The plot, (the continuing discussion around global warming) thickens, and one is reminded that, in a situation where conflicting information about a phenomena is creating confusion, it might not be a bad strategy to base your beliefs (and actions) on what is right in front of you to see and verify.
An excerpt.
A growing glacier
Mount Shasta bucks global trend, and researchers cite warming phenomena
By David Whitney -- Bee Washington BureauPublished 1:43 am PDT Monday, September 4, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Whitney Glacier on Mount Shasta is growing, and scientists think global warming in Northern California is the reason.
This is not the way global warming works in most parts of the world.
In the Arctic and the Antarctic, and all along the West Coast north of the California border, temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting. Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier on the northern end of the Cascades, for example, has retreated by nearly a mile in the past century and continues to shrink.
But Whitney Glacier, on the southern end of the Cascades? "It's still growing," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
According to an article last summer in California Wild, a journal of the California Academy of Sciences, Whitney Glacier is the only ice river in the world that is larger today than in 1890.
Tulaczyk and his team, who began studying the glacier in 2002 and now have expanded their work to the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada, link the advancing frozen mass to the unique way California is being affected by global warming.
While in the short term it means more snow, their findings also contain a dire forecast: High-altitude snowpack, a steady source of water for the state as the snow melts during the summer, is probably doomed.
