Posted on 02/06/2005 12:06:10 AM PST by farmfriend
Climate Glacier Politics
By Roger Bate
What started out as a glacier hiking holiday in the fabulous Southern Alps of New Zealand descended into something quite different. Is the Franz Josef glacier, the most famous in New Zealand, receding and an example of man-made climate change or is it in fact increasing? And if the latter, does this explain why it has not been in the news in the past year, while it dominated local media over the millennium? In other words, are environmentalists only interested in receding glaciers, since they provide the bad news they need to scare us into action on fossil fuels?
Not aware I was going to have to pose these questions, I boarded a helicopter with great anticipation of some marvelous scenery and grueling climbing. Having just been in a helicopter over the devastated, and soon to be malaria-ridden, Port of Galle in Sri Lanka it was good to chopper into the cool of the Franz Josef Glacier -- one of the most beautiful spots of a beautiful country.
The glacier is the prime tourist attraction of the Westland National Park. The Geologist and explorer Julius van Haast named it after Franz Josef, emperor of Austria-Hungary in 1865. In more recent times it had retreated over 600 yards between 1999 and 2003. At that time local papers regularly, and the international climate alarmists occasionally, cited it as evidence of man-made climate change. Indeed, when I mentioned the trip to one environmental friend, she joked that I should go now to see the glacier before it disappeared.
But how things change. While many glaciers around the world are alleged to be shrinking because of global warning, the Franz Josef is now growing at a rate of about 12 feet a day (and there has been no significant change of temperature in New Zealand in the recent past). Local guide Karl Erickson said that on many days it was moving so fast that it was too unstable and therefore dangerous to hike or climb on it. Its speed of growth was actually affecting the adventure tourism business. New paths, ice bridges and steps for the less athletic, have to be carved out everyday by the skilled and very fit guides (swinging an ice axe for several hours a day is most tiring). Clambering over the lower reaches of the slower moving part of the Glacier (gradient probably 1 in 10, one foot drop for each ten foot horizontally), every few minutes one hears ice movements further up in the faster moving part (gradient 1 in 3), which is often above the cloud line and not so accessible, and exceptionally dangerous to climb.
New Zealand climate scientist Jim Salinger commented recently that although the glacier had been a cause celebre of warming alarmists, glacier growth was now accelerating due to continued cold and stormy weather throughout New Zealand's changeable summer (locally known as the worst for 50 years), which has caused a build-up of snow and ice at the head of the glacier. The glacier is now about 7 miles long and has been growing for over a year.
I talked with the guides afterwards about the climate furore and most just shrug about climate politics. They all know that the glacier is constantly changing, and although many may believe that man's emissions alter the climate and affect the glacier, there isn't enough evidence to know conclusively. Karl acknowledged that pessimism was good for the green movement, and that there had been less interest from environmental reporters about the changing glacier in the recent past.
As Philip Stott Professor of Biogeography at University of London told me, 'change is the norm in all habitats', especially fast moving ones such as glaciers. But only bad environmental news seems to sell, so don't expect to hear too much about Franz Josef again -- until it starts to shrink again, as its bound to do at some stage.
Dr Roger Bate is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Friend, if you aren't aware of drive cloning, drop me a note, and I'll try to explain how to do it. It's cheap ( relatively ) insurance against disaster.
Warning... hardware Geek alert! If you have trouble comprehending the following, you need a teenage computer geek translator. Proceed at own risk...
Get a spare drive HD big enough to hold all the data, plus a little more, from your HD. It must be the same electrical interface- IDE ( ATA ), SCSI-- whatever your HD is, it has to match.
Get cloning software. Norton Ghost or Disk Manager are two you can buy, but most HD makers offer free "installation" software that will clone, or migrate, the files from your old HD. There are other ways- sometimes the Windows version of XCOPY works ( google it ) but sometimes it doesn't. I recommend commercial software.
Make sure the HD you are cloning is clean- viruses, spyware malware.
Jumper the new drive as slave, and make a bootable copy.
Then... ( the fun begins! To quote Jimmy Hatlo... ) temporarily set up the clone as "master" and see if it really will boot your system.
If so, you have a mirror copy of the state of your old drive at "whatever" date you clone it-- restore your PC to its normal state and squirrel the clone away in a safe place.
And yes, you need to repeat the process whenever your system undergoes a major change.
This is the low-buck, non-RAID way I've gotten back from disaster several times.
Oh no, been there done that....
I just looked at the time stamps...what are we all doing at this time of night?
Superbowl tomorrow, I need to get to bed!
There are also easier ways to do backups with external drives,
either USB or Firewire attached, and use Knoppix ( a CD resident Linux system) , I have heard.
Aggravating, isn't it?
The alternative to what I described above is to keep copies of your data files on floppies or CD's, keep them updated, and reinstall the system. Maybe I'm atypical, but I haven't done backups since the days of DOS and tape backup systems.
Whatever method you use, the fact has to be faced that electronic data is ephemeral- it can vanish in an instant, and anything connected to your PC is risky- you need to store stuff you don't want to lose somewhere away from your PC.
Ernest, my wife has developed the habit of kicking me awake sometime between midnight and 2:00 AM, and if that doesn't get me up for a while, the old dog likes to go rat huntin' about 2:00 or 3:00 o'clock. Why she regards rodents as some sort of coveted big game animal escapes me, but, hey, I'm not a dog.
Sometimes I wish I were- sleep 23 hours a days, get pampered, bark... I've had worse jobs!
ROFL!
Gosh this is an exciting thread on glaciers.
It did veer off-topic, didn't it?
OTOH, where else would you find such an eclectic mix? Rivers of ice, and tech advice.
Thanks for reminding me- I tend to forget about the newer stuff, which makes backups rather simple.
My husband is a computer tech. The problem is my list was on a disk. I do have an old copy archived on D drive. Anyway, the hard drive was not booting so he tried to reload windows ME (which is what was on it) over top. It wouldn't take it so he put xp pro in it. Well this system won't read the disk that has the ping list. All my ping lists including the list of lists.
Are you saying the disk that holds the ping lists still has them but you just can't read them? Or did he wipe them when he loaded XP?
Correct. The floppy, I should have said, can't be read by XP since it was saved under ME. I've known about this problem for a while since my son's hard drive could never read it. I do have an old list saved on D drive though. I've probably added ten people since then though.
That doesn't seem right!
Maybe bring up a DOS Window and try to read it . or download Knoppix ( a Linux system that can be run from a CD and is very useful for many system activities...
Or find someone that is still running a window version like windows 95 or 98. There are all kinds of way to recover what is on the floppy.
I'm sure there is. But how much touble is it worth?
True.
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