Planet Earth Does Not "Lose" Ice

Breaking news: planet Earth does not "lose" ice or water.  Ice either melts into water and is stored in the oceans, lakes, rivers, atmosphere or underground reservoirs.  When ice is not melting, water is being added to glaciers as snow and ice.  This cycle of cooling and warming, melting and freezing, has been going on essentially since the creation of the Earth.  Note this has been going on longer and is controlled by forces far greater than humans burning fossil fuels.

Here is a summary of what is known as the Earth's Hydrologic Cycle, taken from this blog.  You can do a search of this blog and find much more.
Peter

The Earth's Hydrologic (Water) Cycle - Pete'sPlace

Jan 24, 2008

It seems a refresher course in the basics of the Earth's hydrologic cycle is in order. First of all, it needs to be understood that there is a finite, or relatively fixed amount of water on or in the Earth. This does not, has not, and can ...

http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/

Chilling Report: Earth Loses 300 Billion Tons of Ice Each Year

Takepart.com – 6 hrs ago

It is amazing to see because it feels so clearly out of place, but in some spots along Antarctica’s coast you can actually find hints of grass and other plant life—green evidence that in parts of the long-frozen continent the ice is thinning, and fast.

 

But just how much ice is being lost? A new, ten-year study conducted by Bristol University’s Glaciology Centre says that between Antarctica and Greenland, the answer is 300 billion tons a year.
That’s a lot of ice cubes.

In scientific terms, a decade makes for a short study; this one can’t forecast whether this kind of loss will sustain into the future. (Though reasoned experts believe it will and may even accelerate.) But if it continues at this pace, goodbye Miami, Hong Kong, New York City, etc., as well as the homes of hundreds of millions who live on estuaries, deltas, coral atolls and great city river basins around the globe.

The two massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica combined—the ice in Antarctica is three miles thick at some places—contain 99.5 percent of the earth’s glacier ice. If it were all to melt (which would admittedly take centuries), sea levels would rise by 500 to 600 feet.

I’ve been to Antarctica on a couple dozen different trips, mostly along it’s long, skinny Peninsula, which because it is surrounded by warming ocean on both sides is the area most-impacted by the planet’s changing climate. It’s there each austral summer that more shorelines are exposed thanks to disappearing ice, and where you find hints of plant life. (How did the seeds get there? Most likely hitchhiking on fishing boats and visiting tourist ships, both growing in numbers.)

Another satellite study, conducted over the past 20 years by NASA and the European Space Agency, confirms the Bristol study, reporting that the planet’s ice sheets have melted faster in the last 20 years than in the last 10,000.

According to this study, melting ice from both poles has been responsible for a fifth of the global rise in sea levels since 1992. The rest was caused by the thermal expansion of the warming ocean, the melting of mountain glaciers, small Arctic ice caps and groundwater mining. The share of the polar ice melt, however, is rising and most concerning.

When it comes to Antarctica, though, it can be tricky to generalize. It is a huge continent; the U.S. could easily fit inside its borders. In the huge area of East Antarctica, where the ice is mostly above sea level, the air temperature is also much lower, and the experts do not expect the ice to melt on account of rising temperatures. In this part of Antarctica, the ice sheet is actually growing as a consequence of increased snowfall.

But today, using a variety of satellite reports and on-the-ice studies that have been going on for many decades, even conservative scientists say sea levels are rising 60 percent faster than what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2007.

Coming Ice Age?

The debate about climate change cuts both ways. Is it warming or cooling? This is not merely an academic argument when the government wants to "cap and trade" carbon dioxide emissions, which is merely a thinly disguised tax, projected to cost taxpayers BILLIONS. We need to carefully think these things out.
Peter

The Coming Ice Age
(source)

By David Deming

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously. On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously. For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began. Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

We don't know what causes ice ages to begin or end. In 1875, a janitor turned geologist, James Croll, proposed that small variations in Earth's orbit around the Sun were responsible for climate change. This idea enjoyed its greatest heyday during the 1970s, when ocean sediment cores appeared to confirm the theory. But in 1992, Ike Winograd and his colleagues at the US Geological Survey falsified the theory by demonstrating that its predictions were inconsistent with new, high-quality data.

