Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds

[stockholmer]

Source: Telegraph U.K.

Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.

Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.

The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.

It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.



Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8284223/Himalayan-glaciers-not-melting-because-of-climate-change-report-finds.html

[SpiralHawk]

1. Hmmmm?

"Their report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found the key factor affecting their advance or retreat is the amount of debris – rocks and mud – strewn on their surface, not the general nature of climate change.

"Glaciers surrounded by high mountains and covered with more than two centimetres of debris are protected from melting."

[Doremus]

28. Something like this perhaps?

Apparently not.

[Ter]

2. Hahaha

I figured something was up with this putrid, brutal Winter.

[Turborama]

3. I thought this was going to be either Faux, The Daily Mail or The Telegraph

Looks like I guessed right.

[Tunkamerica]

4. Damn! they've disproven it! Now we must live in a world where pollution is good for all things!

Truly a corporatist shangri-la.

It is unfortunate that all prior scientific data was but smoke to obscure the fact that one article on one range was actually the barometer on which all climate change was gauged. Curses!

[stockholmer]

5. the Global Warming solution is a trading/tax schema designed to transfer trillions to the bankers

It also is not enforced uniformly across the globe, thus allowing countries such as China giant loopholes, whilst ensuring the further non-development of the 3rd world.

Furthermore, it will crush industrial production in the western democracies, forcing the destruction of our important social safety nets, all in the name of austerity, via the IMF, World Bank, BIS, ECB, and the US Federal Reserve.

The carbon trading system will be rife with billions in corruption, and will be controlled by the huge multi-national corporations, whilst driving small to middle sized firms out of business via labyrinthine compliance issues and simple brute-force scales of economy. This ensures further vertical wealth consolidation.

The entire apparatus is a brilliant financial psy-op, designed to prey on the citizens of the world, denying us our hard-fought-for social democratic rights, enriching the global banksters via trading exchange schemes, all through the use of carefully-crafted combinations of feel-good buzzwords, and fear-driven mass psychology.

Bottom line, the problem, if it exists, is not solved, the rich get richer, the common citizens ere further stripped of incredibly important public services, and the wealth of the world is further concentrated upwards to a small elite.

[Celebration]

7. I agree

There should be a straight carbon tax rather than the ridiculous cap and trade. We also need to invest in innovative ways to deal with carbon dioxide, in addition to developing alternative energy sources. This "cap and trade" thing would be the most corrupt global smoke and mirrors scheme ever.

Unfortunately, climate change due to human activity and carbon dioxide emissions is real. The question is how to deal with it.

You are right that the banksters have latched onto this, imho.

[stockholmer]

12. well said, here are some further issues, as well as some solutions

Number one, I think that there needs to be a global Nuremberg-style tribunal into the suppression of alternative energy technology that has occurred over the last 100 years. The huge oil and coal companies (through their banking masters) simply buy up and shelve so so many patents that could possibly lead to huge break-throughs that would render their product (petrol) so much less important. Fusion and battery technology are prime examples. as are 4th generation pebble-bed nuclear reactors (that produce very small amounts of radioactive waste).

This will be fought by the entire monetary system, who have trillions to enforce the current paradigm. They control the hyper-sophisticated global media complex, and they control our sovereign nations (and thus the police and armed forces of control) though the huge leverage of sovereign debt that they have accrued over the last 200 years, and exploded over the last 30 or 40.

I struggle mightily with the evidence and motivations put out by the human-caused global warming camp, and the malfeasance and the manipulation by many in the official UN IPCC camp disturbs me greatly. They claim that it is beyond debate, and that there is a broad, almost total scientific consensus on the evidence. Yet, when they point to a report, they say that 3000 scientists, the most important scientists (in their words) in the world, they leave out the huge fact that of the 3000, less than 400 were actual scientists, and most were simply paid bureaucrats and shills with no scientific training in climatology.

They have have been caught so many times misrepresenting and cherry-picking the data that I am loathe to accept most they put out. Further more, in a multi-level psychological game of "don't throw me in the briar patch", many of the supporters of cap-and-trade regime are the so-called enemies of doing something about climate change--the VERY SAME big oil and banks that are vilified for other, legitimate reasons by a built-in "useful idiot" constituency. These oil firms and banks will actually have increased profit margins as their product price is increased, plus they will carefully orchestrate what countries get to operate under less draconian enforcement regimes.

