Posted by Laura Glendinning in News and Analysis on November 30, 2009
LOS ANGELES (YBH.ME) As the Climategate hacked emails leave the headlines and blogosphere a bit, new climate change data questions have arisen to cast even more pre-Copenhagen doubt. A cornerstone of the global carbon regulation push has been high concern about evidence that glaciers are retreating worldwide. Glaciers are a crucial source of the Earth’s stored water. The “star” glacier, if you will, has been the Himalayan Saichen glacier, 74 km long and the largest outside the polar regions.
A glacier is a slow moving ice mass.
India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has released a comprehensive report on the Himalayan glaciers by the eminent Dr. V.K. Raina, ex-Deputy Director of the Geological Survey of India. According to his report, the Saichen glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” In fact, it is growing. Even Richard Armstrong, Senior Research Scientist at the University of Colorado, and the man who briefed Al Gore on glaciers, concluded there was no major melting in Himalayan glaciers above 5,400 meters. Professor Armstrong’s research, as is typical in the field, uses satellite-gathered data. Dr. Raina and his team actually physically sampled 20 of the 200 Himalayan glaciers over a period of many years. They found little “snout” retreat, if any. The snout is the longest extension of a glacier – the finger. They also found no discernible pattern to glacier melt rates. As Raina put it, “ultimately the movements [of glaciers] are due to climate and snowfall in particular, but the factors are so varied that the snout movements appear to be peculiar to each particular glacier.”
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report had concluded Himalayan glaciers were receding at such a fast rate they could be gone by 2035 or earlier. Raina’s report acknowledges general glacier retreat, but finds no evidence of direct causation by carbon emission. Some glaciers even grew during periods of increased industrialization.
Climate warriors on both sides of the debate are weighing in on Dr. Raina’s research. Cliff Ollier, author of seminal textbooks “Volcanoes” and “The Origin of Mountains”, and a contributor to “The Oxford Companion to Earth” had this to say:
Dr Raina’s data suggest that the position of a glacier snout results from several factors. What is evidence to deny this and show that the position of the glacier snouts is controlled by global warming, and anthropogenically [man made] induced warming at that?
Supporters of climate change theory are trying hard to downplay the Climategate emails, and the glacier evidence is either barely registering with major news outlets, or being explained away as an aberration.