The climate of the ice ages is documented in the ice layers of Greenland and Antarctica. We have cored these layers, extracted them, and studied them in the laboratory. Not only were ice ages colder than today, but the climates were considerably more variable. Compared to the norm of the last million years, our climate is remarkably warm, stable and benign. During the last ice age in Greenland abrupt climatic swings of 30 °F were common. Since the ice age ended, variations of 3 °F are uncommon.

For thousands of years, people have learned from experience that cold temperatures are detrimental for human welfare and warm temperatures are beneficial. From about 1300 to 1800 AD, the climate cooled slightly during a period known as the Little Ice Age. In Greenland, the temperature fell by about 4 °F. Although trivial, compared to an ice age cooling of 50 °F, this was nevertheless sufficient to wipe out the Viking colony there.

In northern Europe, the Little Ice Age kicked off with the Great Famine of 1315. Crops failed due to cold temperatures and incessant rain. Desperate and starving, parents ate their children, and people dug up corpses from graves for food. In jails, inmates instantly set upon new prisoners and ate them alive.

The Great Famine was followed by the Black Death, the greatest disaster ever to hit the human race. One-third of the human race died; terror and anarchy prevailed. Human civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate. Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.

The oscillation between ice ages and interglacial periods is the dominant feature of Earth's climate for the last million years. But the computer models that predict significant global warming from carbon dioxide cannot reproduce these temperature changes. This failure to reproduce the most significant aspect of terrestrial climate reveals an incomplete understanding of the climate system, if not a nearly complete ignorance.

Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models. But our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. In this case, it would be perspicacious to listen to the geologists, not the meteorologists. By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration's announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.

Earth's climate is controlled by the Sun. In comparison, every other factor is trivial. The coldest part of the Little Ice Age during the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the nearly complete absence of sunspots. And the Sun now appears to be entering a new period of quiescence. August of 2008 was the first month since the year 1913 that no sunspots were observed. As I write, the sun remains quiet. We are in a cooling trend. The areal extent of global sea ice is above the twenty-year mean.

We have heard much of the dangers of global warming due to carbon dioxide. But the potential danger of any potential anthropogenic warming is trivial compared to the risk of entering a new ice age. Public policy decisions should be based on a realistic appraisal that takes both climate scenarios into consideration.

David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

COMMENTS:

Archaeologists Recognize Past Climate Change

Geologists are not the only scientists who study and measure past climate change. Archaeologists continually learn more about climate change and how it greatly influenced human evolution and the growth of civilization. The following article is an excellent example of this.

Of course the cause of these often dramatic and rapid climate changes, both warming and cooling, had little to do with human activity and certainly nothing to do with the burning of "fossil fuels" like coal, oil, and gas. How these indisputable facts escape modern climate "modelers" who predict "catastrophic" global warming or climate change is a shocking oversight. Carbon dioxide emissions from "fossil fuels" had nothing to do with these changes, not then, and not now.

The following article adds to our knowledge of how ancient man evolved during the last Ice Age and followed the melting glaciers northward, dealing with constant climate change and rising sea levels. As these early humans moved they followed the animals they hunted for the meat needed to survive. This is all clear beyond a doubt. Sorry PETA, but humans evolved and survived by eating meat.
Peter

14,000-year-old hunting kit found in Scotland
Tools may have been used to hunt and prepare big game from the region
By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery Channel (source)
Archaeologists have just identified the oldest evidence for humans in Scotland, a fairly sophisticated 14,000-year-old toolkit that may have been used to hunt and prepare big game from the region.

According to a report in the latest British Archaeology, the flint artifacts constitute the most northern evidence for the earliest people in Britain.

Alan Saville, senior curator of Earliest Prehistory at National Museums Scotland, worked on the project. He told Discovery News that the toolkit find is "exciting" for two main reasons.
"Firstly, it pushes back the earliest occupation of Scotland by some 3,000 years, and is the first real evidence for Upper Paleolithic open-air settlement occupation north of the English Midlands," he said.