It is very hard to sort through, as many legitimate, hard-science critics of AGW have been employed in the past by think tanks that were funded by the oil firms, and the banks. This makes them vulnerable to critiques as shills (even though the true motivations of these oil and financial firms are NOT what their critics think, they are actually worse). It is all done by design.

Peak Oil is also in this camp, and I also struggle with this paradigm as well.

Finally, as this is an American message board, I address the huge level of both systemic resistance and psychic resistance that the USA has towards limits. Your country is physically laid out in an utterly petrol-fuel dependent way. Your suburbs and rural areas are not accessible without auto traffic. They are profoundly unsustainable without perpetual cheap-flowing gas. Your dominant psyche is that of "bigger is better, rugged individualism, no-limits to American power and ingenuity". This is enforced at all levels of your society via political alignments and the multi-media (both controlled by the monetary masters). Anyone who challenges this is instantly deemed by right-wingers as a communist, AND most who actually see this and want to do something re sucked into the false paradigm of the Malthusian, anti-humanistic camp. Again, 2 sides, same coin, same outcome.

These are 2 huge issues to overcome, and I truly think that it will take an utter collapse to effect change at a meaningful level. Even then, a controlled collapse is exactly what the bankers want, as they have rung up false paper-based debts and losses in the hundreds of trillions and want a global debt-slavery culture to labour under this burden ad infinitum. The West is taken down to the 3rd world level, not the 3rd world raised up, and humanity enters a new dark age, thus reversing 600 years of democratic, intellectual, scientific advance.

Sorry for the doom.

[Celebration]

14. it is hard to sort out

I'm not that knowledgeable about energy technologies, but I know something about economics and globalization, and motivations, and CAP and TRADE would be a disaster. Why anyone at DU could be for that particular solution I have no idea.

It's a lot of strange bedfellow things going on.........I am not a global warming denier, but the proposed solution--cap and trade--is worse than the problem. It is just a money making scheme, and control scheme, and has very little to do with carbon dioxide emissions.

Eh, wouldn't be surprised at all if the answers to our energy woes is in someone's garage right now. But there are lots of claims out there, and 99.999% of them are bogus. So, sorting through all of it gets to be the problem.

And it seems to me the cold fusion people were demonized. Why do I say that? Because productive research in the area is occurring overseas, but the mere mention of the topic in this country will get a scientist blacklisted. And people really do need to get wise about the way we are controlled like this.

Meanwhile the high tech way we are addressing energy issues is increasing ethanol in cars! Oh, yeah and corn rules!! :eyes:

[stockholmer]

17. yes,corn-based ethanol has been a huge disaster for all but the producers and lobbyists, its a crime

not only is it negative in terms of energy-invested to energy-returned, (as are so many of the championed 'green technologies' that the global complex has 'alllowed' to be pushed), but it starves people who could have eaten the corn world-wide

hope the person with a solution in their garage has a good life insurance policy, lololol

[egressingsparrowdrop]

19. kool-aid alert...

The UN has not made the misrepresentation you cite below. Furthermore, nobody has been caught misrepresenting anything. You are an active denialist.

I struggle mightily with the evidence and motivations put out by the human-caused global warming camp, and the malfeasance and the manipulation by many in the official UN IPCC camp disturbs me greatly. They claim that it is beyond debate, and that there is a broad, almost total scientific consensus on the evidence. Yet, when they point to a report, they say that 3000 scientists, the most important scientists (in their words) in the world, they leave out the huge fact that of the 3000, less than 400 were actual scientists, and most were simply paid bureaucrats and shills with no scientific training in climatology.

They have have been caught so many times misrepresenting and cherry-picking the data that I am loathe to accept most they put out.

Nice hit and run.

[stockholmer]

20. I do not hit and run, and your use of kool-aid is juvenile, I weigh all sides of the debate, do you?

[egressingsparrowdrop]

23. Of course I do. I'm also intelligent enough to see

that there's no "debate" anymore...just a bunch of ankle-biting denialists playing their PR game over a couple of innacuracies out of thousands of IPCC report pages, the so-called "climategate," and Al Gore's energy use.

There's no better word than kool-aid for claims like your "there's a tremendous amount of data against AGW." or that the IPCC and/or scientists have been "misrepresenting" global warming data. Those kind of comments are juvenile at best, ignorant in the middle, and dishonest at worse.

