Switzerland's borders change as Alpine glaciers melt away -is it proof of global warming?

The world's glaciers are melting because the world is warming, and the world is warming because of human activity - principally our output of greenhouse gases and agricultural practices.

You have to be careful when you take a specific climate related event and try to draw conclusions.

For example, when talking about glacial advancement or retreat (i.e. melting), there are more factors to take into consideration than temperature. For any two given years, they may have identical average temperatures but a year which has a cool, dry summer and mild, wet winter will add more mass to a glacier due to precipitation in the form of snow and a cool summer which does not melt it enough.

Besides, do another google search and this time look up how many of the world's glaciers have been advancing the past few years. And also check out the biggest glacier in the world, Antarctica, and see how that's doing.

The name global warming is meaningless to an actual scientist unless it is properly defined. By leaving it vague, you play into the hands of people that want you to believe that any warming is due to humans. That is utter nonsense. It has generally warmed for 300 years. Glaciers melt. That is what they do. MTR student got it partly right. The distance a glacier moves is based on many factors. It continuously (over the years) builds up ice on one end (the upper) based on precipitation, slope, temperature, etc and melts on the other end (terminal end also based on similar factors). The terminal end of a glacier tends to move up and down the slope based on the fact that temperature and precipitation are not constant and never were. Pretending that recent regression is due to human emissions of CO2 is idiotic and unscientific but that is where we have arrived in our pop science culture that believes that whatever they want to be true must be.

Deniers? Is that an acceptable phrase to describe people who understand the issue? The ice is now reaching where it was in the holocine optimum. The border is defined by a watershed. Erosion causes rivers to move even without global warming. Blaming that on global warming is ignorant about basic geology but what is new.

This is proof that glaciers in switzerland are melting. This is not proof that Global warming due to human activity has caused its melting. Global warming is the biggest bunch of crap I have heard of anyways.

What I found the most interesting was the finding of farms and villages from the 1200s under the glaciers as they melted. So only 800 years ago families were farming and hunters were hunting there and there was no glacier then. As has been said we are recovering from the little ice age that ended only 150 years ago and are still well below the climate conditions of the medieval warm period when those farms were active and villages busy with commerce.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers....

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice...

http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/lec...

Because science and archeology both show that it has been much warmer and much colder climate wise in just recent historical times it is extremely difficult to take warmer rhetoric seriously as they have no scientific basis for their claims.

It depends on your definition of Global Warming...if you mean Global Warming (as in the earth will warm at times) Then yes it is..

However if you are talking about AGW (Human emissions are causing Global Warming) Then no. This is because the glaciers could be melting for a number of reasons....hell, it could be because my cat just killed a mouse....The glaciers show that the earth is warming...but it does not say WHY it is warming.

Yes, it is further proof that exiting out of a mini ice age which lasted from around 1200 AD to 1850 AD causes the Earth to warm up and glaciers to melt back to where they were at the height of a Warming period.

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It's only proof that glaciers are apparently melting in the Alps.

This means that melting is outweighing precipitation and, given the geography of the Alps, this means that the Alps are probably warming (which is supported by measurements of temperatures and by direct measurements of the greenhouse effect there).

So this is solid evidence for warming in the Alps.

Firstly, it's evidence, not proof. Secondly, it's in line with what climate models expect and what we expect from warming in general, but warming in a tiny part of Earth is not proof that the rest of the globe is warming!

The closest we have to 'proof' of global warming comes from combining everything we have: worldwide thermometers and satellite measurements of temperature, changes in ice cover, permafrost and precipitation worldwide, increased atmospheric water vapour, changes in seasonal arrival times and changes in the areas animals live in.