Observations of glaciers have proved reality of global warming

Mountain glaciers were the most vulnerable forms of a landscape for action of global warming – reductions in their area for 99% are connected in recent years with increase in temperatures because of anthropogenous emissions of CO2 in the atmosphere, scientists declare.

“We said long ago that mountain glaciers the first will suffer from climate change, but very few people tried to check it from the scientific point of view. It has turned out that this is true – all glaciers which we have studied, recede that is a convincing example of the fact that global warming exists. Locals have noticed it long ago, these glaciers are now far from their primitive borders” — Gerard Roe from university of Washington in Seattle (USA) has declared.

According to the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), today most of scientists is sure for 95% that increase in global air temperatures and waters of the seas is caused by activity of the person, including emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, still there are climatic sceptics who are sure that these fluctuations of temperatures have natural character.

The unusual delay of rates of global warming in the last one and a half decades recorded by climatic satellites and sea observing stations forces climatologists to argue whether sceptics are right or this delay is simply connected with the fact that in last years measurements were conducted on wrong or just to other techniques overestimating real rates of warming.

Ро and his colleagues have checked, whether so it, having studied how nearly four tens the largest mountain glaciers of the world located in moderate and tropic latitudes behaved in the last several decades. As scientists explain, ice deposits in mountains poorly react to seasonal fluctuations and other short-term climatic trends, and are, according to Ro, “the purest climatic indicator”.

Using the data collected for the last 100-130 years by means of climatic satellites and during field observations climatologists have tracked how the area of these glaciers changed, and have checked whether these fluctuations have been connected with climate changes.

As it has appeared, all reductions in their square at 99% have been caused by global warming. By calculations of scientists, the probability that many European glaciers have receded on 2-3 kilometers in itself doesn’t exceed 0,001%, and the level of reliability of such conclusions in many cases exceeds values which usually are required for commission of opening in physics of elementary particles, the most strict field of science from the point of view of the statistical importance of opening.

All this, according to Ro and his colleagues, allows us to say that mountain glaciers are really most of all vulnerable for climate change action and that it exists with confidence. Similar calculations, of course, will hardly force to recede climatic sceptics, and discussions around global warming will continue.

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