The History of the Jostedal Glacier

The Jostedal Glacier, located in the mountains of Norway is the largest glacier on the continental mainland of Europe. To find larger European glaciers, we have to go to Iceland or Svalbard.

However, few glaciers have been as closely studied as the Jostedal Glacier, once thought to be the remnants of the great Scandinavian Ice Sheet that covered most of Northern Europe.

It used to be that anyone interested in climate change had to study the history of the Jostedal Glacier in great details. So important was its history that it was taught in primary school in Norway. I still remember having to learn the basic facts about this impressive glacier.

It is therefore quite astonishing to me to find the Jostedal Glacier getting hardly any attention these days. With the wealth of information available, I would have thought that Wikipedia would have had more on it than it has.

Even the Norwegian version of Wikipedia fails to mention the important fact that the Jostedal Glacier is no more than 6,000 years old.

During the early to mid Holocene, there was no glacier in the Jostedal area. Rather, there was a lush forest growing there. We know this because bits and pieces of this forest still come out with the melt water. When carbon dated, we get that the pieces are about 6,000 to 10,000 years old.

North western Europe was therefore at its warmest and most welcoming between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. If we draw a long term trend line from the peak, we get that temperatures are going down.

Furthermore, we know that warm periods don't usually last more than 10,000 years. We are therefore due for a further decline in temperatures.

All of this was common knowledge, readily available in encyclopaedias back in the days when I went to primary school in Norway. But if we want to find these facts today, we have to read the scientific papers where they are mentioned.

On the other hand, if we want to learn about CO2, there's no lack of material in which we are told that this trace gas that makes up no more than 0.041% of the atmosphere is somehow of vital importance to the climate. The fact that the CO2 content has gone from 0.035% back in the 18th century to about 0.041% today, is presented as an existential threat to life on Earth.

In contrast, if we look up the deadliest super-volcano of the last 100000 years, long passages are dedicated to how insignificant this event might have been.

The pattern is clear, Wikipedia's editors will omit or trivialize anything that suggests that nature is the biggest driver of climate change, while they will go to extreme lengths to support the idea that a small variation in a trace gas will lead to catastrophic changes.

If anyone were still wondering, Wikipedia has long since been taken over by political trolls who seek to suppress and misrepresent certain facts. While factually correct, the information found in Wikipedia is always presented in favor of the Status Quo. It can therefore only be used to find officially sanctioned information, and facts that cannot be denied, such as the precise CO2 content of the atmosphere. For a critical and balanced interpretation of the facts, we have to do our own research and thinking.

Sidearm of the Jostedal glacier

By G.Lanting - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link