"Secondly, it appears to represent a technological variant which has not been recognized anywhere else in Britain," he added, explaining that the style of the tools matches hunting implements from southern Denmark and northern Germany.

It's now believed people from those regions made their way to Scotland via a large land bridge called Doggerland, which connected the island of Great Britain to mainland Europe during the last ice age. The individuals in this case likely belonged to the Hamburg culture, known for its reindeer-hunting prowess.

Early Scotland supported herds of reindeer, along with mammoths, rhinos, horses and other large animals. The climate "fluctuated wildly" at the end of the ice age, resulting in more moderate temperatures, but also icy cold snaps that caused the reappearance of glaciers in the highlands.

Scientists unearthed the prehistoric tools in a field at Howburn Farm, Elsrickle, South Lanarkshire, in the southern part of Scotland.
"The tool types involve particularly a couple of tanged points (projectile heads), but also burins, end-of-blade scrapers, and a piercer of so-called Zinken-type, as well as there being evidence for a certain type of blade-core preparation technique known as en eperon," Saville said.

A burin was a flaked rock tool with a chisel-like edge probably used to remove flesh from bone. "Eperon" means "spur" in French. Here it refers to a blade with a thick-ended butt at one end.
The toolkit suggests there were at least two major technologies in early Britain: Hamburgian and Creswellian. The latter was characterized by "Cheddar points," tools with trapezoidal-backed blades.

Saville thinks early hunters followed migrating herds of big game beasts, "and that human groups would follow these migrations of what was a major food source for the time."
He added, "We have no way of calculating numbers or densities, but the general assumption must be that inhabitation was low-level and sporadic."

Archaeologist Mike Pitts, editor of British Archaeology, suggested to Discovery News that the nature of this find — researchers simply digging up flint tools at a Scottish farm — shows "what you can do without a lot of expensive technology or lengthy project designs." He said he made similar discoveries "while still at school walking over ploughed fields."
Residents and visitors to Scotland might therefore do well to look downward while walking, as they could stumble upon the next big archaeological find.
"In Scotland now," Pitts said, "the search is on for sites of this age with well-preserved stratigraphy that would hold out hope for seeing just what these people (the first Scots) then were doing."

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Did Not End The Last Ice Age

Here is yet another study supporting the vast amount of evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing global warming and climate change.
Peter

BREAKING NEWS!
from: http://www.junkscience.com/

Carbon dioxide did not end the last Ice Age
Media Release, University of California
9-27-07 1400 ET

Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records.
"There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change," said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express.
"You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages."

Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found. The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown - but was not its main cause.
"I don't want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn't affect climate," Stott cautioned. "It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change."

While an increase in atmospheric CO2 and the end of the ice ages occurred at roughly the same time, scientists have debated whether CO2 caused the warming or was released later by an already warming sea.
The best estimate from other studies of when CO2 began to rise is no earlier than 18,000 years ago. Yet this study shows that the deep sea, which reflects oceanic temperature trends, started warming about 19,000 years ago.
"What this means is that a lot of energy went into the ocean long before the rise in atmospheric CO2," Stott said.

But where did this energy come from" Evidence pointed southward.
Water's salinity and temperature are properties that can be used to trace its origin - and the warming deep water appeared to come from the Antarctic Ocean, the scientists wrote.
This water then was transported northward over 1,000 years via well-known deep-sea currents, a conclusion supported by carbon-dating evidence.
In addition, the researchers noted that deep-sea temperature increases coincided with the retreat of Antarctic sea ice, both occurring 19,000 years ago, before the northern hemisphere's ice retreat began.

Finally, Stott and colleagues found a correlation between melting Antarctic sea ice and increased springtime solar radiation over Antarctica, suggesting this might be the energy source.
As the sun pumped in heat, the warming accelerated because of sea-ice albedo feedbacks, in which retreating ice exposes ocean water that reflects less light and absorbs more heat, much like a dark T-shirt on a hot day.
In addition, the authors' model showed how changed ocean conditions may have been responsible for the release of CO2 from the ocean into the atmosphere, also accelerating the warming.

