Funeral For An Icelandic Glacier

By Paul Homewood

One of the sillier climate stories doing the rounds this week is the “funeral of an Icelandic glacier”.

It is remarkable how widely it has been reported, testament to a highly organised effort to publicise it throughout the world, complete with silly “Climate Emergency” placards:

Mourners have gathered in Iceland to commemorate the loss of Okjokull, which has died at the age of about 700.

The glacier was officially declared dead in 2014 when it was no longer thick enough to move.

What once was glacier has been reduced to a small patch of ice atop a volcano.

Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir, Environment Minister Gudmundur Ingi Gudbrandsson and former Irish President Mary Robinson attended the ceremony.

After opening remarks by Ms Jakobsdottir, mourners walked up the volcano northeast of the capital Reykjavik to lay a plaque which carries a letter to the future.

"Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as glacier," it reads.

"In the next 200 years all our main glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.

"Only you know if we did it."

The dedication, written by Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason, ends with the date of the ceremony and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air globally – 415 parts per million (ppm).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49345912

If they had bothered to check with proper glaciologists, they would have known that Icelandic glaciers expended massively during the Little Ice Age, reaching their Holocene maxima then.

By contrast, many present-day glaciers did not even exist 5000 years ago:

Abstract

Iceland was heavily glaciated at the Last Glacial Maximum – glaciers extended towards the shelf break. Ice thickness reached 1,500±500 m. The rapid deglaciation, starting 17.5–15.4 cal. kyr BP, was controlled by rising global sea level. The marine part of the ice sheet collapsed 15.4–14.6 cal. kyr BP and glaciers retreated inside the present coastline. In Younger Dryas, 12.6–12.0 cal. kyr BP, the ice sheet readvanced and terminated near the present coastline. After 11.2 cal. kyr BP the ice sheet retreated rapidly and relative sea level fell towards and eventually below present sea level at 10.7 cal. kyr BP. At 8.7 cal. kyr BP glaciers terminated proximal to their present margins. During the mid-Holocene climate optimum some of the present-day ice caps were probably absent. Ice caps expanded after 6.0–5.0 cal. kyr BP, and most glaciers reached their Holocene maxima during the Little Ice Age (AD 1300–1900).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571086609013049

HH Lamb, in his own inimitable way, described just how bitterly cold it was during the Little Ice Age:

In Iceland the old Norse society and its economy suffered a severe decline which set in first about AD 1200 and could be said to have continued over almost six centuries. The population of the country fell from about 77500, as indicated by the tax records in 1095, to around 72000 in 1311. By 1703 it was nearly down to 50000, and after some severe years of ice and volcanic eruptions in the 1780’s it was only about 38000. The people’s average stature also seems to have declined, much as in Greenland, from 5ft 8in to 5ft 6in from the 10th to the 18thC.

It is clear from the surviving records that years when the Arctic sea ice was close to the Iceland coast for long months (usually between January and August) played a big part in this. In such years, the spring and summer were so cold that there was little hay and thousands of sheep died. The shellfish of the seashore were also destroyed by the ice. Gradually all attempts at grain growing were given up. The glaciers were advancing.

The times of most ice and coldest climate in Iceland seem to have started suddenly in 1197-8 and 1203, and reached culminating phases around 1300, from about 1580 to 1700, especially the 1690’s, and again in the late 18th and 19thC.

HH Lamb: Climate, History and the Modern World – page 189

Meanwhile, temperatures in the region have been barely higher in the last decade or two than they were 80 years ago:

https://en.vedur.is/climatology/data/#a

When the AMO turns cold in the next few years, Iceland will have to endure the same bitter cold which they named the Sea Ice Years in the 1960s and 70s, when the country suffered dreadfully.

The BBC article finishes with this statement from Oddur Sigurdsson, a glaciologist at the Iceland Met Office:

"150 years ago no Icelander would have bothered the least to see all the glaciers disappear," he said, as they advanced over farmlands and flooded whole areas with melt waters and streams. "But since then, while the glaciers were retreating, they are looked at as a beautiful thing, which they definitely are.

"The oldest Icelandic glaciers contain the entire history of the Icelandic nation," he added. "We need to retrieve that history before they disappear."

Not only does he evidently not understand Icelandic history, but he seems to care more about “glaciers’ beauty”, than he does about the livelihoods and interests of Icelanders who have to live alongside them.

One thing is for certain – if those glaciers began advancing again, Iceland will be very, very sorry indeed. I wonder where the prats holding CLIMATE EMERGENCY placards will be then?