Media Blames ‘Climate Change’ For Loss Of Venezuelan Glacier
Did you know that Venezuela’s last glacier was just demoted to an icefield? Or that this tropical, nearly equatorial, nation even had glaciers?
Well, it was and it did.
A reader asked us how to answer an alarmist claim that the demotion proves there’s a man-made ‘global heating crisis’, which of course is being bleated in unison by the herd of ‘independent’ media minds around the world.
None of whom of course hitherto knew or cared that said glacier even existed until it afforded this week’s opportunity to bang the climate apocalypse drum.
To which we said, as we usually do, check how long it’s been melting, because as a rule, the shrinking of glaciers demonstrates not that man is warming the planet but that the planet is warming man.
Then, and yes in true scientific fashion, we checked it ourselves to see if our hypothesis was sound. Si señor. It most certainly is.
The thing’s been melting since before World War I, most of the melting happened before World War II, and whenever the man-made ‘climate breakdown’ thingy hit, surely it wasn’t 1938.
The ex-glacier in question is the Humboldt Glacier, “struggling for survival in the Sierra Nevada National Park” according to the Times of India. Brave glacier! (And not to be confused with Greenland’s “Humboldt Glacier“.)
Mind you the South American one is not going to make it, given that Venezuela is not merely tropical but very nearly touches the equator, and is not a major mountaineering destination because its highest one, Pico Bolívar (not to be confused with Colombia’s Pico Simón Bolívar, a massive 5,730 meters high) tops out at just under 5,000 meters above sea level (4,978) and the ice field in question is on Pico Humboldt (please give now to alleviate the name shortage) at 4,925 meters.
Not where you’d store your ice if you cared about it.
Euronews.green complains that:
“Venezuela has lost its last glacier, making it the first nation in modern history to hold this unenviable record.
At least five other glaciers have disappeared in the South American country within the last century as climate change drives up temperatures in the Andes.
The country lost 98 per cent of its glacial area between 1952 and 2019, research shows.”
Note again that climate change is some weird mystical thing that surrounds us and penetrates us and causes temperatures to rise. It is not a description of them doing so. And of course when “research shows” mere citizens fall silent.
Despite this we did go and look at the actual research and, persevering down to Figure 5, found this map proving we were completely right all along and these journalists don’t know how to fact-check:
It’s a nice piece of work graphically speaking, with bright colors easy to follow, based on a reconstruction of the various glaciers going back to 1910, and the key here is that all the purple stuff is what melted between 1910 and 1952.
Big splotches, aren’t they? And look at the other two areas: they were half gone by 1952 and dwindled to specks or vanished by 1998, a full 26 years ago (the blue stuff being what vanished between 1952 and 1998).
Showing crucially that major melting started over a century ago, at a minimum.
We don’t know what happened before 1910 because ice doesn’t leave much in the way of a fossil record.
The pattern of Venezuelan glaciers is not anomalous. Rather, all glaciers have been retreating for centuries, with most of the melting predating the recent past.
Where we know in more detail, most of it happened before the 19th century. For instance, look at the map of Alaska’s famed glaciers published by W.S. Cooper in 1923 (below) and compare the ice extent in Alaska’s Muir Inlet as of 1880, compared to 1916.
Or the Reid and Torr inlets from 1879 to 1916:
Or, for a prettier version, look at this 2013 brochure given to one of us when we visited:
Look at the ice in 1750 and 1880, and then from 1880 to today. There was some mighty ‘climate change’ back in George Washington’s day, that’s for sure.
But not by us and our horse-drawn buggies. As is also true of the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand, in case anyone tries to tell you the Little Ice Age was regional.
All of this does not prove that something weird started in 1958, 1988, or 2000, or whatever the alarmists currently claim. On the contrary, it proves the exact opposite.
We are in a long-term warming trend that is overwhelmingly natural unless you believe that human CO2 not only causes artificial heating but shuts off the natural kind through some hitherto unknown process incompatible with the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them.
People get it wrong all the time because they’re so dogmatically certain that they do not check either facts or reasoning.
As we noted back in 2020, claims that the shrinking of France’s largest glacier was “irrefutable proof of global warming” were dead wrong.
It was the opposite.
The glacier had grown dramatically in the 18th century, peaked around 1850, and then shrank dramatically.
Glacier disappearance goes back much farther than 1800, too. As one paper safely published back in 1992 put it, concerning Hannibal’s apparently eccentric decision to bring elephants through the Alps:
“By the 3rd century BC the Alpine glaciers were in a backward position compared with their position in 900-350 BC.
This fact and the mildness of the climate, inferred from tree-ring analyses, suggest that ice conditions were not severe in the Alps in 218 BC.”
And the two main primary sources, Livy and Polybius, stress the appalling geography of whichever pass or passes he used but do not mention ice or glaciers. So possibly some countries that now have at least residual glaciers did not then.
Which again rather proves our point.
Nowadays everybody’s so sure of the opposite that they find it whether it’s there or not.
The research that says claims that:
“Glacier retreat in mountainous regions has accelerated worldwide within the last fifty years, triggering efforts to document what will soon become legacy landscapes (Barry 2006; Zemp et al. 2015; Huss et al. 2017).
In the tropical Andes, the rate of glacier retreat after 1950 is above the world’s average, with a notable increase after 1970 (Rabatel et al. 2013; Veettil and Kamp 2017).”
