Rising Temperatures Melt Ice Caps 18 Jun 1947. “Scientists who wish to remain anonymous” Now it’s just, “scientists say.” Nothing has changed in 70 years. They say anything but won’t put their names to it.
“Rising Temperatures Melt Ice Caps” Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate (NSW : 1876 – 1954) 18 June 1947: 4. Web. 30 Nov 2019 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/140305066?searchTerm=melting%20ice%20caps%20mystery&searchLimits=#
“Herald” New York Service
A gradual rise in temperatures throughout the world,with results that so far cannot be forseen, is believed by American scientists to have been going on for at least 5years.
When this cycle will end, or even what is causing it, is still the subject of speculation.
Scientists think the earth may slowly be moving away from the last ice age toward climatic conditions comparable with those of one million years ago, when the North Pole was a temperate region.
Speculation follows a recent address by Dr. Hann Ahlmann, the noted Swedish Geophysicist, to the University of California’s Geophysical Institute.
He said that a mysterious warming of the climate was slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic and that if the Antarctic ice regions and the major Greenland Icecap should reduce at the same rate as they were at present melting, the oceanic sur faces would rise to catastrophic proportions and people living in the lowlands along the shores would be inundated.
Scientists who wish to remain anonymous, say records taken in North America in the past 50 years show there has been an average annual increase of 31-100th of a degree equal to 1½ degrees in 50 years.
It is believed that a similar rise of temperatures is occurring throughout thy world.
Observations taken in the eastern ranges of Peru from 1921 to 1943 showed that there had been a vertical recession of glaciers totalling 70 metres.
In a period of 33 years there had been a rise of 50 metres in the snow line.
New Zealand glaciers had been receding and losing their thickness since the first observations were made in the sixties of the last century, the scientists said.
Since 1934 they had been wasting at an “abnormal” rate. The lower edges had been reduced
up to 200ft. in thickness.
Similar changes had been noted in glaciers of the European Alps and in North America.
Two theories are advanced for thistemperature rise.
One is that the sun is “variable” and is giving off greater heat in some periods than at others.
The second theory is that there are small variations in the elements of the earth’s orbit round the sun which, with slight alterations in the angle of the earth to its own orbit, cause changes in the length of winters and summers.
According to the second theory, the earth is now moving into a period of warmer summers, which are the dominating influence on the earth’s climate.
Scientists, who are unwilling to commit themselves about the results of this change of climate, say that Dr. Ahlmann’s predictions go further than the facts at their disposal justify them going.
There is general agreement, how ever, that a large-scale melting of the Polar ice caps mast cause a rise in the sea level and possibly result in other changes in the earth’s surface because of the lifting of the pressure at the Poles and the increase in the weight of water in the oceans.
Any changes are likely to be very gradual and it is impossible to indicate with any accuracy when the warmer cycle might end.
There is no body of scientific agreement on the available facts.
( The obvious conclusion is that the melting stopped and the ice grew again. Then it started melting again, and then it got colder and the ice grew again. So here we are today in a climate emergency)