Read here. The IPCC and climate alarmists have become well known for their hysterical and failed glacier catastrophe prognostications. To add to the IPCC's growing embarrassment, new research indicates that the Rhône Glacier is currently larger than in previous times, which doesn't lend much credence to their claims of the supposed "unprecedented" warming of the 20th/21st centuries.
Interestingly, due to the glacier's melting, it has actually revealed how warm it really was in the not too distant past - under the glacier were remains of human settlements and forests that are now seeing the light of day, again. Obviously, much to the chagrin of the IPCC's Climategate scientists, the human past has experienced a much warmer climate.
Using novel techniques involving measurement of isotopes Carbon 14 and Beryllium 10, Goehring et al. were able to analyze past glacier growth and shrinkage over the past 11,500 years.
"Until now, scientists have had no accurate way of knowing the long-term history of the glacier. Local records of the ice date back to 1602, and it is clear that the Rhone, like other glaciers in the Alps, has retreated dramatically in the past 150 years. This melting has exposed intriguing clues – remnants of trees from once-forested land, and artifacts of human settlements dating back thousands of years, to times when even more of the land was uncovered and green...the researchers said that their more robust history of the Holocene glacier fluctuations reflects how sensitive glaciers are to small changes in climate...said he was surprised by the evidence of exposure revealed by the isotopes. The amount of Beryllium 10 and Carbon 14 they found "told us that not only were the surfaces exposed for significant periods of time, meaning the Rhone Glacier was smaller than today..." [Brent M. Goehring, Joerg M. Schaefer, Christian Schluechter, Nathaniel A. Lifton, Robert C. Finkel, A.J. Timothy Jull, Naki Akçar, Richard B. Alley 2011: Geology]
Additional glacier-ice sheet and peer-reviewed postings.
