Piers Corbyn on Fake Climate News

Global warming activists hate this man. Why? His paradigm for understanding climate cycles is based on empirical evidence.

Corbyn encourages people to double check science reports related to climate.


Related reading: Kansas Bill Calling for Objectivity in Science Education Fails; Americans Sick of Partisan Science; Carbon Capture and Storage; Two Environmentalists Knock Heads; Antarctic Ozone Hole Smaller; Lower Solar Irradiance, Higher Atmospheric Temps?; Antarctic Once Had Baobab Trees; Global Temps Dropping; Stephen Wilde on AGW

Storm Chasers Killed in Oklahoma

Three stars of the former reality show Storm Chasers were among the nine people who were killed in the powerful storms that struck Oklahoma on Friday night, reports CNN. Tim Samaras, one of the world’s best known storm chasers, was among those killed highlights National Geographic. Samaras’ son, 24-year-old Paul Samaras, was also killed, along with Carl Young. The three were best known for starring in the former Discovery Channel reality show Storm Chasers. "They all unfortunately passed away but doing what they LOVED," Jim Samaras, Tim's brother, wrote on Facebook.

Read it all here.

Antarctic Ozone Hole Smaller

The hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica was the smallest for a decade in 2012, satellite data reveals.

Read about it here and watch the animation. Note that the article admits in the last paragraph that climate is a factor.

This emphasis on reduced emission is a hoax. Little progress has been made in reducing emissions.  In fact, as the chart below shows, carbon dioxide emissions are at the same level today as they were in 1992.

Greenhouse gas emissions were higher in 2010 than in 1990, as shown in the chart below.

Related reading: Climate Cycles Indicate a Dynamic Earth; Two Environmentalists Knock Heads; Climate Cycles and Noah's Flood; Lower Solar Irradiance, Higher Atmospheric Temps?; Antarctica Once Had Baobab Trees

2012: America's Wake Up Call on Climate

Temperatures will continue to rise in America, "with the next few decades projected to see another 2 degrees [Fahrenheit] to 4 degrees [Fahrenheit] of warming in most areas," according to the latest National Climate Assessment, which came out Friday afternoon.

That means we can expect to see more "extreme weather events," according to the report, such as heavy precipitation — particularly in the Northeast and Midwest — and intense Atlantic hurricanes. Other parts of the U.S. will experience heat waves and droughts, especially in the West.

By 2100, U.S. temperatures are projected to rise 3 to 5 degrees, under the most optimistic estimates — and 5 to 10 degrees if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase.

While it doesn't seem to bring any startling new facts to the table, the assessment's authors say that "evidence for a changing climate has strengthened considerably" since the last report, issued in 2009.

Some of that evidence has been on display recently. Earlier this week, we were told that 2012 was the hottest year on record for most of the U.S. The year's weather, marked by droughts and powerful storms, led NPR's Adam Frank to call 2012 "the year that climate change got real for Americans."

Seeking to highlight the everyday effects of those changes, the report's advisory committee included a "Letter to the American People," in which they laid out some of the ways the changing weather has begun to affect livelihoods and futures:

"Many more impacts of human-caused climate change have now been observed. Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont have observed changes in their local climate that are outside of their experience. So, too, have coastal planners from Florida to Maine, water managers in the arid Southwest and parts of the Southeast, and Native Americans on tribal lands across the nation."

The 1,193-page report, the work of more than 240 scientists, is in "draft" form; it has been released for three months of review and comment by other scientists and the public. That review period will begin Monday.

"This could help restart a national conversation about climate change," writes Todd Sanford, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It gives us a road map for climate change. And the road is much bumpier if we continue along a higher emissions pathway."

Source: NPR News


Related reading:  Beijing: Smog Hits Extreme Levels; Antarctica Once Had Baobab Trees; Climate Cycles Indicate a Dynamic Earth; Two Environmentalists Knock Heads; Lower Solar Irradiance, Higher Atmospheric Temps?

