German flagship news magazine Der Spiegel reports here on new satellite measurements of Himalayan glaciers. Not long ago IPCC scientists, among them Prof. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber and train engineer Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, claimed with grave tones that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2030.
Hat-tip: a NTZ reader.
That, among other errors, fantasies and exaggerations, turned out to be a hugely embarrassing blunder for the IPCC stemming from one of the many bedwetting environmental activists who have long since infiltrated and compromised the IPCC process.
Spiegel starts with:
Surprise: The ice sheets of the Karakorum range in the Himalayas grew over the period from 2000 to 2008. The thickness over the period increased by more than ten centimeters. […] The glaciers of the world are shrinking faster and faster – that’s what many scientists tell us. However there are exceptions – and not only in Antarctica, but also in the Himalayas.”
Forget melting rapidly. It turns out that the Himalayan range is not even melting slowly. In fact it’s not melting at all! Indeed according to new satellite measurements they are growing. The once global warming is obviously becoming more and more local.
According to the abstract of the study conducted by French scientists Julie Gardelle, Etienne Berthier, and Yves Arnaud, published in Nature Geosciences here:
The regional mass balance is just positive at +0.11±0.22 m yr water equivalent and in agreement with the observed reduction of river runoff that originates in this area. Our measurements confirm an anomalous mass balance in the Karakoram region and indicate that the contribution of Karakoram glaciers to sea-level rise was −0.01 mm/yr for the period from 1999 to 2008, 0.05 mm yr lower than suggested before.”
Melting, we were told, was supposed to threaten the local water supply. Instead we now see that it is the lack of melting that is the real threat. Der Spiegel adds:
The first measurements were recorded by the US shuttle ‘Endeavour’ in February 2000 . The French satellite ‘SPOT5’ delivered the second set of data in 2008. The glacier comparison yielded a clear result: The thickness of the ice grew by more than 10 cm over the period.”
And reminds us:
Many of the ice sheets globally are shrinking, however they are melting more slowly than previously thought, as galciologists found out in February. On the poles the glaciers are more stable than in the early years; in the high mountains outside of Antarctica and Greenland, they are melting only half as fast as first thought.”
Finally, no model simulations up to now confirming that the Himalayan glacier growth is due to the accelerating global warming.
And there’s still no indication from the end-of-world modelers at various climate institutes that they are insisting that the real measurements must be faulty because their fined-tuned models are correct and superior.
I don’t see an English version of this at spiegle.de yet, I did notice this entertaining mistranslation (I assume it’s right in the german version) in http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,794124,00.html . It must be getting pretty toasty up there by now. Everest cimbers will be able to trade parkas for sun screen:
“Glacial loss is caused mainly by rises in temperature, especially in the high altitude regions,” lead researcher Zongxing Li said in the statement. Some 77 percent of the 111 weather stations included in the study showed an increase of temperature from 1961 to 2008. The 14 weather stations above 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) showed an annual mean temperature increase of 1.73 degrees Celsius in that time.
The data comes as no surprise to other scientists. Temperatures in the Alps have likewise increased by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius per year, and glaciers are melting worldwide. Still, Andreas Bauder, a glaciologist from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, pointed to a somewhat inconsistent data pool used in the Chinese study. “The time spans studied in the individual glacier areas are in part very different and thus difficult to compare with one another,” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
“Some 77 percent of the 111 weather stations included in the study showed an increase of temperature from 1961 to 2008.”
They always pick a period beginning in 1961. It’s like that date was the beginning of the world. Of course that was about when most of these “researchers” were born, so for them it was. 1961 was close to the coolest year in the last 80. If you measure from 1930 those numbers change dramatically.
The glaciers are growing because their…melting. It sounds like this one: There is Global Cooling because of man-made Global Warming 😆