The link between the sun and ice age cycles is not new. The theory of Milankovitch cycles states that periodic changes in Earth's orbit cause increased summertime sun radiation in the northern hemisphere, which controls ice size.
However, this study suggests that the pace-keeper of ice sheet growth and retreat lies in the southern hemisphere's spring rather than the northern hemisphere's summer.
The conclusions also underscore the importance of regional climate dynamics, Stott said. "Here is an example of how a regional climate response translated into a global climate change," he explained.

Stott and colleagues arrived at their results by studying a unique sediment core from the western Pacific composed of fossilized surface-dwelling (planktonic) and bottom-dwelling (benthic) organisms.
These organisms - foraminifera - incorporate different isotopes of oxygen from ocean water into their calcite shells, depending on the temperature. By measuring the change in these isotopes in shells of different ages, it is possible to reconstruct how the deep and surface ocean temperatures changed through time.

If CO2 caused the warming, one would expect surface temperatures to increase before deep-sea temperatures, since the heat slowly would spread from top to bottom. Instead, carbon-dating showed that the water used by the bottom-dwelling organisms began warming about 1,300 years before the water used by surface-dwelling ones, suggesting that the warming spread bottom-up instead.

"The climate dynamic is much more complex than simply saying that CO2 rises and the temperature warms," Stott said. The complexities "have to be understood in order to appreciate how the climate system has changed in the past and how it will change in the future."

Lake Lahonton, Nevada: Climate Change

The Black Rock Desert and ancient Lake Lahontan in northwestern Nevada bring back fond memories for me. To those who know and remember, this is a tribute to "Bruno's Country Club", in Gerlach, Nevada, to days gone by.
Peter

Searching for Lake Lahontan
Evidence of the giant, ancient lake can be seen throughout northern Nevada.
Mark Vanderhoff RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL Posted: 5/17/2003
There was a time when a giant lake covered much of northwestern Nevada. Between 9,000 and 20,000 years ago, the same mountains that exist today dipped into its deep, dark blue waters. Junipers or limber pine carpeted the slopes from the snowcapped peaks to its shores. Nearby, prehistoric camels, mammoths, bison and horses grazed. Cheetahs chased antelope. Huge sloths and the giant short-faced bear, larger than a Kodiak bear and fast on its long legs, roamed.
Fingers of the lake reached into mountain valleys and the tops of large hills poked out of the water, forming little islands. What is now the high country beginning in the Truckee Range north of Fernley to the Jackson and Kamma Mountains forming the eastern border of the Black Rock Desert once was a large island in the middle of the ancient lake.

Lake Lahontan, as the giant lake was called, reached its high point 15,000 years ago.
The climate then was much different than it is today because a massive glacier of the last ice age stretched down to the Canadian border, deflecting polar jet streams toward the southwestern United States. An abundance of rain and snow filled the Great Basin with hundreds of feet of water. During its highest years, the lake was almost 900 feet deep at present-day Pyramid Lake.

Lake Lahontan at its highest stretched from the Oregon border to Walker Lake, as far east as Winnemucca and as far west as Honey Lake up U.S. 395 in California. Although Reno and Carson City were high and dry, the Black Rock Desert, Lovelock and Fallon were under water.
Climate changes eventually dried up the lake, but today, clues about Lake Lahontan remain all across its former domain.
“You can see a world that was different from today,” said Pat Barker, the Bureau of Land Management’s Nevada archaeologist.

The beach
The playa of the Black Rock Desert may be the most famous remnant of Lake Lahontan.
“I think one of the coolest things is it’s one of the biggest, flattest surfaces on the planet,” said Ken Adams, a Desert Research Institute geologist who studies Lake Lahontan.
Playa means beach or shore in Spanish, but in the days of Lake Lahontan, the playa was at the bottom of the lake. The fine silt and clay that compose the playa was light enough to be carried in by the rivers and streams that flowed into Lake Lahontan. That sediment eventually settled to the bottom.

