Summary: Climate activists provide journalists with vivid stories about global warming, inciting public action to regulate CO2 emissions. Such as the recent surge of articles describing the melting Lyell Glacier in Yosemite Park as warnings of our future. They misrepresent the science by conflating natural and anthropogenic warming, an example of activists’ tactics which have failed despite decades of effort.
The Lyell Glacier in Yosemite Park is one of climate activists’ “poster children” for global warming. Recently there has been another surge of articles such as “Glacier was once Yosemite’s largest; now it’s almost gone” by Tom Stienstra in the San Francisco Chronicle of 16 October 2015…
The glacier has lost about 90% of its volume and 80% of its surface area from 1883 to 2015, according to Stock and Peter Devine, a naturalist with the Yosemite Conservancy who has studied the Lyell Glacier for 30 years. Stock and a crew of geologists measured the perimeter of the glacier with a GPS in the last week of September.
“’I think about John Muir a lot up there on the glacier,’ Stock said. ‘I try to envision what it was like when Muir was here. It would have been so different. I think about what (Francois) Matthes (of the U.S. Geological Survey) said in 1935, about why we need to measure our glaciers, that glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate change.’
“… At one point, Devine turned to get one last glimpse of the Lyell Glacier. ‘It’s like saying goodbye to an old friend,’ Devine said. ‘It’s hard to believe that the glacier that John Muir found and that I’ve loved for most of my life looks like it will be gone.’”
Other recent examples are “You Can Barely Even See Yosemite’s Largest Glacier Anymore” by Ria Misra at GIZMODO and “Incredible images show how the Lyell Glacier has lost nearly 80% of its surface area since 1883” at the Daily Mail. An older example is “Yosemite’s largest ice mass is melting fast” by Louis Sahagun in the LAT of 1 October 2013.
These show one of the major climate scams: describing the effects of two centuries of warming as purely anthropogenic (see other examples below). In fact much of the warming of the past two centuries is a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. Our CO2 emissions skyrocketed after WWII (see data here), becoming a major driver of warming. Which is why the IPCC’s AR5 says “It is extremely likely (95 – 100% certain) that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010.” (See this for details.). Attributing all glacial melting to our actions is a material misrepresentation of the facts.
About the Lyell Glacier
The Chronicle’s graph shows only part of the record. How long has the glacier existed? When did it start shrinking? How much of the shrinking occurred before 1950? The National Park Service website about the Lyell Glacier gives some answers. It is several thousand years old; in 1885 it was near its maximum extent.
… the earliest documentation of the Lyell and Maclure Glaciers occurred near the peak of the Little Ice Age (circa 1300-1850 AD). The first map of the glaciers, published in Russell (1885), indicates that the glaciers were up against the Little Ice Age moraines. It is also correct that the glaciers were considerably smaller before the Little Ice Age, and were quite likely non-existent during the middle Holocene {7 – 5,000 years ago}.
The Lyell Glacier has receded in surges, as shown by this map of the past 80 years. It shrank rapidly in the warming of the 1930s and 1940s, as the USGS described in its atlas of satellite images of glaciers (1998)…
“In 1947 the DWPB visited the glacier to see whether it might be suitable for inclusion in their network. It was found to have receded so much that what was left of the forefoot was too steep for their purpose … {in 1930 the terminus was in a proglacial lake.} By 1953 the terminus was 60 meters beyond the beyond the lakeshore and some 4 meters above its surface.”
Recession of the Lyell Glacier since 1933
Conclusions
The answer to the title is: we are responsible for some of the melting of Lyell and other glaciers, but not — as these articles imply — all.
For 27 years (since James Hansen’s famous Senate testimony) the American public has heard many exaggerations and misrepresentations of climate science, while most climate scientists sit quietly (another example: the misrepresented basis for most of the scary predictions beloved by activists and journalists). The IPCC was once the “gold standard” description of climate science research; by 2011 activists were saying it was “too conservative” (e.g., see Inside Climate News, The Daily Climate, and Yale’s Environment 360).
This has failed to create strong support for policy action: polls consistently show climate change near or at the bottom of the public’s policy priorities. Perhaps activists and scientists should consider a change of tactics. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous (people who know all about dysfunctionality)…
Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.
Another example
Obama used Alaska’s melting glaciers as tangible evidence of anthropogenic climate change. As with Lyell glacier in Yosemite, the actual story is more complex — with melting beginning when the Little Ice Age ended, long before anthropogenic CO2 levels surged after WWII. As shown in this table from an article by Susan Huse, a biologist for the Alaskan Support Office of the National Park Service.
Other posts about activist scientists misrepresenting science
- “Climate change is slowly but steadily cooking the world’s oceans” — Spoiler: no.
- About RCP8.5: Is our certain fate a coal-burning climate apocalypse? No!
- Are we “choking the ocean with plastic”? — Spoiler: no.
- The New Yorker’s “The Siege of Miami” reveals a serious problem.
For More Information
What’s been done wrong in the campaign for policy action to fight climate change. Here is a first step to restarting the debate.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See these posts about activists misrepresenting the effects of climate change…
- Kevin Drum talks about global warming, shows why the Left’s credibility has collapsed — An example from 2012 of conflating natural and anthropogenic warming.
- Mother Jones sounds the alarm about global warming! This time about the north pole.
- Alaska’s climate scientists tell us the rest of the news, what Obama forgot to mention.
- “Climate change is slowly but steadily cooking the world’s oceans” — Spoiler: no.
- Are we “choking the ocean with plastic”? — Spoiler: no.
- The New Yorker’s “The Siege of Miami” reveals a serious problem.
- Alaska’s climate scientists tell us the rest of the news, what Obama forgot to mention.