UN again claims: World heading for a watery grave

Glaciers are incredibly important.

They contain an estimated 41 thousand cubic miles of ice, enough to put much of the world's land mass under water if they melt, causing sea levels to rise by almost 17 inches. Or at least, that’s according to one estimate of many. There is no commonly agreed upon definition of a glacier, and no clear way of measuring them. According to glaciologist Valentina Radic at the University of British Columbia, less than one percent of the world’s glaciers have been measured for ice thickness, so it’s really impossible to know whether the computer models developed to calculate ice mass are accurate.

All the same, UNESCO has now issued a new report on glaciers that presents alarming predictions, based, it says, on satellite data projections. Focusing only on the glaciers in UN World Heritage sites, UNESCO is warning that one third of the 18,600 glaciers in those sites will have melted by 2050, due to climate change.

The glaciers to disappear include those located at Mount Kilimanjaro, Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and the Pyrenees.

UNESCO further states categorically that nothing mankind can do will reverse this course of events – however, there is still hope for the remaining two-thirds of the Heritage glaciers, but only if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “If we can manage to drastically cut emissions,” Carvalho Resende, one of the study’s authors said, “we will be able to save most of these glaciers. This is really a call to take action at every level – not only at the political level, but at our level as human beings.”

What does UNESCO have in mind, beyond “drastically reduced carbon emissions”? The organization is “advocating for the creation of an international fund for glacier monitoring and preservation . . . [to] support comprehensive research, promote exchange networks between all stakeholders and implement early warning and disaster risk reduction measures.” What that means in practice, other than a lot of money for a lot of bureaucrats, is unclear.  It also seems to be a Quixotic quest given that another UN agency, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), has already despaired of restricting global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius. UNEP predicts that temperatures will rise by at least 2.5 degrees over the coming decades – and that’s if all the countries who committed to making environmentally friendly changes actually keep their pledges.

According to UNEP’s report, published just last week, the world has “no credible pathway” to keeping temperature increases to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, and there is little hope that COP27, the annual UN global climate change conference being hosted in Egypt this week, will do anything to change that.

What, then, of the glaciers, which are, allegedly, retreating at an incredibly fast rate? “What is quite unprecedented in the historical record is how quickly this is happening,” Beata Csatho, a glaciologist from the University of Buffalo, told the BBC. “In the middle of the 1900s, glaciers were quite stable,” she added, omitting to go any further back in the historical record.

UNESCO also stresses the importance of glaciers for biodiversity and how they “feed many ecosystems”. What they most likely did not have in mind when describing the many forms of life that glaciers sustain is a different study, also recently published, warning of the danger that “the next pandemic may come not from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice, according to new data,” reported on in The Guardian.

Genetic analysis of soil and lake sediments from Lake Hazen, the largest high Arctic freshwater lake in the world, suggests the risk of viral spillover – where a virus infects a new host for the first time – may be higher close to melting glaciers.

The findings imply that as global temperatures rise owing to climate change, it becomes more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local wildlife, particularly as their range also shifts closer to the poles.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Ottawa who sequenced RNA and DNA in their soil and sediment samples in an attempt to match them with known viruses, and then used an algorithm to assess the chances that those viruses could spread. They concluded that the chances of viral spillover was higher in areas near melting glaciers, “a situation that becomes more likely as the climate warms.”

Researchers at Ohio State University, meanwhile, announced last year that they had found genetic material from 33 viruses, 28 of them novel, in ice from the Tibetan plateau in China. They estimated that the viruses were 15 thousand years old. In 2014, French scientists succeeded in reviving a “giant virus” that was isolated from Siberian permafrost, “making it infectious again for the first time in 30,000 years.” The study’s author, Jean-Michel Claverie, told the BBC at the time that exposing such ice layers could be “a recipe for disaster".

Should we be worried? Let's look at predictions climate alarmists have made in the past:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. (AP, June 30, 1989)

A secret report . . . warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas . . . by 2020. (The Guardian, February 23, 2004)

NASA scientist . . . Hansen told the AP . . . in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer. (AP, June 24, 2008)

The entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in five years. (Al Gore at COP15, December 14, 2008)

An ongoing US Department of Energy-backed research project led by a US Navy scientist predicts that the Arctic could lose its summer sea ice cover as early as 2016… (The Guardian, December 9, 2013)