[stockholmer]

24. your "there's no "debate" anymore" quote would make any fascist proud

it also sounds like an age-old clarion call for a good burning-at-the-stake

[egressingsparrowdrop]

31. should we debate gravity as well, lest we be accused of fascism?

get real

[stockholmer]

32. the last time I checked, AGW is a THEORY, gravity is a LAW, and cap and trade is a poor solution

I am not swayed in either direction on AGW, and I despise big oil, I am not one of those asinine drill drill idiots.

I think fossil fuels, on many levels, are the bane of the planet, and many so-called anti-AGW people who parade as champions of science when they attack mistakes made by pro-AGW scientists are simply hypocrites as well.

These bastards (if AGW was indeed shown to absolutely be the main cause of a huge problem) would STILL be against anything that cuts back their lust for power and profit and delusions of unlimited petrol-based growth. They earn my disdain as well.

That said, the global monetary system stands to profit billions in their approved cap and trade solution, we as citizens get our heads handed to us by destruction of tax base that supports our social welfare states due to the tax and regulatory schema proposed by the IPCC, the banks, and other sriously financially conflicted parties. In addition, only about 20 percent of the IPCC were scientists that had anything to due with climatology and Hadley CRU did get caught with their pants down pretty low.

I smell rats everywhere, sorry if you cannot accept my scepticism, that, I am afraid, is on you, not me.

[jpak]

37. Ummm...you do know that a theory is not conjecture - don't you?

but explains natural phenomena based all the available evidence.

Which in this case is overwhelming.

and I smell a rat too...

[Celebration]

26. the main issue is

What do you want to do about it?

I don't deny climate change due to humans at all. What I do deny is that cap and trade is anything but a money making scheme for the global elites and will do very little to mitigate carbon dioxide release.

Just because climate change is a reality does not mean that the favored solution is anything but a piece of crap to grab power and control.

[stockholmer]

29. solutions

Build-out of a massive network of high-speed mag-lev trains, and realize that suburban sprawl based on petrol-fuels is absolutely unsustainable (this will be a hard sell in the USA, but I do believe that the market forces will step in and simply make it economically unaffordable to maintain suburbs 200 kms from a city center)

outlaw ALL speculation markets on any scheme designed to ween the world off of its disastrous addiction to fossil fuels

also, your posting of Cell Energy's synthetic oil is great http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x283004

cold fusion, hydrogen cells, etc, leading to zero-point energy sources http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/ (this is the big one, and unfortunately, the farthest off)

electric car further build-out, such as Denmark is doing http://www.greenbang.com/103-million-euros-for-danish-electric-car-network_7238.html

throw huge efforts into battery and storage technology

reinstate national sovereign control at governmental level, and truly hold officials accountable to the citizens, not to the bankers, multi-nationals, and trans-national power matrix

end the monetary system that is based on compound interest of debt at all levels, as this demands a suicidal chase of capital looking for more debt that can never be satiated, as any further growth is based on more debt, and never-ending expansion

great videos on this http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf7hlk_1-damon-vrabel-debunking-money-myth-and-machiavelli_school

North American Water and Power Alliance , even if the very strange LaRouche group is currently one of the champions of this, it does have some merit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance

have an honest debate on Generation IV pebble-bed nuclear reactors, as they produce a tiny percentage of waste compared to even the most up-to-date current ones http://www.eskom.co.za/nuclear_energy/pebble_bed/pebble_bed.html

continue to use strategically placed alternative energy sources such as hydro, geo-thermal, wind, etc, but do not allow low or negative energy invested to energy-returned industries to become poster-children of the big oil companies to whip up the reactionary troglodytes (this is an age-old trick, build up an alternative option based on one that you know will fail)

lastly, realize that not everything on the planet is meant to be disposable, especially human life

[jpak]

41. ahhh - LaRouche! Not only do I smell the rat, it now has a name too!

:rofl:

[stockholmer]

44. LaRouche is damn lunatic, & that water project dates from 1950's USA,decades b4 they hijacked it

Here at my universitet in Stockholm, we studied the North American Water and Power Alliance in Geovetenskap in a Hydrology class, and the LaRouche name came up from other students, thus my disclaimer.

you are a game player, and a very bad sophist, you only seem capable of ad hominen attacks and guilt by inference

things in life are not nearly as settled as your cock-sure attitude suggests

you sound like a flat-earther from the 1500's at times, so quick to defend the company line

[jpak]

48. LOL!!!1111

:rofl:

[jpak]

36. yup!

what you said

:yourock:

[jpak]

35. It's UN conspiracy now? What horseshit - the science is robust and settled

more denier suckage

yup!

