Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Tajikistan's glacial crisis: Central Asia's melting heart | Talk to Al Jazeera" video.

  1. The retreat of Himalayan glaciers began before the current warming and was caused by reduced precipitation (Shekhar, 2017. Singh, 2020.). This supported by further work done by Schneider (2014), and Chen (2019). The retreat was due to a reduction in precipitation. Currently, precipitation is half of what it was 20 years previously. Research by Salerno (2015) "challenges the assumption of the main driver [i.e. temperature] of glacier mass changes". Satellite data shows the glaciers in the Karakoram largely unaffected by current warming. Of 1219 glaciers surveyed, 79.5% were stable, 5.3% were advancing, and 7.6% retreating (Rankl, 2014). Swiss Alps glacier extents were smaller than 2000 C.E. during the warmer-than-today Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and throughout 75% of the Holocene, or when temperatures were 1-3°C warmer (Schimmelpfennig et al., 2022). Glaciologists Bohleber et al, 2020 of the Austrian Academy of Science discovered from ice cores that the 3500-meter high Weißseespitze summit was ice free 5900 years ago. There is “no evidence” that Jostedalsbreen, a southern Norway glacier, even existed during the first several thousand years of the Holocene, or when CO2 hovered near 260 ppm (Winker, 2021). In Alaska's Glacier Bay the melt rate from 1780 to 1880 was much greater than the melt rate from 1880 to the present. There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. Glacial retreat is certainly not evidence of this.
    2