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On Sunday a funeral was held in Iceland to commemorate Okjokull, what was once a vast glacier, reports the Associated Press. It was estimated to span 15 square miles (38 square kilometers) in 1901. It now takes up less than half a square mile (under 1 square kilometer), according to NASA's Earth Observatory.
Icelandic geologist Oddur Sigurðsson presented to the audience, which included Iceland's Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson and around 100 others, a death certificate for Okjokull. In a symbolic move, a plaque was planted with a message to future generations. It reads:
"Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it."
The funeral is actually a few years late, as Okjokull lost its glacier status in 2014. Since jokull is Icelandic for volcano, the former glacier now just goes by Ok -- named after the volcano it rested atop.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by bradley13 on Tuesday August 20 2019, @06:32AM (3 children)
AC isn't talking about a 12 year cycle - have a look at the link provided.
Leaving AGW aside for the moment: the earth has been warming naturally for hundreds of years. Glaciers were receding before people started putting large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. This is indisputable fact. AGW is also a factor, also pushing towards warming. But that's too complex a story for one-neuron journalists to understand, so they blame/credit all of warming to human activity. Which is incorrect.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday August 20 2019, @03:39PM
This is the VERY FIRST sentence in the article that picture is attached to:
"The solar cycle or solar magnetic activity cycle is a nearly periodic 11-year change in the Sun's activity."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @10:24PM (1 child)
Regardless - https://skepticalscience.com/What-would-happen-if-the-sun-fell-to-Maunder-Minimum-levels.html [skepticalscience.com]
Basically the change in solar output is almost insignificant. So you're technically correct but effectively wrong.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 22 2019, @12:25AM
Unless, of course, it's not almost insignificant. Even the IPCC grants a significant (though by their estimates considerably smaller than anthropogenic) contribution of solar influx to the global warming of Earth since the beginning of the Industrial Age. The Maunder Minimum would have been an even larger difference in solar influx than that. How much we don't know, since we've never measured solar influx during such a situation. But it apparently is large enough that a chain of these solar minima coincides with a climatic event called the "Little Ice Age" with notably lower temperatures in the northern hemisphere (basically the usual mid-latitude places where a little more snowfall can happen and shift climate significantly through positive feedback).