“Most glaciers in the NH [Northern Hemisphere] have only formed in the last 4,000 years. While these new glaciers are often used as evidence of global warming, that these new glaciers have formed in the past few thousand years is actually evidence that the Earth and Northern Hemisphere specifically are cooler now than they were in the past few thousand years.” (John Kehr, The Inconvenient Skeptic: The Comprehensive Guide to the Earth’s Climate, page 116.)
Mr. Kehr seemingly wrote this book (2011) and then walked off the face of the earth. He’s not on YouTube, makes no public appearances, doesn’t Google well. Maybe (guessing) he opted not to engage the propaganda and madness that is the Climate Change movement. Maybe he did not want to endure personal attacks from people less knowledgeable than him. Maybe he just doesn’t suffer fools well.
Lately, there has been wild talk about us being in the hottest month on record and a certain day in July the hottest in the Earth’s history.
The news media in unison screamed this message at us. This is utter steaming nonsense, as we only have temperature records for the last 100 years or so, and plenty of physical evidence (Vikings farming Greenland) that the Mediterranean Warm Period (~750-1350) was far warmer than today. In fact, Michael Mann, in constructing his goofy Hockey Stick, deliberately left out the MWP, as it would have shown that we are cooler today than then. Further, I have evidence here provided (but not publicized by) NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) showing that at least in our lower 48, the 1930s were and are the hottest decade on record. (Think Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath.)
It should come as no surprise too that we are entering an ENSO, or El Nino Southern Oscillation, which causes temperature spikes, the last in 2016. El Ninos are followed by La Ninas, where temperature return to normal.
It appears in my reading of The Inconvenient Skeptic that the interglacial period we are currently enjoying, called the Holocene (~14,500 years ago to present), came in like a lion. It melted all the glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, leaving standing ice only in Antarctica and Greenland. The glaciers we have now have formed since then. Most of them are receding, but not all, and there are some mid-equatorial glaciers currently forming. Due to this massive melt, sea levels rose almost 400 feet fr0m 20,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago. Obama’s, Al Gore’s, John Kerry’s and Bill Gates’ luxurious waterfront properties would not have survived.
Picture, if you will, those four clowns in a lifeboat. I enjoy such images.
In fact, Kehr reminds us, for the last 4,000 years, each succeeding 1,000 year period has been cooler than the one before. As he says repeatedly throughout the book, and in closing on page 268,
Summer is over …
Fall is fading …
And Winter? Winter is coming!
In other words, the Holocene is winding down. Cold is the enemy of humanity, not warming. Growing seasons shorten, we have early and late frosts, crops fail and people starve. Thank goodness we have abundant stores of fossil fuels as we enter a period of cooling.
Oh, wait …
Piece of Mindful 
What sort of sources does he give, eg for that first quote? How do we know the glaciers only formed in the past 4,000 years? I’m not disputing it, just curious what this is all based on.
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Kehr relies heavily on ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. There are no ice cores taken from any other glaciers that go back more than 2,000 years. What strikes me is the 400 foot increase in sea level at the onset of the Holocene, as that amount of water did not arrive from outer space, but had to be caused by rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets. Only Greenland and Antarctica had enough ice to survive. Archeology and geology are unable to explain much, and unwilling to leave convention, but something happened 11-12,000 years ago to cause a massive melt-off.
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Oh okay, thank you.. I’m glad you’re covering his book because I thought about getting it but probably won’t, so it’s good to at least get some selected summary and excerpts.
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Mark, I hope you are well.
I’m very glad that you went to the trouble to get hold of John Kehr’s book and I hope you enjoyed reading it. It’s one of my favorite works on climatology. The large graphs that illustrate how global average temperatures according to ice core proxies have risen and fallen over the past several hundred thousand years and how these rises and falls correlate with changes in insolation caused by the Milankovitch cycles.
Are John’s ideas and forecasts for future millennia on the mark? Perhaps and perhaps not. Ask me again in 10,000 AD.
But beyond that and more important than that, he explains a lot of things that you probably won’t hear about anywhere else. For instance, why does the Earth’s average temperature warm up as we head towards July when the planet is moving away from the Sun, and cool down as we head towards January when the planet I moving toward the Sun? Why does the Northern Hemisphere undergo a much greater degree of heating and cooling over the course of a year than the Southern Hemisphere? Why did the Eemian interglacial reach higher temperatures and higher sea levels than the current Holocene interglacial and yet go through the process of rise and fall faster?
The book explores and explains these and many other fascinating questions that anyone interested in learning about how the natural world works will be eager to learn about. Lamentably, in our dumbed-down society in which science, like much else, is monetized and politicized to the extent of being bastardized, only a small minority of people seem interested in asking or seeking answers to such questions.
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So you were the one who alerted me to the book. I have much more work to do with it, and I am reminded of Blanche in Streetcar, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
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