Climate "Experts" Mainly Students

Donna Laframboise

Later this month thousands of bureaucrats, politicians, media, activists and scientists will travel to Durban, South Africa, for the latest round of UN climate talks. We’ll be advised that the world must slash its carbon-dioxide emissions because a United Nations report, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has concluded that humans are changing the climate in dangerous ways.

The people who write the IPCC’s report — which is informally known as the Climate Bible — are supposedly the crème de la crème of world science. Rajendra Pachauri, the person who has been the IPCC’s chairman since 2002, tells us this repeatedly. In 2007 he explained to a newspaper how his organization selects individuals to help write the Climate Bible: “These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done,” he said. “They are people who are at the top of their profession.”

Two years later, when testifying before a committee of the U.S. Senate, Pachauri argued that “all rational persons” should be persuaded by the IPCC’s conclusions since his organization mobilizes “the best talent available across the world.”

Whether he speaks in Austria or Australia, whether he gives an interview or writes articles himself, Pachauri says he “can’t think of a better set of qualified people” to write IPCC reports.

A close look at the IPCC’s roster of authors reveals that – on a wide range of topics including hurricanes, sea-level rise, and malaria – some of the world’s most seasoned specialists have been left out in the cold. In their stead, the IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students.

For example, Laurens Bouwer is currently employed by an environmental studies institute at the VU University Amsterdam. In 1999-2000, he served as an IPCC lead author before earning his Masters degree in 2001.

How can a young man without even a master’s degree become an IPCC lead author? Bouwer’s expertise is in climate change and water resources. Yet the chapter for which he first served as a lead author was titled Insurance and Other Financial Services.

It turns out that, during part of 2000, Bouwer was a trainee at Munich Reinsurance Company. This means the IPCC chose as a lead author someone who was a trainee, who lacked a master’s degree, and was still a full decade away from receiving his 2010 PhD.

Who else falls into this category? As recently as 2008, Lisa Alexander was a research assistant at Australia’s Monash University. After completing her PhD in 2009, she was hired by another Aussie university – which noted in its hiring announcement that she had already “played a key role” in both the 2001 and 2007 editions of the Climate Bible.

In the first instance Alexander contributed to a chapter that addressed crucial questions such as How much is the world warming? and Is the warming unusual? This means that the IPCC’s leadership decided Alexander was a world-class expert 10 years before she, too, had earned her doctorate.

Sari Kovats, currently a lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is an even more egregious example. She didn’t earn her PhD until 2010. Yet in 1994 – 16 years prior to that event and three years before her first academic paper was published – Kovats was one of only 21 people in the entire world selected to work on an IPCC chapter that examined how climate change might affect human health. On that occasion the IPCC said climate change would increase the percentage of the world’s population at risk of malaria – a finding that has been vigorously disputed by bona fide malaria experts ever since.

Chairman Pachauri’s credibility deficit doesn’t end there. In 2007 he told a newspaper: “So you can’t think of a more transparent process…than what we have in the IPCC.” In 2009 he insisted in a magazine interview: “The IPCC is a totally transparent organization…Whatever we do is available for scrutiny at every stage.”

But there’s the party line and then there are the experiences of real people. Last year the InterAcademy Council (an organization of science bodies from around the world) took an historic step. It established a committee to investigate the policies and procedures of the 21-year-old IPCC. Former IPCC participants were invited to complete an online questionnaire. Their responses were eventually made public after their names had been removed.

The person whose remarks begin on page three of the collected 678 pages of questionnaire answers is no IPCC novice. He or she has been a contributing author, a lead author, and even a coordinating lead author. Yet, when asked to comment on how the IPCC selects its lead authors, this person says: “I’m not clear how this actually happens…” Such confusion is widespread among IPCC insiders – who used words such as mysterious, closed-door, and black box when discussing this matter.

The fact is that Climate Bible authors are chosen via a secretive process. First, the IPCC receives nominations from governments – but it declines to make public the names of these nominees. Second, the IPCC fails to explain what selection criteria it uses. Third, when it announces who has been chosen, the only piece of information it feels obliged to provide is the name of the country the author represents.

In what other context, when a hiring announcement is made, is a person’s nationality announced yet no mention is made of their specific credentials?