[stockholmer]

46. more boilerplate, ad hominen, mentally jingoistic attacks from you, yawnnnn

love how you can only deal in sloganeering

[jpak]

50. Sloganeer this

T. P. Barnett, D. W. Pierce, R. Schnur (2001). Detection of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the World's Oceans. Science 292: 270-274.

S. Levitus, J. I. Antonov, J. Wang, T. L. Delworth, K. W. Dixon, and A. J. Broccoli (2001) Anthropogenic Warming of Earth's Climate System. Science 292: 267-270.

J. E. Harries, H. E. Brindley, P. J. Sagoo, R. J. Bantges (2001). Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997. Nature 410: 355 - 357

D. J. Karoly, K. Braganza, P. A. Stott, J. M. Arblaster, G. A. Meehl, A. J. Broccoli, and K. W. Dixon (2003) Detection of a Human Influence on North American Climate. Science. 302: 1200-1203

B. D. Santer, M. F. Wehner, T. M. L. Wigley, R. Sausen, G. A. Meehl, K. E. Taylor, C. Ammann, J. Arblaster, W. M. Washington, J. S. Boyle, and W. Brüggemann (2003) Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes. Science. 301: 479-483

P. A. Stott, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen (2004) Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003. Nature 432: 610-614

J. Hansen, L. Nazarenko, R. Ruedy, M Sato, J. Willis, A. Del Genio, D. Koch, A. Lacis, K. Lo, S. Menon, T. Novakov, J. Perlwitz, G. Russell, G. A. Schmidt N. Tausnev (2005) Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications. Science. 308: 1431 – 1435

T. P. Barnett, D. W. Pierce, K. M. AchutaRao, P. J. Gleckler, B. D. Santer, J. M. Gregory, and W. M. Washington (2005) Penetration of Human-Induced Warming into the World's Oceans. Science. 309: 284-287

M. Lockwood and C. Frohlich (2007) Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature. Proc. R. Soc.doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880 Published online

[underpants]

10. Which probably why the Republicans first proposed it as a "Market based solution"

you could be right. I have to say that this is new to me.

George Allen and Jim Gilmore, to name just two, were all about creating a trading platform. Of course, they (the right) never thought anyone would take them up on it. They thought it would be another unresolved issue (abortion, guns, etc.) that people would vote on as one issue voters. They actually got called on it and now it is the WORST idea they ever heard.

[egressingsparrowdrop]

18. The problem "if it exists"....

...that, alone, demonstrates you have no clue what you speak of and can't be trusted.

I have no doubt carbon trading is problematic, and susceptible to abuse/corruption, but you make wide, sweeping generalizations. And like I said, your flippant comment about "the problem, if it exists" wrecks your credibility, stockholmer.

[stockholmer]

21. I am sorry, but I do not blindly accept one side, nor the other, I am a sceptic of all dogma

there is a tremendous amount of data that argues against AGW, just as there is on the other side, it is up to each person to do their due diligence

my creditability is simply that I question anything that is shoved in front of my face

http://www.collapsus.com/

[egressingsparrowdrop]

22. Oh, it's "dogma," is it?

yeah. You're so discerning and logical. Good for you.

Keep doing your "due dilgence" on the "tremendous amount of data that argues against AGW."

Let me know when it pays off.

[jpak]

38. There is no dogma regarding AGW - only an abundance of peer reviewed science

that overwhelmingly indicates human activity is warming the planet.

yup!

[The Croquist]

42. Perhaps you should continue this argument

at the DU Environment/Energy forum. Please be respectful.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=115

[jpak]

43. Where we play nicey nice with LaRouchite UN One-World science conspiracy-mongering climate deniers

yup!

:rofl:

[The Croquist]

45. Glad to see you're playing with yourself

as usual, jpak

[Psephos]

53. Your attitude is the very definition of true science.

The smartest guy of the 20th Century thought so too.

Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.
As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way:
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
- Richard Feynman

[Demit]

25. I don't find anything flippant in what you've said. Your posts in this thread are substantive.

I appreciate your comments in this post and below because they inform me that there are other things to consider in the matter of global warming. That it is not merely a matter of either/or, or 'them' vs. 'us'. Please keep commenting and ignore the taunts.

[jpak]

33. "the problem, if it exists" Clue - it does

denier suckage

yup!