And nobody saw it coming that the place they were studying would be going up in flames faster than the average. But the rest of the statement is also nonsense.
They have no idea what the rate of retreat of the glaciers in this region was before 1900 so they can’t compare it to the present.
Besides what “rate” are they talking about? Distance? Volume? Percentage? If the latter it’s a cheat, because of course as it gets smaller, the rate of percentage decrease will accelerate.
But as we’ve shown before, only an insane person would maintain that the rate of glacier retreat in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park was slower 200 years ago than recently, or that it doesn’t have mountains.
Wikipedia predictably claims that:
“Most of New Zealand’s large glaciers shrank significantly towards the end of the 20th century, a consequence of global warming.”
But after that ritual genuflection, it blurts out that:
“Franz Josef Glacier advanced rapidly during the Little Ice Age, reaching a maximum in the early 18th century.
When Haast became the first European to see the glacier it was still much longer than today, and the ice surface was 300 m higher.
Between its first official mapping in 1893 and a century later in 1983, Franz Josef Glacier retreated 3 km up the valley.”
Note the “still”. That mapping was in 1893 and it had already retreated an enormous distance.
Like the Humboldt, it responded to natural warming long ago, and the fact that it still is doesn’t mean the warming suddenly started recently or changed its nature and cause.
It means it’s a continuation of a long, natural, cyclical rebound from the Little Ice Age.
https://principia-scientific.com/media-blames-climate-change-for-loss-of-venezuelan-glacier/
**************************************************Guardian Removes Article Claiming Renewables are Cheap
Regular readers of my Substack might recall that back in April, I wrote an article rebutting a blatant piece of propaganda that appeared in an advertorial in the Guardian, paid for by the National Grid.
I complained to both the Guardian and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and there is both good news and bad news to report.
The good news is the ASA appear to have taken a dim view of the article. Its response noted that the article has now been removed from the Guardian’s website and it said:
We have decided to resolve your complaint through the provision of advice to the advertiser. Therefore, we have explained the concerns raised to the advertiser and provided it with guidance on how to ensure that its advertising complies with the Codes both now and in future.
It is not clear whether the withdrawal of the article is related to the “advice” it gave or whether it is merely a coincidence. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that renewables are an expensive source of power and false claims can no longer be made in the press.
I think we should chalk this up as some sort of victory.
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New Survey Reveals Just How Unmotivated Americans Are To Purchase EVs
The Biden administration is aggressively pushing electric vehicles (EVs) on Americans, but consumers do not seem to be especially enthused about buying them, according to a new poll.
While 46% of respondents indicated that they are unlikely or very unlikely to purchase an EV, 21% said that they are “very” or “extremely” likely to purchase an EV for their next vehicle, and 21% said they are “somewhat” likely to buy an EV, according to the results of a new poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule in March that will require EVs to make up 56% of all new car sales on top of 13% for plug-in hybrids or partially electric models come 2032.
Respondents who are not inclined to purchase an EV identified several issues motivating their skepticism, according to the results of the AP’s poll. About half of adults point to concerns about EVs’ range as a major reason for not buying one, while approximately 40% identify charging time or uncertainty about nearby charging stations as problems. (RELATED: Biden Says That Americans Can Buy Any Car They Want. His Admin Is Forcing EVs To Be Huge Share Of Sales By 2032)
The Biden administration is spending $7.5 billion to help build out a national network of EV charging infrastructure, but those funds have only produced a handful of operational charging stations to date. The nation’s charging systems remain concentrated mostly in densely-populated coastal regions, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).
New EVs cost $52,314 on average as of February, according to the AP, while the average gas-powered compact crossover sets buyers back approximately $35,722, according to Edmunds. Nearly 60% of adults also cite the cost of EVs as a major reason not to get one.
Interest in EVs also varies by age, with more than half of respondents under the age of 45 indicating that they are at least “somewhat” likely to think about buying an EV compared to about 32% of respondents over the age of 45, according to the poll’s results.
The poll sampled 6,265 adults between March 26 and April 1o using a combination of interviews and online panels, according to the AP. The poll’s margin of error was 1.7%.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/04/biden-electric-vehicles-american-consumers-poll/
************************************************UK: Labour’s energy claims are ‘divorced from reality’
The Labour Party is saying that its energy policies – a rapid decarbonisation of the electricity system – will save consumers money. The claim is apparently based on an October 2023 report by Ember,[1] which says that a decarbonised electricity system can reduce bills by £300 per household.
However, the report also says[2] that the authors are assuming that windfarms in the future will secure ‘the same price as [Contracts for Difference] auction round 4’. The prices achieved in Round 4 (£37.50) are around half the price (£73/MWh) currently on offer to offshore windfarms in Round 6 [3]. And industry insiders are suggesting that even the latter figure may be inadequate.[4]
In other words, Labour’s savings rely on assuming that wind power costs half of what it actually does.
A second problem Labour’s putative savings figure is that Ember’s report compares bills in their hypothetical decarbonised electricity system against bills in the third quarter of 2023, which were still inflated by the Ukraine war.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
Labour’s claim of a reduction in household bills is based on figures that are entirely divorced from today’s reality.
And Mr Montford continued by calling for a new reality-based debate on Net Zero.
When it comes to energy policy, the political establishment is operating in a fact-free void. For the sake of the country, they need to start asking very hard questions about what they are being told by civil servants and environmental activists like Ember.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/labour-divorced-from-reality
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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