We know that authors’ resumes are submitted as part of the nomination process – but they are then locked in a drawer. It would be easy for the IPCC to post these resumes on its website, but it chooses not to. In other words, an organization that claims to be utterly transparent expects us to simply take it on faith that the most qualified people were nominated and selected.

And then there’s the peer-review fairy tale. In its zeal to persuade us that its findings are credible, the IPCC has spent years claiming it examines only peer-reviewed literature, published in academic journals, prior to coming to its momentous conclusions.

In 2008, chairman Pachauri addressed a committee of the North Carolina legislature. Here’s what he said to those assembled lawmakers: “we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that.”

In 2009 a journalist asked Pachauri whether the IPCC’s next report would consider the findings of a discussion paper issued by India’s environment ministry that questioned the idea that Himalayan glaciers are endangered by climate change. Pachauri’s response was arrogantly dismissive. The “IPCC studies only peer-review science,” he said. “Let someone publish the data in a decent credible publication… otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin.”

But the we-use-only-peer-reviewed-scientific-literature claim is total nonsense. It turns out those North Carolina legislators were misled by the head of the IPCC himself.

In early 2010 I was taken aback by a blog post authored by economist Richard Tol. He complained that, in a particular chapter of the 2007 Climate Bible, IPCC authors had ignored the findings of peer-reviewed studies and had instead cited non-peer-reviewed material to make the opposite case.

Looking up that chapter’s list of references online, I wondered how this could be. And yet, as I began to scan these references for the first time, I discovered the IPCC had relied on numerous sources that had not, in fact, been published in scientific journals.

Five weeks later, an audit of all 44 chapters of the 2007 Climate Bible (conducted by citizen volunteers recruited from 12 countries via my blog), determined that fully one-third of the IPCC’s references are to non-journal material.

Among the sources used to support IPCC assertions are newspaper and magazine articles, unpublished master’s and doctoral theses, Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund documents, and press releases.

Although Pachauri had declared the Indian government discussion paper fit only for the dustbin, we found that the Climate Bible cites dozens of discussion papers. In one case, the document relied on by the IPCC is clearly labelled as ‘version one’ of a draft.

Indeed, the peer-reviewed literature score was so dismal that, in 21 instances, the chapter would have received an F on a grade school report card (59% or lower).

The responses provided by IPCC insiders to the online questionnaire make it clear large numbers of them were fully aware that the IPCC’s use of non-peer-reviewed material is rampant. Again and again, they used terms such essential, necessary, and unavoidable while discussing such material.

Numerous individuals knew, therefore, that Pachauri’s public statements were at odds with reality. Hundreds of people involved in the IPCC knew perfectly well he was misleading top government officials as well as the public every time he made the we-only-use-peer-reviewed-sources claim.

In recent years, scientists affiliated with the IPCC have signed many open letters urging governments to pursue a variety of climate change measures. So where are the open letters, signed by hundreds of scientists, setting the record straight regarding the IPCC’s use of non-peer-reviewed material? Why have there been no public declarations to the effect that while the undersigned support the work of the IPCC, not everything being said by the IPCC’s leadership is borne out by the facts?

The willingness of everyone involved to overlook this discrepancy tells us that the IPCC is an outrageously spoiled child. No one expects it to follow the rules the rest of the world lives by. No one calls it onto the carpet when it tells tall tales. Keeping up the fiction of how admirable this child is has always been more important.

In other contexts, this would be called a conspiracy of silence. When people know that dramatic untruths are being uttered yet decline to challenge them, it means they belong to an organization that lacks integrity. A long, long list of IPCC officials flunked a basic test here. Like everyone else, they chose to avert their eyes.

But leadership failed on another level, as well. We are repeatedly told we should believe in dangerous, human-caused global warming because science academies from around the world have endorsed the IPCC’s findings. Climate skeptics are frequently asked why they imagine their own judgment to be more reliable than the judgment of such esteemed bodies.

The answer to that question is this: No science academy noticed that one in three references in the 2007 Climate Bible is actually to non-peer-reviewed, grey literature. If these academies are so well-informed why did it take a group of Internet-linked volunteers to bring this to the world’s attention? Why didn’t even one of these science academies subject chairman Pachauri’s rhetoric to rudimentary fact-checking?

