As you know from the Prez, the UN, and countless NGOs, the earth is ready to get a heat stroke, we're told that "climate change" is the mother of all threats. All because of your use of (still?) incandescent light bulbs, not wanting to freeze in the dark, or your need to drive to the drugstore for a medicine or to work.
Really, you should do better, Mother Earth depends on it. Take the bicycle or walk to the drugstore, hitchhike to your place of employment or just work from home. Better yet; don't work at all and collect government handouts, carbon credits, or whatever. Once you are registered in the system, the benefits will arrive regularly, adjusted to compensate for inflation, etc.
Where was I going?
Oh, yeah, equatorial glaciers. By all accounts of the global warmist crowd, they should have disappeared a long time ago. Even the super-guru Al Gore said so in his (2006) movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Actually, that movie claimed to be a "documentary" but you really wouldn't know from the falsehoods presented. For example, the scene with a polar bear trying to swim to one of the few remaining pieces of ice in the Arctic and so forth. Neither the water, nor the polar bear, nor the sea-ice is actual photography. That whole scene is nothing but "computer-imagery" by Hollywood's finest.
Now to the glaciers. Gore also claimed that the ice field on Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa was melting away, because of that evil carbon dioxide (CO2) gas every man, woman and child exhales at a concentration of 45,000 ppm. Even a High Court in Britain called his bluff on that but I'm getting sidetracked again.
Think equator, the place on earth where each day has 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night, no winter or summer seasons, just a tropical paradise on earth. Except for the higher elevations, where there are glaciers. Yes, real natural ice right there on the ground courtesy of Mother Nature.
Equatorial Glaciers
Let's look at the glaciers near the earth's equator and you'll find some on each continent that straddles the equator, i.e. South America, Africa, and Asia. They are:
- Carstensz Glacier, near the peak of Puncak Jaya, Indonesia, island of New Guinea; 04°05'S, 137°11'E; elevation ~4,700 m.
- Furtwängler Glacier (Mt. Kilimanjaro), Tanzania, Africa; 03°04.3'S, 37°21'E; elev. ~5,700 m.
- Cayambe Glacier, Ecuador, South America; 0°00'N, 78°00’W; elevation ~5,000 m.
If you want to find them on Google Earth, just copy the bold coordinates (e.g.,
04°05'S, 137°11'E) into the search field and it will take you right there. The screenshot above is taken from the satellite imagery of the Furtwängler Glacier, as available on Google Earth on Feb. 26, 2015. The information on the bottom of the image (not shown) says "Image © 2015 Digital Globe."
Of course, Gore's prophecies predicted the Furtwängler Glacier to have long disappeared by now. After all, according to Wikipedia, its size
was only six hectares in the year 2000. Surely, the additional umpteen ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere since then should have made it disappear entirely by now. What's the hold-up?
Then there are more glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro too, like the Rebmann Glacier on the opposite side of the mountain and even larger than the Furtwängler. You can visit them all, guided tour packages are available from several outfits, like
Climbmountkilimanjaro.com and
gadventures.com.
Perhaps you are wondering why there are any glaciers near the equator to begin with? Isn't it all tropical paradise with shimmering white-sand beaches and some steaming jungle interiors? Obviously, the answer is NO and the reason is the third dimension.
The Third Dimension
That's the height or elevation above sea level and it is much more critical than the latitude of your position on the globe. If you have flown in a modern airplane you'll probably know what I mean. The little flat screen in front of you allows you to not just to watch movies but check up on your current location and the outside temperature. At typical cruising altitudes of 35,000 ft. (11 km) the temperature is around MINUS 40 F (-40 C). It does not matter whether it's hot or cold at sea level, at an elevation of 5 km or so the temperature is around freezing and it decreases rapidly the higher you go.
Therefore, you are not likely to see much liquid water at those elevations. It is either frozen or invisible vapor and seasonal shrinkage of such high altitude glaciers and snowfields is by sublimation, the process of direct change from the solid to the vapor state. However, this process is not restricted to high altitudes. You can observe it just as well in low elevation areas that have snow cover in late winter or early spring when the air temperature is still well below freezing. Then the vapor pressure of the "water" molecules in the snow is greater than that in the air and causes the snow to volatilize directly without prior melting. Even so, there is a large amount of energy required to volatilize the ice. That energy comes from the sun via radiation, from the air and the remaining water, ice, or snow. How much energy? Let's do a simple calculation of the water cycle.
Water Cycle
Worldwide, the energy flux between solid or liquid water and its vapor is gigantic.
You can get an idea of that from the total world river flow, estimated to 1,000,000 cubic meter (m^3) each second; the
Amazon River alone has a flow of 200,000 m^3/s. That adds up to 3x10^13 m^3 per year, or 30,000 cubic kilometer (km^3) per year. Add to that the amount of rainfall on the ocean surface and the amount evaporated from the land surface and the number is more like 100,000 km^3 or 25,000 cubic miles of water that gets evaporated in a year.
Now you know what drives the climate on earth. It is not CO2. It is the water cycle.
