Obama's news from the 1700s - The Glaciers are Melting!

Barack Obama is in Alaska and has discovered that the glaciers are melting.  Moreover, he wants you to believe it can be stopped if only you give the federal government vast new powers to tax and regulate you. This is a con.  It's not that glaciers aren't melting, but that it has been happening for a really long time and precedes the industrialization blamed by today's warmists.   

As a kid I remember learning about "the ice age".  As an adult I have come to learn there were probably tens of thousands of ice ages in geologic history spanning billions of years.  (UPDATE:  If scientists are right, earth is 4.5 billion years old.  We now know from ice cores at Vostok and Dome C that there is a major ice age every 100,000 years.  That means there may have been more than 45,000 massive global warmings in earth's history!)  Countless times the earth cooled, and countless times glaciers melted.  

Looking at the tiny speck of recorded history and trying to blame this all on manmade CO2 levels is like looking at a single cell from an elephant and trying to tell what it's great grandfather had for lunch!

Here, in it's entirety, is the piece by Jeff Dunetz who blogs at "The Lid", which spurred this post:  

Obama's Lying About The Alaskan Glaciers They've Been Melting For Three Centuries

Once again this president is lying to promote his global re-distribution of income policy also known as climate change.  Yesterday he visited the glaciers in Alaska (having been there...they are beautiful!).  He claimed that global warming was melting the glaciers---he is lying.  They've been melting since before the American Revolution. (Undiepundit update: they've been melting for over 10,000 years since the last temperature minimum.)  The good news is that the Arctic ice caps are growing:

- President Barack Obama walked down a winding wooded path, past a small brown post marked "1926" and a glacial stream trickling over gravel that eons of ice have scraped off mountain peaks.

He reached another post reading "1951", a marker for the edge of Alaska's Exit Glacier that year, and gazed up toward where the rock-rutted ice mass has since receded, a quarter mile away.

"This is as good a signpost of what we're dealing with on climate change as just about anything," Obama told reporters near the base of the glacier.

Glacial melting is nothing new, they have been receding before this country had a president.  Lets go back in history...take a look at this news article from 1952 which says the glaciers in Alaska had already lost half their size:

OK I hear you--1952 isn't early enough, how about 1923?

You want it even earlier, take a look at the map of Glacier Bay Alaska.  It shows where the glaciers are today vs. where they were up to at various points back to just before the American Revolution.  Unless Gen. Washington let the revolutionary army in SUVs there was no problem with greenhouse gasses back then.  In fact if you look at the map most of the melting took place before the 20th century.  Does Barack Obama really believe Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and melted the glaciers?

Note: the source of the three pictures above is Steven Goddard's Real ScienceBlog

Lets take a look at what's been happening since Obama was elected.  Check that, let's take a look at what's been happening since Bill Clinton was president. To be honest NOTHING.

That's right, the satellite monthly global mean surface temperature  shows no global warming for 18 years 7 months since January 1997 the last time Hillary Clinton was trolling around the White House. Note that yes there was warming before Jan. 97, and thanks to the El Nino there may be warming in the near future (at least until the La Niña starts or the lack of sunspot activity throws us into a mini ice age as some scientists are predicting).

Those claims of the hottest temperatures on record are "sort of"  true also. Firstly they are talking warmest by a hundredth of a degree. Secondly it uses land based temperature readings rather than satellite data. Climate scientists actually preferred the satellite data as being more accurate until it started disproving their global warming hypothesis.  (Undiepundit update: It's been much warmer, even in Earth's recent history.  Vikings farmed Greenland up until 500 years ago, which would not be possible today.  And when they first went to Iceland 1100 years ago, there were no glaciers on that island that is now largely covered by ice!) 

I hate to upset the president but the truth is the ice caps are growing. A July 2015 article in the U.K. Telegraph called "How Arctic ice has made fools of all those poor warmists" reported:

In recent years there has been more polar ice in the world than at any time since satellite records began in 1979. In the very year they had forecast that the Arctic would be “ice free”, its thickness increased by a third. Polar bear numbers are rising, not falling. Temperatures in Greenland have shown no increase for decades.

When the Telegraph talks about more polar ice since 1979, it is really talking about both poles combined as the Antarctic ice cap has been growing more substantially over that period.

The Arctic Ice had a period of melting but as reported in Nature Geoscience:

However, we observe 33% and 25% more ice in autumn 2013 and 2014, respectively, relative to the 2010–2012 seasonal mean, which offset earlier losses. This increase was caused by the retention of thick sea ice northwest of Greenland during 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 5% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred—conditions more typical of the late 1990s. In contrast, springtime Arctic sea ice volume has remained stable. 

In other words if the ice cap could talk it would say, "Baby I'm Back!"   It seems as if the Ice Cap size ebbs and flows for natural reasons and has nothing to do with CO2 in the air. That's why as the carbon in the atmosphere as been growing in the last century we've seen the ice grow, recede, and grow again.

In fact the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is at its highest level in almost13,000 years. Approximately 12,750 years ago before big cars and coal plants CO2 levels were higher than today. And during some past ice ages levels were up to 20x today's levels--ice ages, that's a lot of polar ice that didn't melt.

Obama talked about severe storms yesterday...another lie. No Increase In Hurricanes: A study published in the July 2012 in the journal of the American Meteorological Society concluded unequivocally there is no trend of stronger or more frequent storms, asserting:

We have identified considerable inter-annual variability in the frequency of global hurricane landfalls, but within the resolution of the available data, our evidence does not support the presence of significant long-period global or individual basin linear trends for minor, major, or total hurricanes within the period(s) covered by the available quality data.

Perhaps it's because he thinks news doesn't travel well from Alaska, but Barack Obama is lying about glacier shrinkage, about the ice caps, and about an increase in storms during his first trip to Alaska.