[stockholmer]

49. in interest of civilty, & also to not abuse others on this thread, I wish you well

Im nothing that you infer I am, I am a member of our Swedish Social Democratic party (although not a fan of Mona Sahlin, lolol), Im an athiest humanist, and I am fierce defender of our Folkhemmet (our socilst welfare state).

I am NOT a LaRouche supporter, ffs, and for you to say this is not productive, nor supported by ANY of my comments.


cheers

[LawnKorn]

6. The IPCC prediction came from a mis-quote during a telephone interview. It was corrected a year ago

At any one time, some glaciers will show growth while others show shrinkage. The overall trend for glaciers around the world is shrinkage, and has been for decades.

[Mojeoux]

8. The Far Right Rapturists believe weather and climate are changing.

They accept it all as a sign that Jesus is coming soon. But I think the Creator would want us to clean up our mess here on earth before the true believers get to be raptured away.

Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann are both publicly declared "Rapturists."

[sam sarrha]

9. once the glacier melts back , the cap or plug at the end is gone and the glacier "runs" quickly out

[HereSince1628]

11. Yes, it would seem that position of the glacial fronts isn't exactly

the same thing as saying the glaciers are increasing in mass.

An increase in mass would require a period of greater precip. Greater precip in some higher elevation locations is expected under global warming.

[sam sarrha]

51. WRONG... tibetan glaciers are all melting at extreme rates.. >>..Links>>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDcGKptuzCs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD0IWb2w-jM&feature=related

http://climatechange.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/01/18/the-melting-himalayas/
The Asia Society held an interesting event the other day on the ins and outs of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the IPCC, was the keynote speaker. Dr. Pachauri highlighted this startling observation: There were 500,000 square kilometers of glacial cover in the Himalayas in 1995. At the present rate of shrinking, there will be 100,000 by 2030. Got that?! These glaciers are shrinking at a faster rate than any other in the world. The permafrost is also thawing rapidly

[sam sarrha]

52. WRONG... tibetan glaciers are all melting at extreme rates.. >>..Links>>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDcGKptuzCs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD0IWb2w-jM&feature=related

http://climatechange.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/01/18/the-melting-himalayas/
The Asia Society held an interesting event the other day on the ins and outs of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the IPCC, was the keynote speaker. Dr. Pachauri highlighted this startling observation: There were 500,000 square kilometers of glacial cover in the Himalayas in 1995. At the present rate of shrinking, there will be 100,000 by 2030. Got that?! These glaciers are shrinking at a faster rate than any other in the world. The permafrost is also thawing rapidly

[petronius]

54. That was the first thing I noticed - glaciers can lose mass (or gain it) with no change

in the position of the toe. And, an increase in velocity and resulting advance would be consistent with a warming and melting glacier slipping more easily. So, the news article appears to be reading too much into the the results if they think it means 'Demonstrated: glaciers aren't really shrinking.'

It is important to understand how ice in different areas responds to changing conditions, so this paper could be a useful contribution. But based on the abstract and the figures, it really doesn't look like the IPCC-disproving smoking gun the Telegraph (or was it the Guardian?) wants it to be...

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Reality: most Himalayan glaciers are melting, but not in one area - the Karakoram

From the paper:

More than 65% of the monsoon-influenced glaciers that we observed are retreating, but heavily debris-covered glaciers with stagnant low-gradient terminus regions typically have stable fronts. Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher. In contrast, more than 50% of observed glaciers in the westerlies-influenced Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable. Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability or global sea level.

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1068.html

For the Telegraph to say "Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating" is so inaccurate as to be a lie. Note that the actual Telegraph article does say what the Geoscience paper says; it's the headline and 'sub-headline', which are probably inserted by the Telegraph editors, which are the lies. But that's what they put in bigger print, and what many will take as the 'main message' of the article.

[groundloop]

16. And of course the deniers will pick up this one little tidbit to prove their point

I'm sure this will be on Faux News (without the proper explanations of course) countless times in the next week.

[hatrack]

27. It's the Torygraph - what do you expect?

Of course it's a shitty misleading headline. It's what they do.

[xchrom]

15. it's nice the glaciers in karakorum aren't melting -- how about all

the other goddamn glaciers around the world?

[Brother Buzz]

34. California's Sierra glaciers are melting, yet glaciers on California's Mt. Shasta are growing

Glaciers on California's Mt. Shasta keep growing

<snip>

With global warming causing the retreat of glaciers in the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere in the Cascades, Mt. Shasta is actually benefiting from changing weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean.

