Glacier National Park Quietly Ditches Signs Saying Glaciers Will ‘All Be Gone’ By 2020

The National Park Service has quietly gotten rid of signs at Glacier National Park in Montana that warned visitors the beautiful ice fields they were beholding will “all be gone” by 2020.

The signs were installed during the administration of Barack Obama and told park goers that global warming was so dire that what they were seeing would soon be gone, melted away.

“As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projections from the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers ‘will all be gone by the year 2020,’ federal officials said,” the Daily Caller reported.

“Glacier retreat in Glacier National Park speeds up and slows down with fluctuations in the local climate,” the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which monitors Glacier National Park, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Those signs were based on the observation prior to 2010 that glaciers were shrinking more quickly than a computer model predicted they would,” USGS said. “Subsequently, larger than average snowfall over several winters slowed down that retreat rate and the 2020 date used in the NPS display does not apply anymore.”

NPS updated signs at the St. Mary Visitor Center glacier exhibit over the winter. Sign changes meant the display warning glaciers would all disappear by 2020 now says: “When they completely disappear, however, will depend on how and when we act.”

The USGS now says much of the glaciers will be gone by 2080. “Worldwide glacial glacier recession is well documented (1,2) and varied model projections suggest that certain studied GNP glaciers will disappear in the next few decades, between 2030 (3) to 2080 (4).  USGS scientists in Glacier National Park are collaborating with glaciologist from Alaska and Washington and using emerging technologies to understand glacier-climate interactions to advance the understanding of alpine glaciers.”

Roger Roots, a Ph.D. and the founder of Lysander Spooner University, called attention to the removal of the signs in a blog post published Thursday on the website “Watts Up With That.”

“As recently as September 2018 the diorama displayed a sign saying GNP’s glaciers were expected to disappear completely by 2020,” Roots wrote. “The ‘gone by 2020’ claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources.”

“In recent years the National Park Service prominently featured brochures, signs and films which boldly proclaimed that all glaciers at GNP were melting away rapidly,” Roots wrote. “But now officials at GNP seem to be scrambling to hide or replace their previous hysterical claims while avoiding any notice to the public that the claims were inaccurate. Teams from Lysander Spooner University visiting the Park each September have noted that GNP’s most famous glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier and the Jackson Glacier appear to have been growing—not shrinking—since about 2010. (The Jackson Glacier—easily seen from the Going-To-The-Sun Highway—may have grown as much as 25% or more over the past decade.)”

And for the record, glaciers have been receding for, oh, the last couple of million years. “At one point during the Ice Age, sheets of ice covered all of Antarctica, large parts of Europe, North America, and South America, and small areas in Asia. In North America they stretched over Greenland and Canada and parts of the northern United States. The remains of glaciers of the Ice Age can still be seen in parts of the world, including Greenland and Antarctica,” Live Science reported in 2017.

 

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