If the world’s science organizations had spent the past decade helping to keep the IPCC honest that would be one thing. Instead, they have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with this delinquent teen, smiling for the cameras, and giving him absolutely no reason to pull up his socks.


Donna Laframboise is a Canadian journalist. This article has been republished at MercatorNet with permission from her book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, published this month by Ivy Avenue Press.

Two Environmentalists Knock Heads

 Rex Weyler, a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation and author of a history of the organisation challenges Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace "dropout." Below is a portion of debate between the two men which summarises many of the key disputes over climate change policies.

Rex Weyler: You portray yourself as “sensible” and disparage all non-corporate environmentalists, but you don’t act scientific. You employ rhetorical devices such as: “There is no alarm about climate change,” since “the climate is always changing.” I’m sure this plays well at corporate speaking gigs, but you should google the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness.” I assume you are aware that you erroneously presume a word means the same thing in different contexts.

Patrick Moore: I hardly think Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, is a corporate environmentalist, more of a loveable hippie with a big brain. Do you think Bjorn Lomborg is “corporate”. I don’t agree with either Brand or Lomborg on everything but at least they cause me to think rather than people who repeat a memorized party-line. I also admire James Lovelock even though I find him enigmatic. All three of these environmentalists that I admire are non-corporate. Which “corporate environmentalists” am I allegedly admiring?

I believe I am sensible and have been all my life, as in common sense. But I suppose that is a matter of opinion.

As to acting “scientific” the highest duty of a scientist is to retain a healthy scepticism about all hypotheses, especially regarding subjects that have many variables like climate. I think you are aware that I hold an Honours BSc in Biology and Forest Biology, a PhD in Ecology, an Honorary Doctorate of Science and have received the the US National Award for Nuclear Science and History from the Einstein Society, affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute. Would this not make me at least as credible as any member of the IPCC?

If you are referring to the word “climate” you must elaborate as I fail to understand what you mean here. First, you have added in the word “since,” which makes my statement a syllogism. When you do write your critique of my new book, I do hope you will not manipulate my words in that way.

Second, I did not say “there is no alarm about climate change,” but that “there is no REASON FOR alarm about climate change.” The fact that there is such alarm I blame in part on Greenpeace itself.

And finally, as to the “misplaced concreteness”, I refer to climate as a scientific subject, measurable and real. Following Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of this fallacy, I see no misplaced concreteness there.

My belief that there is no reason for alarm has no bearing on the fact that the climate is always changing. I can imagine the public outcry when you accuse me of “misplaced concreteness”, Lordy Lordy.

You and your allies love to use the words “corporate” and “industry” as if they are epithets, swear words, put-downs, etc. with the implication that something sinister is going on. My public appearances are in public, usually with media present.

Read it all here.
 
 
Alarmists and those profiting from the global warming “crisis” stress the melting of the Artic glacial ice but conveniently fail to point out that the snow caps on South America highest mountains and the glacial mass in Antarctic are growing. Here is the latest science report:
 
An International Polar Year aerogeophysical investigation of the high interior of East Antarctica reveals widespread freeze-on that drives significant mass redistribution at the bottom of the ice sheet. While surface accumulation of snow remains the primary mechanism for ice sheet growth, beneath Dome A 24% of the base by area is frozen-on ice. In some places, up to half the ice thickness has been added from below. These ice packages result from conductive cooling of water ponded near the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountain ridges and supercooling of water forced up steep valley walls. Persistent freeze-on thickens the ice column, alters basal ice rheology and fabric and upwarps the overlying ice sheet, including the oldest atmospheric climate archive, and drives flow behavior not captured in present models. (Source: Science Magazine)

The rise and fall of ice ages is caused by changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun due to the influence of the other planets. These changes are slight and can be triggered by events like the earthquake and tsunami recently experienced in Japan.

