Growing California Glaciers and Carbon Calculations

Believe it or not, California has glaciers and they’re growing. These were two facts I learned at the recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, when about 10,000 scientists gathered to present their work and catch up on the research of others.

During the last 50 years, glaciers on the summit of Mt. Shasta in northern California have bulked up, according to Ian Howat of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Howat and a team of earth scientists from UCSC traveled to the summit of Mt. Shasta a few years ago to predict the expiration date of small glaciers on Mt. Shasta. Instead, they found the glaciers had grown since 1951, and the largest, Whitney Glacier, had advanced about one kilometer during that time.

Since most (but not all) Alaska glaciers are melting at a rapid rate, one might expect California glaciers to have disappeared long ago, but Howat explained that the state holds many small cirque glaciers in its high mountains. The seven glaciers extending like pudgy fingers from the summit of Mt. Shasta have grown in the last 50 years because of weather patterns that have resulted in lots of snow up high, enough to offset melting losses below.

“In some areas, global warming can result in the increase of snow at high elevations,” Howat said.

To get a perspective on the size of Mt. Shasta’s glaciers, an Alaska scientist at the meeting figured all the ice on Mt. Shasta equals about what Alaska’s Columbia Glacier calves into the ocean every two or three days.

In a press conference held during the San Francisco meeting, scientists argued that mankind had elevated the levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, one suspected cause of global warming, long before the industrial revolution of the 1700s and1800s. William Ruddiman, an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia said that people had deforested much of Eurasia by the time of Christ’s birth, and widespread cutting down of forests caused elevated levels of carbon dioxide. Ice cores show drops in CO2 levels during times of great human die-offs, such as the Roman plague and the Black Death.

Carbon was also the topic of a presentation by Paul Higgins of Stanford University, who studies how ecological systems respond to climate change. Higgins calculated that if all Americans under the age of 64 walked or biked to work instead of driving, the U.S. could save more oil each year than the total amount of oil expected to be in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Furthermore, the walking and biking could take care of America’s obesity problem, Higgins said.

In a more reality-based study, Lawrence Plug tallied up the mileage traveled by the 10,000 scientists who attended the San Francisco meeting and added in the carbon dioxide released by their airplane travel. Plug, who studies permafrost at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, estimated that each attendee had traveled an average of 4,900 miles round-trip to reach the conference, and had released 1,745 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere by attending. He concluded that holding the conference in Denver, a more central location, would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 7.7 percent.

In other oil and carbon-based news, my own informal poll showed that hybrid gas/electric vehicles are catching on in San Francisco. I counted more than two dozen hybrid cars on the roads, most of them Toyota Prius sedans, Honda Civics and Honda Insights. While roaming the streets of San Francisco last year, I counted half as many.