren't the clouds mitigating the insolation of the Himalayan glaciers? Where are they, or rather where's the forecast moisture?
Clouds can increase ablation, think that snow reflects most of the incoming short wave radiation from the sun but absorbs all the long wave from clouds.
A couple of introductory texts if you want to read more:
Glaciers and glaciation
Douglas I. Benn, David J. A. Evans
Physics of Glaciers, Third Edition
W. S. B. Paterson
While most Himalayan glaciers are retreating, in neighbouring Karakoram they have advancing and retreating phases e.g. http://tinyurl.com/3lp8vj4
@Philip Bradley: "However, India monsoonal rainfall peaked in the 1940s and has declined since, which indicates decreased precip is as much the cause of glacier retreat as GW."
Thanks Philip, that was my point I believe, none of this could have happened if GW was having the effect it should have, that is increasing the precipitation, or that least that's what we were all told by the Gorgeous George himself, that snow was a result of global warming because of all the precipitation it's causing. So why is there reduced precipitation in the Himalayas when it should be increasing according to the IPCC? Maybe Richard Betts will explain it to us if he picks up these posts.
'Bore, Get Mooing' as we call him down on the farm.
The trouble is, of course, the likes of George Monbiot get LISTENED TO by the political establishment - because he (and they) create the illusion that they know what they're talking about..! ('Oooh, really, George..? My goodness - we'd better get some new climate taxes going...')
However, in reality they know about as much as the guy who keeps predicting the end of the world - but they are very dangerous, nonetheless...
Zed - I see you're up and about. Any chance of an answer to my question on the Peter Foster thread? Or an answer to anyone else's questions, come to that...