Today, the playa owes its flat surface to the water table, Adams said.
A water table, standing water that sits underground, has a flat upper surface, just like a lake.
The winds that blow over the playa only blow off the loose items — they can’t pick up the cohesive, moist sediment wetted by the upper surface of the water table. Essentially, the playa surface has been “planed off by the wind,” Adams said.

Part of Adams’ research consists of finding remnants of the ancient shorelines and measuring their heights in the hills that once surrounded Lake Lahontan.
He has found the highest shorelines in the hills surrounding the Black Rock Desert and the Carson Sink. Those areas may have been under as much as 450 feet of water at one point, he said.

Shorelines and seashells
The highest shorelines may have been around the Black Rock Desert and Carson Sink, but the deepest waters stood at what is now Pyramid Lake.
Today, it is easy to see where the waves of Lake Lahontan also lapped at the hills surrounding Pyramid Lake.
“They’re very obvious if you know what to look for,” Adams said. “There’s a lot of places I could bring my mother and she’d understand what she was looking at.”
Look at the mountainsides that surround the lake, and white or light tan splotches will begin to appear among the brown dirt. Those spots consist of very fine silts that were deposited by Lake Lahontan on these hills thousands of years ago.

Next, search the slopes of the mountains for horizontal lines. Look closer and notice the terraces cut into the mountains like giant steps. Those terraces formed as crashing waves eroded soil from the hillsides. As the lake level dropped, the waves tore at successively lower spots on the slopes.

Pyramid Lake yields other clues about Lake Lahontan.
Walk to the beach and examine the sediment in the escarpments cut by the waves. Pick up a handful of sediment and look closely, and some white shells will appear among the sand and pebbles. “They look like snail shells, but there are no aquatic snails in the lake today,” Adams said. Those snail shells, called gastropods, have been dated to as far back as 25,000 years ago, suggesting they lived in Lake Lahontan. While the snails no longer live in Pyramid Lake, one species that swam Lake Lahontan does still call Pyramid Lake home. The qui-ui, a bottom-feeding fish that is now endangered because its spawning habitat on the Truckee River has been altered, thrived for thousands of years in Lake Lahontan and now only lives in Pyramid Lake.
“That’s one reason why we know Pyramid has never dried up since Lake Lahontan,” Adams said.
Pyramid Lake is, in fact, the real heir to Lake Lahontan. Walker Lake is also a remnant of Lahontan, but it has dried up numerous times over the years because of climate change and the diversion of the Walker River.

Surf’s up
If humans existed during Lake Lahontan’s prime, they could have stood on a sandy finger reaching into the lake now called the Russell Spit. Russell Spit looks like a long, wide pile of sand sticking out of the hills south of Fallon like an earthen finger. It was formed when Lake Lahontan’s waves crashed on nearby slopes at a slight angle, tearing away soil and then redepositing it down the shoreline. “You can stand on this beach and look north and go ‘Wow, there must have been huge waves here,’” Adams said. The waves here got so big because they had a large fetch, Adams said. Fetch is the area of open water where waves are built by the wind.

From the Russell Spit, it’s more than 50 miles as the wave rolls to the north end of the Carson sink. Back then, the Desert Mountains, on the edge of which Russell Spit stands, rose out of the water. Today, someone standing on Russell Spit can see where that giant expanse of water stood, clear beyond Fallon.

The human element
Throughout its long life, Lake Lahontan grew and shrank as the climate of the Great Basin gradually changed. After its high point, the lake dried up as the ice sheets retreated. A long drought ensued, followed by a very cold period that probably froze any water left.
Then the lake returned one final time. Scientists believe humans lived at the lake during this last incarnation, and the proof lies in sites like the Grimes Point-Hidden Cave Archaeological Area.