The earliest ice ages came about every 41,000. Later ones came every 100,000 years. Scientists do not know what caused the change from 40,000 to 100,000 years, but they have noticed that the 100,000 year cycle aligns with periods of Earth’s more-elliptical orbits. Earth's orbit around the sun changes shape every 100,000 years, becoming either more round or more elliptical. The shape of the orbit is known as its "eccentricity." The 41,000-year cycle of the tilt of Earth’s axis is related. The original research correlating climate, glaciation and orbit and was done by University of California (Santa Barbara) geologist Lorraine Lisiecki.

Lisiecki believes that climate change involves complicated interactions between different parts of the climate system and three orbital systems: 1) eccentricity of Earth’s orbit; 2) tilt of Earth’s axis; and 3) precession or change in the orientation of the rotation axis.

 
Related reading: Antarctic Ozone Hole Smaller; Climate Cycles and Noah's Flood; Lower Solar Irradiance, Higher Atmospheric Temps?; Antarctic Once Had Baobab Trees; Global Temps Dropping

Climate Deal Lacks Substance

COPENHAGEN, Dec 19: UN climate talks ended with a bare-minimum agreement on Saturday when delegates ‘noted’ an accord struck by the United States, China and other emerging powers that developing countries dismissed as betrayal, saying it fell short of the original goals.

“Finally we sealed a deal,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “The ‘Copenhagen Accord’ may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but this ... is an important beginning.”

In a stormy overnight session, the talks came to the brink of collapse after Sudan, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia lined up to denounce the US and China-led plan, after heads of state and government had flown home.

A long road lies ahead. The accord — weaker than a legally binding treaty and weaker even than the ‘political’ deal many had foreseen — left much to the imagination.

It set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times — seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more floods, droughts, mudslides, sandstorms and rising seas. But it failed to say how this would be achieved.

It held out the prospect of $100 billion in annual aid from 2020 for developing nations but did not specify precisely where this money would come from. And it pushed decisions on core issues such as emissions cuts into the future.

Read it all here.

Climate Data Fudge Factor

There is some evidence giving cause for concern:

· There is evidence of dogmatism: ‘The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.’[1] Now it is indeed possible that the data is wrong, but the lack of a continued warming trend (since 1998?) is contrary to the predictions of the models on which IPCC predictions are based, and a common variety of dogmatism is to deny evidence that doesn’t fit your preconceived beliefs.

· There is evidence of arbitrary data manipulation: ‘Another serious issue to be considered relates to the fact that the PC1 time series in the Mann et al. analysis was adjusted to reduce the positive slope in the last 150 years ... At this point, it is fair to say that this adjustment was arbitrary.’[2]

· In the computer code there is evidence of data manipulation conducted in order to get a pre-conceived result.

· Remarks from a programmer writing code indicate serious problems with collection and recording of original data ‘another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases’[3]

· For some time there has been controversy over the selective use of data. For a recent example from a Russian institute commenting on the CRU use of Russian data (report here): the continuous data records from Russia which taken in their entirety show warming of 1.4 C since 1860 versus CRU use of only 25% of that data to show 2.06C rise since 1860; the use by CRU of stations with incomplete and interrupted data where such data shows warming versus the omission of stations with complete and continuous data which doesn't.

· More broadly, local scientists in Australia and New Zealand have found broadly constant original temperature data on which a rising official temperature record has been based through the use of methods of data manipulation originating in or influenced by CRU practices. See this discussion of the problems in raw data and controversy over claims of inhomogeneity in that data and adjustments made to produce estimates of historical temperatures from weather stations in Northern Australia: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

None of these examples demonstrate straightforward dishonesty. For example, all sorts of junk gets left in computer code. People put bits in that they call ‘fudge factors’ because they think they know the broad shape of some other correction process which is not yet coded, so in early drafts a ‘fudge factor’ procedure stands as a proxy for some real adjusting factor. They are, however, evidence that more subtle vices may yet be in play.

Read it all here.

Manipulating Climate Data

When news of climategate first broke and spread across the blogosphere, the reaction from the scientists involved and their many supporters was much like Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz, "Do you presume to criticize The Great Oz?" Now that Toto has pulled back the curtain by posting emails, computer codes and other materials online for Dorothy and the world to see, things in the world of climate science will never be the same.

