thebigp

The numbers are wrong, but that's not all.

By Ciara O'Rourke---April 2, 2019---POLITIFACT
V***l meme about Al Gore and glaciers is wrong
Former vice president Al Gore has used his celebrity to try to curb the worst consequences of c*****e c****e. The 2006 movie "An Inconvenient T***h," for example, follows Gore as he discusses the dangers of g****l w*****g. A recent Facebook post seems to play on that film title with a claim about glaciers.
"The day Al Gore was born, there were 130,000 glaciers on earth," reads the text of a Facebook post featuring pictures of the veep. "Today, only 130,000 remain."
"Awkward," wrote the Facebook account that published the post on March 11. It was f**gged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) We turned to research and climate scientists to help us figure out if it’s accurate.
What’s a glacier?
A glacier is a body of snow and ice that’s big enough in size and mass to move under its own weight, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But what qualifies as a glacier depends on who you ask. The USGS defines them "according to the commonly accepted guidelines in which a body of ice has an area of at least 0.1 kilometers squared, or about 25 acres."
But that’s not universal.
Over in Argentina, for example, a grassroots group challenged the size cutoff for a glacier to be included in the country’s national inventory, arguing it has imperiled important water sources. And a recent study in the journal Nature discusses sea level rise from uncharted glaciers, ones that disappeared before they were documented or are "missing," meaning they’re too small to be included in inventories.
William Colgan, a senior researcher with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told PolitiFact that the emerging global standard for defining a glacier is a minimum of 1 hectare, or 100 meters by 100 meters.
How many glaciers were there in 1948?
According to Colgan, we don’t know what the global number of glaciers was in 1948, the year Al Gore was born. Scientists use satellites to map glaciers and reliable satellite monitoring didn’t start until the mid 1980s. "We just don’t have the snapshots from space in 1948," Colgan said.
How many glaciers are there today?
We do have estimates of the total number of glaciers today. According to the Randolph Glacier Inventory, Colgan said, there are 197,654 glaciers that are at least 1 hectare, or 0.01 square kilometers. That’s 67,654 more than the Facebook post says, not counting the thousands of "missing" glaciers, Colgan said.
Walt Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told PolitiFact that inventories are always changing. The numbers could increase because more glaciers are getting mapped, he said. One database on the center’s website lists 306,865 glaciers, for example.
Michael Kemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, cited 215,000 glaciers today. He said in an email that the number 130,000 probably comes from the World Glacier Inventory, which is a snapshot of the glacier distribution in the second half of the 20th century. But, Kemp said, it’s not globally complete.

donrent Loc: SW Florida -Born Texas-Lived Panama & Alaska

Slightly smaller...............................