This site, south of Fallon, consists of caves hidden among hills and large boulders and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. “Those boulders would have been on the shore lines,” said Amy Dansie, a retired Nevada State Museum anthropologist. The Spirit Cave Man might have lived on this shore and caught giant Lahontan cutthroat trout from its waters. This mummified human was found in nearby Spirit Cave in 1940 by two archaeologists who thought the remains were only 2,000 years old.

The remains were boxed and forgotten for six decades until the Nevada State Museum tested them as part of a program to return the remains to the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone tribe, who claim the Spirit Cave Man as their ancestor. The tests showed the mummy was about 10,630 years old. That places him at the Spirit Cave around the time Lake Lahontan was a dying lake.
But Dansie and other archaeologists believe humans may have seen Lake Lahontan in its prime.
Their theories are based on artifacts believed to have come from a period before this marshy time.

Some artifacts found at high elevations appeared to be “water tumbled,” Dansie said, suggesting they existed around the time of Lake Lahontan’s high stand. Dated bones belong to horses that appear to have been butchered using tools that predate the Spirit Cave Man’s culture. One spearhead called the McGee point is believed to be more than 13,000 years old, putting humans at Lake Lahontan no later than its high stand.

Any people that lived around Lake Lahontan through its varied life would have had to put up with — or perhaps retreated from — the changing climate. “They may have existed here but gone south and come back up multiple times,” Dansie said. Dansie is searching for a smoking gun, some artifacts that can be positively dated using the most modern technology. Those artifacts might be buried deep in layers of lake silt.

She believes such artifacts might prove humans appeared about 1,000 years before the Clovis Man, a member of a culture that lived 11,000 years ago — the earliest accepted date of a human presence in the New World. “It’s only another 1,000 years,” she said. “It’s not like we’re proposing 30,000 years.”

Greenland, Melting Glaciers and Sen. Barbara Boxer

The following is an article about a trip to Greenland and its melting glaciers by Sen. Barbara Boxer and nine members of her committee. She is chairman (woman) of the Environment and Public Works Committee. She believes man is causing global warming and the melting of the glaciers by burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

She is trying to gather support for legislation she is proposing to reduce these carbon dioxide emissions, and presumably control global warming with all of it's alleged undesirable effects. This is what it is all about. Is the science of man-caused global warming valid? Is legislation to control it capable of working? What is the "cap-and-trade" system for controlling carbon dioxide emissions? Is it simply a hidden tax, or a cost which will simply be passed on to consumers already burdened by higher energy costs.

These are the important questions we must be asking ourselves. I wish the authors of this article had included some scientific articles to support the statements being made. We'll have to find them ourselves.
Peter


Greenland Trip Stokes Boxer's Global Warming Fire
By Nathan Burchfiel CNSNews.com Staff Writer July 31, 2007(CNSNews.com) -

A fact-finding trip to Greenland has renewed Sen. Barbara Boxer's desire to pass legislation aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, according to the senator who has been promising such legislation since early in her term as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.Boxer, a California Democrat, took nine members of her committee to Greenland July 27-29 to tour glaciers, ice shelves and fishing villages in the arctic nation which is home to 10 percent of the planet's ice. "It's one thing to hear about the Greenland ice sheet; it's another thing to see it," she told a news conference Monday. "It's one thing to read about the impacts of global warming on the native people there; it's another thing to have them look you in the eye and tell you."

Boxer said icebergs "are heading to the Atlantic Ocean at a speed twice as fast as in 1985; melting at a rate that will lead to sea-level rises with disastrous consequences unless we act to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide that have already caused the temperature in Greenland to rise four degrees since 1988."She said increased temperatures are driving polar bears into villages where they are killed because they pose a risk to humans. She also said fishermen in the region are being forced to adapt to changes in fish habits as a result of the warming.

Boxer said the trip reminded her that "I have a responsibility to move now to lessen the impacts of severe global warming." Several bills have been drafted that would address carbon emissions through cap-and-trade systems. Boxer has promised since April that she will move legislation through her committee as soon as a bill exists that could pass the narrowly divided Senate. Most recently, she pledged to use the momentum created by former Vice President Al Gore's Live Earth concerts to push for action on climate change.