Phil Jones, the man whose emails are now open for all to see, has stepped down as Director of the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia. East Anglia says it will review the leaked material "to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice." Climate scientists who support global warming and the Copenhagen process continue to say there is nothing in the leaks to show data was manipulated and that nothing has changed. Yet the university, one of the premiere institutions for climate science and the one which provided the research backbone to many reports on global warming, says it sees enough to investigate.

Read the full report here.



Stephen M Barr, a professor of physics at the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, picks up the theme:

Ideologues who would trample down legitimate scientific questions raised by their entirely qualified colleagues are risking terrible damage to science in the long run. If it turns out, as it might, that the global warming fears are overblown or ill-founded, the credibility of the scientific establishment will suffer a grievous blow from which it will be hard to recover. It will open the door for all the real kooks and purveyors of pseudoscience, who will be that much harder to resist in the future. And what if at some point in the future an environmental catastrophe looms about which there really is a solid consensus in the scientific community? And what if at that point it really is only kooks who deny it? Won’t non-scientists be disposed to say: ‘We’ve heard that all before? We believed you the last time and you led us astray?’

Related reading: Scientists Behaving Badly

Global Warming Cronies Getting Rich

Climate change is a fact of life on Earth. The climate change cycle corresponds to the Earth's rotation and sidereal astronomy. The cycle appears to be about 25,000- 28,000 years, but since no one has been keeping records that long, it isn't certain.

That's not going to stop climate change celebs from lining their pockets through speaking engagements and books. No. They are getting rich and building a global network. But this isn't about science, folks. This is about money.

Climate doom-saying this now a "gargantuan industry" and here's what one blogger has to say about it:

In an article entitled Climategate: Follow the Money, columnist Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal points out that the funding of climate skeptics is a drop in the ocean compared to the huge industry that human-driven climate change science has spawned.

“The European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.” Stephens writes.

“And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls ‘green stimulus’—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.”

Billions of dollars in grants for one research institute or university does not go unnoticed by the rest, and there is a valid point to be considered in the notion that this is where the “scientific consensus” has it’s roots.

“Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own.” comments Stephens.

Al Gore, the first carbon billionaire, has proven that he is only interested in solutions to environmental problems that line his pockets. The industry beneath him depends on anthropological global warming like the dot com industry depended on the internet he claims to have invented.

If you follow the money it becomes clear that it is the “consensus” that is being driven by gargantuan financial backing, not the skeptics, as climate change alarmists would have everyone believe.

Read it all here.

Related reading: Two Environmentalists Knock Heads; Climate Experts Mainly Students; Antarctic Ozone Hole Smaller

South American Glaciers Growing

Two South American glaciers are displaying strange behavior for the times: They're growing.

Most of the 50 massive glaciers draped over the spine of the Patagonian Andes are shrinking in response to a global warming, said Andrés Rivera, a glaciologist at the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile. (Related: "Mountain Glaciers Melting Faster Than Ever, Expert Says.")

But the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina and Pio XI glacier in Chile are taking on ice, instead of shedding it.

"What is happening … is not well understood," Rivera said.

Theories center on the geography and topography of the glaciers; the depth and temperature of the waters where the glaciers end; and how quickly, or slowly, they react to changes in the climate.

Yet overall, "if you account for the gains and losses of all of Patagonia's glaciers, they are [still] losing huge amounts of ice," Rivera pointed out.


Climate Insensitivity?

One hypothesis for the 3-mile-wide (5 kilometer-wide) Perito Moreno's advance is the glacier's apparent insensitivity to changes in what glaciologists call the equilibrium line on glaciers, Rivera said.

Roughly equivalent to the snow line, the equilibrium line is the elevation above which the glacier is growing, due to snow accumulation, and below which the glacier is melting.

When this line moves higher up a hill or a mountain due to rising temperatures, for example, more of the glacier is situated in the melting zone, and the glacier retreats.

But because Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier is so steep in the area where the equilibrium line falls, climate shifts don't impact the line's movement much, at least as it relates to the height of the mountain, Rivera noted.

As a result, the amount of of ice lost or gained is minimal.

Read it all here.