Alaska Mornings

The days here in Alaska have been fabulous, the mornings have been...cold. Note that this morning we woke to ice on the coffee water I'd set up the night before. Brrr.
We are back from our Glacier cruise. While there were many tour boats we could take, we elected to take a ferry from Valdez to Whittier. This brought us in contact with famous glaciers such as the Columbia glacier (loosing 2 cubic miles of ice annually). The glaciers are typically at 90% loosing ice. We are coming out of a mini ice-age, according to Jim our US Forest Service guide for the cruise, but this doesn't mean that humans aren't responsible for making some of the damage worse. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051210120437.htm
If 90% of the Alaskan glaciers are shrinking, 10 % are growing. Harvard Glacier is growing http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002AGUFM.C62A0913T and one of the 10%.
Glaciers growing does not mean that climate change is NOT happening, rather these glaciers actually have a few things in common.

"Calving glaciers that are currently growing and advancing have at least four things in common. All of them
(1) are at the heads of long fiords, (Harvard is at the head of College Fiord)
(2) have undergone massive retreats during the last thousand or more years, (Harvard has a well-documented history of advance beginning between 1905 and 1911)
(3) presently calve over relatively shallow moraine shoals, and
(4) have strongly positive mass balances that are a consequence of a surface-area distributions that have unusually small ablation areas compared to the accumulation areas. " http://adsabs.harvard.edu

There are a few other glaciers around the world that have some advancing characteristics.
The skeptical Scientist makes his case for these glaciers in context to other effects humans have on the planet. Check this out: http://www.skepticalscience.com/himalayan-glaciers-growing.htm