Alaska Glaciers Receding Since at Least 1778, So Why Does NASA Start at 1941? (3 min read)

Click here to read the original Cautious Optimism Facebook post with comments 

3 MIN READ - CO recently posted some spectacular photographs of his vacation cruise sailing into Glacier Bay, Alaska to take in the magnificent ice sheets. 

However, the Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Left Coast Affairs and Other Inexplicable Phenomena would like to unapologetically leverage CO’s vacation to illustrate the less-than-honest way in which the climate alarmism lobby has used Glacier Bay in particular to further their global warming agenda.

Glacier Bay, and in particular the Muir Glacier within the bay, is cited by scientists and climate change activists as a stark warning of the dangers of a warming planet. According to them, man’s industrial activity and greenhouse gas production are precisely what has driven the glacier’s rapid inland retreat.

As evidence, NASA’s Climate365 page provides the first photograph (attached) contrasting Muir Glacier’s impressive ice sheet in 1941 which has retreated so far in present day that it’s mostly a watered inlet. 

What more proof could anyone need that we need to be forced into electric cars, lose our gas stoves, and pay trillions of dollars in new taxes? Humans began producing cars and flying airplanes at an accelerated rate after World War II, so it couldn’t be more obvious that mankind is the cause.

However what NASA never posts online is the tiny size of the 1941 glacier compared to its original size in 1778.

Yes, westerners mapped Glacier Bay as far back as 1778, but that’s not important for you to know.

As you can see from the second attached photo (map) Glacier Bay was first mapped by Captain James Cook in 1778, although there wasn’t much “bay” to map back then.

In 1778 the giant ice sheet covered the entire bay all the way out to the ocean, so Cook may not have even realized there was a “bay” there and proceeded up the coast.

In 1794 Captain George Vancouver took a closer look and, according to Gemini AI, “documented the presence of a large glacier filling the bay. At that time, the bay was just a small indentation in the coastline, with a massive glacier extending far into what is now Icy Strait.”

And as you can see from the map, the glacier has been receding rapidly from 1778 into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In fact, if one looks at the position of Muir Glacier in the 1940’s, the original ice sheet had already lost well over 80% of its length and far more of its volume before World War II, also before humans started driving cars and flying in planes en masse.

It had even lost two-thirds by the turn of the 20th century.

What caused the ice to recede so rapidly in the 18th and 19th centuries?

There were virtually no cars, the very first production internal combustion engine car manufactured in 1886.

There was no commercial aviation.

There was no commercial electricity generation on earth until 1882.

In 1900 there were about 1.6 billion people on earth, compared to 8.2 billion now, and back then almost none of them had cars, flew airlines, had electricity, or took mass transit like buses and only a tiny number had ever ridden a train.

Clearly something other than human CO2 made the glaciers melt before 1900. Some scientists argue the planet has been warming for quite some time, coming out of the “Little Ice Age” of the 16th through 19th centuries, but don’t know for sure, just as the climate alarmists clearly don’t know for sure themselves. 

If you look at the map’s other inlet glaciers, the numbers are even worse. Many of them had already receded 90% from the ice sheet’s original ocean terminus by dates like 1892 and 1912, and the retreat has slowed dramatically since then.

This tactic of parading glacial retreat exclusively between recent dates that coincide with mass automobile, air travel, and electricity production is used over and over by the climate alarmist crowd—including NASA (i.e. the federal government). They showboat dramatic ice loss from glaciers around the world, but deliberately conceal the even greater ice loss that preceded large scale human greenhouse gas activity. After all, we must all believe glacial retreat only started when lots of humans started driving cars.

ps. Although westerners weren’t present to map every glacier in every remote corner of the earth in the 18th century, the Left Coast Correspondent has seen very old data on many glaciers in Canada, Europe, and Greenland that show the same pattern. 

In a followup he’ll later post a typical 20th century retreat photo of the famous Canadian Athabasca Glacier—a popular tourist attraction—alongside another photo of what he’s seen firsthand at the glacier but which the climate alarmists never show the world: far more distant retreat markers from the mid-1800’s.