Disappearing Glaciers in Glacier National Park
What Remains of Agassiz Glacier in GNP Sometimes well-meaning people shoot themselves in the foot. Somebody at Glacier National Park put up signs indicating that all the glaciers in Glacier National Park would be "gone by the year 2020." Sign at GNP The strange thing about this is that the statement wasn't accurate even when the signs were made. The reference to "computer models" refers to a paper published in 2003[1] that made predictions under two scenarios regarding a subset of the glaciers in the Blackfoot-Jackson Basin of GNP, with one scenario "based on carbon dioxide–induced global warming and the other on a linear temperature extrapolation." The Area for the Modeling Study To evaluate how well this model has performed, it's important here to understand how these two scenarios were defined. I'll quote the paper's definition of each. Scenario 1: "The carbon dioxide–doubling scenario, is based on the US Environmental Protection...