In June, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) announced plans for a bipartisan bill to establish an economy-wide cap-and-trade program. Their bill is expected to be unveiled before the August recess begins next week, and Boxer expressed her interest in addressing the bill when Congress returns in September. Even though no cap-and-trade legislation has passed in the seven months since Democrats took control of Congress, Boxer said Monday that she is pleased with her progress. Pursuing a bill in her committee is "all about the votes," and Warner's support for global warming legislation "was our breakthrough," she said.

Not everyone who went on the trip was convinced that what senators were looking at was the result of man-made global warming. In a blog posting on the Environment and Public Works Committee website Monday, Marc Morano, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), pointed to several studies that question human contribution to global warming. Inhofe did not travel to Greenland with his committee colleagues, but Morano, a former reporter for Cybercast News Service, went as his representative.

"Recent research has found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880s, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955," Morano wrote. A 2006 study carried out by Denmark's Aarhus University found that Greenland's glaciers have been melting for the past century, since before man-made carbon emissions were a factor, he noted. A 2006 Los Alamos National Laboratory study found the rate of warming in Greenland was higher in the 1920s than the 1990s.

Other studies Morano cited found that while low elevation ice sheets are thinning, higher elevation interior ice sheets are thickening. A 2003 Harvard University study found that the Earth was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300 AD) than it is today. "These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland's glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt," Morano wrote, noting that U.N. scientist Jim Renwick has acknowledged that "half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well [in forecasting what will happen]."

Boxer acknowledged Morano's presence on the trip, noting that he frequently challenged scientists with those and other studies, and said his objections were "really very illuminating." But she said she was confident that all senators ended the trip accepting that man-made global warming is responsible for Greenland's changes. Morano said he couldn't speak for the senators' views on the subject but told Cybercast News Service, "what all the senators and I saw was nothing more than natural climate variability and normal summer melt of Greenland's glaciers." "The senators were shown nothing alarming," he said. "They were shown Greenland during the summer during a melt ... that was still not as warm as the Greenland of the 1920s and 30s, according to the peer-reviewed research."

Direct Evidence Of Over 300 Feet Of Sea Level Rise Since Last Ice Age

This article is from the New York Times and describes a system of caves and underground rivers in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula which were formed when sea level was approximately 300 feet lower than it is today. When the current period of warming began approximately 18,000 years ago, sea level began rising to the point where it is today, flooding the caves.

Note that caves in carbonate rocks, (which these are) are formed by rain water combining with carbon dioxide, forming carbonic acid, which dissolves the carbonate rocks (primarily limestone). This is an important chemical process going on every day, all around the world. How it might figure into the balance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, I do not know. Does anyone?

Divers have gone underground and under water to explore these caves and water ways and have found evidence of human habitation. This they can date very accurately and develop a picture of global climate warming since the last ice age. This matches with many other kinds of evidence demonstrating substantial global warming long before mankind began burning oil and coal. Note also the mention of pollution of this fresh water research caused by careless pumping of human sewage. Read the article. It is fascinating.
Peter


May 21, 2002

Divers Discover Maya Relics in Caves That Became Rivers
By ANGELA M. H. SCHUSTER
Nearly 100 feet beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico, cave divers are mapping the world's longest underground river. More important, they are unraveling the mysteries of a fragile ecosystem that may be destroyed before it is fully understood.

That the peninsula is rich in human history is attested by the temples and pyramids built by the Maya during the first millennium. Underground runs a common thread that has woven the fabric of life and directed the distribution of human settlement for the past 10,000 years: a complex system of rivers and natural wells whose formation began more than 100 million years ago, when the peninsula lay beneath a shallow sea.

Over a succession of ice ages, sea levels dropped some 300 feet, exposing the limestone platform that makes up the peninsula. Over time, rivulets of carbonic acid (a byproduct of rainwater bonding with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) carved out the caverns. When sea levels began to rise with the last ice age 18,000 years ago, the once dry caves began to fill with water, a process that continued until about 1,000 years ago. Collectively, these submerged river systems provide all of the peninsula's fresh water.

