GLOBAL WARMING - Cause of Pacific Northwest glacier retreat

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PACIFIC NORTHWEST GLACIER RETREAT - IS IT GLOBAL WARMING?

Written August 28, 2001 By Joe D'Aleo Chief WSI/INTELLICAST Meteorologist

In recent years, we have heard how the polar ice caps and mid- and low- latitude mountain glaciers are disappearing, and this was yet more proof of "global (greenhouse gas) warming."

In a recent story, "Are the Icecaps Really Melting", we showed that if you really look in detail at polar temperature trends and the actual observed changes in the polar ice cover, polar temperatures were not warming, but in many cases actually cooling and that the ice caps were, in recent years, growing not shrinking. We clearly found in the data, decadal-scale oscillations, which seemed to relate well to decadal-scale ocean circulation changes as Bill Gray and others have proposed.

Most of the world's glaciers have been in at least intermittent retreat ever since the end of the last ice age. This is true in the mountainous Pacific Northwest. The retreat there is said to have accelerated in recent years, and this meltdown has been attributed to "global warming."

As in the case of the Polar Regions, annual temperature plots in rural areas of the Northwest generally show decadal scale oscillations, but the trend shows no runaway global warming.

-- Anonymous, August 31, 2001


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