"When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking," said Slawek Tulaczyk, an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "These glaciers seem to be benefiting from the warming ocean."

Warmer temperatures have cut the number of glaciers at Montana's Glacier National Park from 150 to 26 since 1850, and some scientists project there will be none left within 25 to 30 years. The timeline for the storied snows at Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro is even shorter, while the ice fields of Patagonia in Argentina and Chile also are retreating.

It's a different story at Mt. Shasta, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade Range that is about 270 miles north of San Francisco.

Scientists say a warming Pacific Ocean means more moist air sweeping over far Northern California. Because of Shasta's location and 14,162-foot elevation, the precipitation is falling as snow, adding to the mass of the mountain's glaciers.

"It's a bit of an anomaly that they are growing, but it's not to be unexpected," said Ed Josberger, a glaciologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Tacoma, Wash., who is currently studying retreating glaciers in Alaska and the northern Cascades of Washington.

Historical weather records show Mt. Shasta has received 17% more precipitation in the last 110 years. The glaciers have soaked up the snowfall and have been adding more snow than is lost through summer melting.

<more>

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2008-07-08-mt-shasta-growing-glaciers_N.htm

I have no idea how much of this story is hokum, but it's interesting nevertheless

[Xithras]

47. California's Sierra glaciers aren't shrinking because of global warming either.

The primary causes of glacial loss in the Sierra's have been identified as:

1. Particulate pollution from sources ranging from China to the SF Bay Area and the Central Valley (mostly dust from agricultural/dessication activities and diesel exhaust). The particulate pollution lowers the albedo of the snow, which increases its annual melt rate.
   
2. The draining of the Central Valley wetlands. The CV used to be home to several hundred miles of wetlands and Lake Tulare, the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. The eradication of those wetlands began shortly after 1900 and was completed by the 1950's. The removal of these water bodies reduced the humidity in the prevailing east/west air currents that once swept across the Valley and up the Sierras. This reduced the summertime cloud cover over the range. It also accelerated the annual melt rate.
   
3. The total removal of the old growth forest downslope from those glaciers. Like the marshlands, the once-thick ancient forests held a lot of moisture throughout the year, increasing the local humidity. Virtually none of the original forest remains, and the second and third growth forests that exist today do not have the ability to retain the same amount of moisture as the older forests did. This means hotter, drier Sierra summers. Again, bad for glaciers.
   

While global climate change may play a role, it's not a major factor in our glacial losses. Other human stupidity is to blame for that.

[ronnie624]

30. In other words,

a few Himalayan glaciers are melting more slowly than all of the others.

[struggle4progress]

39. Debris on Certain Himalayan Glaciers May Prevent Melting (Science Daily)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2011) — A new scientific study shows that debris coverage -- pebbles, rocks, and debris from surrounding mountains -- may be a missing link in the understanding of the decline of glaciers ...

Bookhagen noted that glaciers in the Karakoram region of Northwestern Himalaya are mostly stagnating. However, glaciers in the Western, Central, and Eastern Himalaya are retreating, with the highest retreat rates -- approximately 8 meters per year -- in the Western Himalayan Mountains. The authors found that half of the studied glaciers in the Karakoram region are stable or advancing, whereas about two-thirds are in retreat elsewhere throughout High Asia. This is in contrast to the prevailing notion that all glaciers in the tropics are retreating ...

"The debris cover has the opposite effect of soot and dust on glaciers. Debris coverage thickness above 2 centimeters, or about a half an inch, 'shields' the glacier and prevents melting. This is the case for many Himalayan glaciers that are surrounded by towering mountains that almost continuously shed pebbles, debris, and rocks onto the glacier." ...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110124162708.htm

[struggle4progress]

40. Spatially variable response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change affected by debris cover

Dirk Scherler, Bodo Bookhagen & Manfred R. Strecker
Nature Geoscience (2011) doi:10.1038/ngeo1068
Received 02 November 2010
Accepted 20 December 2010
Published online 23 January 2011

... we report remotely-sensed frontal changes and surface velocities from glaciers in the greater Himalaya between 2000 and 2008 that provide evidence for strong spatial variations in glacier behaviour which are linked to topography and climate. More than 65% of the monsoon-influenced glaciers that we observed are retreating, but heavily debris-covered glaciers with stagnant low-gradient terminus regions typically have stable fronts. Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher. In contrast, more than 50% of observed glaciers in the westerlies-influenced Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable. Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat ...

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo1068.html