Congress Renames Glacier National Park

December 17th, 2012 | Posted by The Green Man in Environment | Legislation - (0 Comments)

There won’t be glaciers in Glacier National Park for much longer.

Why? The burning of fossil fuels, including natural gas, has pumped extreme amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing the warming of temperatures around the globe, and leading directly to the rapid melting of the glaciers in Glacier National Park.

How has Congress responded? By passing comprehensive legislation to slow down climate change? No.

Congress has responded to the crisis of global warming caused by burning fossil fuels by passing legislation to make it easier for people to burn more fossil fuels. Today, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass H.R. 4606, a law that enables pipelines carrying natural gas to run across Glacier National Park, so that people can burn the gas and release even more carbon dioxide into the air.

fossil fuel pipeline

In effect, if not in literal legal code, the U.S. House of Representatives has just voted to rename Glacier National Park, giving it the new name of Fossil Fuel Pipeline National Park.

Only 10 members of the U.S. House had the decency to vote against H.R. 4606. Their names are:

Yvette Clarke
William Lacy Clay
John Conyers
Donna Edwards
Sam Farr
Dennis Kucinich
John Lewis
Stephen Lynch
James McDermott
Jose Serrano

Everyone else, Republicans and Democrats, voted to let the fossil fuel pipeline lay across the National Park.

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Nuth! Moholdt! Svalbard! New Paper on Glacial Thinning

June 2nd, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Environment | Outside the USA | Science - (9 Comments)

A paper published two months ago in the Journal of Geophysical Research by Norwegian researchers Christopher Nuth and Geir Moholdt takes the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), previously used to study glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, and turns its gaze upon glaciers in the Arctic island group of Svalbard (population 2,067). ICESat data is used to augment more laborious estimates from previous research.

There’s a lot of detail to the paper, of course, but the researchers’ bottom-line finding is that overall the Svalbard glaciers are losing ice at the rate of 9.71 +/- 0.53 cubic kilometers in volume per year. The recent rate of ice volume loss (1990-2005) for the various glaciers is as much as double the rate of loss earlier in the 20th century (1936-1990). Put in 2-D terms, another paper by Nuth reveals that the glaciers had already lost 16% of their area from 1936-2004.

Between the various glaciers of the Svalbard archipelago, it turns out there’s a fair amount of variability, with glaciers in the south of Svalbard melting most quickly and some small glaciers in the northeast of Svalbard actually accumulating volume over the period. A map from p. 11 of the paper shows this variability:

Nuth et al 2010 map of Svalbard glacial volume changes

I find this sort of research to be really interesting, using space-based instruments to study what’s happening in remote, decreasingly icy places. But I also must admit I’m sharing this information with you because I enjoy speaking the name “Svalbard.”

Svalbard!

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Greenland Melting Further North, Scientists Find

March 24th, 2010 | Posted by The Green Man in Environment | Science - (0 Comments)

Today brings yet more evidence that, in spite of the fact that there was a snowstorm in the middle of the winter this year, global warming continues as a part of a larger trend in worldwide climate change. Measurements of glaciers in Greenland show that melting that has been taking on the southern part of the island is now being joined by increased melting of glaciers further to the north.

Those who suspect that climatologists have been incorrect in their predictions of global warming have been right, it turns out. The Greenland glacial melt is taking place faster than had been predicted. “These changes on the Greenland ice sheet are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated,” commented Isabella Velicogna, a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who participated in the study.

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Greenland Melting Getting Worse, Faster

June 12th, 2009 | Posted by The Green Man in Environment | Science - (8 Comments)

In spite of all the promises we heard last year about how the Democrats in Congress about how they would inaugurate a new generation of sustainable energy in order to fight the global climate change caused by the 20th Century’s fossil fuel economy, we’re getting new energy legislation that looks an awful lot like what Bush and Cheney were hoping for, with expanded offshore drilling and other dirty energy sources such as Canada’s tar sands.

There are real consequences to the Democrats’ assistance with the Republicans’ backwards energy policy. We’re seeing those consequences in places like Greenland. A study just published finds that the glaciers of Greenland are now melting at a rate even faster than previously believed.

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