By Paul Homewood
You stupid woman!!!
Theresa May has said seeing melting glaciers while on her walking holidays played a part in her push for the UK to be carbon neutral by 2050.
She was speaking on her way to the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, where she will ask other countries to act.
It came as UK’s new aim to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 became law on Thursday, making it the first major economy to set such a target.
All this week, Sky News has been setting out why the climate crisis is among the biggest challenges faced today by the human race.
The prime minister told reporters on the plane to Japan the retreat of a glacier on one of her walking routes in Switzerland had illustrated the need for action.
So that revelation is going to cost us all £1 trillion?
For Theresa bloody May’s information, Switzerland’s glaciers have retreating since the early 19thC, something that has nothing to do with carbon dioxide.
This is a comparison of the Rhone Glacier between 1750 and 1950 . It is from HH Lamb’s “Climate, History and the Modern World”.
It show just how much of the glacier was lost prior to 1950.
From HH Lamb’s Climate, History and the Modern World , page 215
I have unearthed some more photos, to help fill in the gaps.
Back in 1856, Rhône Glacier almost reached Gletsch village down in the valley. View from the valley.
In 1870, Rhône Glacier had retreated about half a mile
and lost considerably in thickness, but still leaped down to the valley
http://travelguide.all-about-switzerland.info/rhone-glacier-retreat-globalwarming.html
The glacier appears to be about as large in 1856 as it was drawn in 1750. But even by 1870 it had experienced a rapid retreat.
We can contrast the 1950 photo with one taken in 2009
http://www.photoree.com/photos/permalink/789321-93939220@N00
They actually look pretty similar.
Scientists have long known about this, though some now try to cover it up.
This is an excerpt from the book, “Comptes rendus of observation and reasoning”, published in 1917:
http://www.archive.org/stream/comptesrendusofo00buchiala#page/286/mode/2up
If the idiotic May had gone walking there in the 17thC, she would have found out what climate change really meant to the Swiss. This is from Brian Fagan’s book, The Little Ice Age:
In the 16th Century the occasional traveller would remark on the poverty and suffering of those who lived on the marginal lands in the glacier’s shadow. At that time Chamonix was an obscure poverty stricken parish in “a poor country of barren mountains never free of glaciers and frosts…half the year there is no sun…the corn is gathered in the snow…and is so mouldy it has to be heated in the oven”. Even animals were said to refuse bread made from Chamonix wheat. Avalanches caused by low temperatures and deep snowfall were a constant hazard. In 1575 a visitor described the village as “a place covered with glaciers…often the fields are entirely swept away and the wheat blown into the woods and onto the glaciers”.
In 1589 the Allalin glacier in Switzerland descended so low that it blocked the Saas valley, forming a lake. The moraine broke a few months later, sending floods downstream. Seven years later 70 people died when similar floods from the Gietroz glacier submerged the town of Martigny.
As the glaciers relentlessly pushed downslope thousands of acres of farm land were ruined and many villages were left uninhabitable such as La Bois where a government official noted “where there are still six houses. all uninhabited save two, in which live some wretched women and children…Above and adjoining the village there is a great and horrible glacier of great and incalculable volume which can promise nothing but the destruction of the houses and lands which still remain”. Eventually the village was completely abandoned.
The same official visited the hamlet of La Rosiere in 1616 and found" “The great glacier of La Rosiere every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending…There have been destroyed 43 journaux of land with nothing but stones and 8 houses, 7 barns and 5 little granges have been entirely ruined and destroyed”.
Alpine glaciers, which had already advanced steadily between 1546 and 1590, moved aggressively forward again between 1600 and 1616. Villages that had flourished since medieval times were in danger or already destroyed. During the long period of glacial retreat and relative quiet in earlier times, opportunistic farmers had cleared land within a kilometer of what seemed to them to be stationary ice sheets. Now their descendants paid the price with their villages and livelihoods threatened.
Between 1627 and 1633 Chamonix lost a third if its land through avalanches, snow, glaciers and flooding, and the remaining hectares were under constant threat. In 1642 the Des Bois glacier advanced “over a musket shot every day, even in August”.
By this time people near the ice front were planting only oats and a little barley in fields that were under snow for most of the year. Their forefathers had paid their tithes in wheat. Now they obtained but one harvest in three and even the grain rotted after harvesting. “The people here are so badly fed they are dark and wretched and seem only half alive”.
In 1715 the village of Le Pre-du-Bar vanished under a glacier caused landslide. The glacial high tide in the Alps came around 1750 and gradually the glaciers began their retreat, much to the relief of the people who lived there.
This apparently is the climate to which Theresa May wants us to return.