By far the largest of the submerged river systems is called Ox Bel Ha (pronounced OHSH bel hah; the name is Mayan for "three paths of water). Its labyrinthine passageways, an estimated 200 miles, wind their way underground within a triangle, embraced on the surface by the resort city of Cancún, the late classic Maya coastal trading center of Tulúm and the inland classic Maya site of Cobá.

Since 1998, an international team of divers — Sam Meacham of Austin, Tex.; Bil Phillips of Vancouver, British Columbia; and Stephen Bogaerts, a Londoner — has been documenting Ox Bel Ha armed with surveying equipment, lights, hard hats and gas tanks. Some dives last more than 12 hours, the time necessary to reach Ox Bel Ha's deepest recesses, map them and safely return to the surface.

To date, the team has charted more than 60 miles of submerged caverns and documented 57 cenotes, or natural wells, and three freshwater passageways just offshore that are connected to the Ox Bel Ha system.

"In the 21st century, the world is focusing of dwindling freshwater reserves and the need to conserve them," said Mr. Meacham, 34, director of Cindaq, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the exploration and protection of freshwater resources in the Yucatán. "To find such a pristine supply of fresh water in this world is quite rare indeed."

After transporting thousands of pounds of gear deep into the jungle on horseback, the team sets up camp near entrances to the cave system, many little more than sinkholes a few feet in diameter.

"Cave divers have always operated at the edges of the envelope, adapting existing technologies and inventing new ones to push further and deeper," said Mr. Bogaerts, 37.
Carrying reels of line knotted every 10 feet to serve as measuring tapes, divers map the chambers and collect samples of underwater life — small fish, blind shrimp, algae. Where passages splinter off, directional markers are attached to lines with arrows pointing to the nearest exit, in some cases more than two miles away.

Besides collecting samples, Mr. Meacham said, the team plans to install data collectors in the caves to record tidal fluctuations and other characteristics of the water, including temperature, flow rates and salinity.
The fresh water flows through the cave passages and empties into the Caribbean, Mr. Bogaerts said, while denser, warmer saltwater from the sea enters the river system through deeper passages as well as through the limestone itself, which functions as a porous membrane.
Besides the river system, the peninsula is pocked with cenotes and sinkholes to the west that appear not to be connected to Ox Bel Ha. Exploration of several in the vicinity of Cobá has yielded evidence of early human occupation.

"We have found hearths and human remains dating to a period when the caves were dry, an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 years ago," Mr. Meacham said. "We have also documented deposits of ceramics and human bones from the Maya period."

Cenotes and caves played an important role in Maya religion: they were regarded as portals to the underworld, a potent realm of gods and ancestors. (The word cenote, pronounced suh-NOH-tee, comes from the Maya dzonot, which means sacred well.) The finds will be left in place, to be investigated by archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.
The divers say they have investigated about half the underground river system.
"We believe Ox Bel Ha is connected to two nearby hanging cave systems, each about 12 miles in length," Mr. Meacham said. "If we add these to what we have already explored, the passageways of Ox Bel Ha will stretch some 84 miles. To document the entire system is simply a matter of time and money."

But preserving it will be a more formidable task, given the development plans for the Riviera Maya, the 70-mile stretch of idyllic coastline between Cancún and Tulúm. Already the area has 22,000 hotel rooms for more than 4 million tourists a year. More than 80,000 rooms are to be added by 2015. Mr. Bogaerts notes that the hotels dispose of sewage through deep injection wells, which deposit human waste 70 to 100 feet underground.

Raw sewage treated with fresh water gradually bubbles up through the saltwater layer, polluting the freshwater aquifer miles inland from its origin.
"A minor cave system near the resort of Puerto Aventuras has already been pumped full of sewage," Mr. Bogaerts said. "What we are seeing is an inadvertent contamination of the aquifer."
Working with Mexico's Secretariat for the Environment and Natural Resources, the team has started an education program in hopes of curtailing future contamination. They will return this summer to resume unlocking the secrets of Ox Bel Ha.