Glacier National Park to be glacier-free by 2020
From Climate Progress: 
[I welcome your ideas for a new name for the park. The pictures below are Grinnell Glacier circa 1940, top, and 2004, bottom.] National Geographic News reports the oft-repeated statistic that the glaciers at Montana’s Glacier National Park will disappear by the year 2030 is being revised:
But Daniel Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who works at Glacier, says the park’s namesakes will be gone about ten years ahead of schedule, endangering the region’s plants and animals. The 2030 date, he said, was based on a 2003 USGS study, along with 1992 temperature predictions by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Temperature rise in our area was twice as great as what we put into the [1992] model,” Fagre said. “What we’ve been saying now is 2020.”
Yet another climate impact occurring faster than the models had projected. As noted in my November post Himalayan glaciers “decapitated,” glaciers all over the world are melting faster than previously expected, such as the Naimona’nyi Glacier in the Himalaya (Tibet): (more…)
