"The media love to bandy around big numbers in order to scare people:
The study referred to is here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z
267 billion tonnes sounds scary, but it is in reality a mere drop in the ocean, equating to 0.7mm a year in sea level rise, three inches a century.
The claimed acceleration of 48 Gt/year, which is little bigger than the error margin, is even more tiny, about 0.1mm a year.
[“Glaciers”, by the way, exclude the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets].
As we know, glaciers worldwide expanded massively during the Little Ice Age,
And they have been retreating since the mid 19th Century, long before any supposed man made global warming (AGW).
As for sea levels, they too began rising in the 19th Century, and, following a slowdown in the second half of the 20thC, are again rising at a similar rate to the rest of the period 1850 to 1950:
In short there is not the slightest evidence of anything unusual, unprecedented or scary going on.
Drilling down into the study, most of the claimed acceleration of 48 Gt a year arises in Alaska and Central Asia.
We know that Alaskan glaciers were melting much faster during the 19th Century.
And evidence of medieval forests being discovered as glaciers retreat now prove that they used to be much smaller than now.
The acceleration of glacial retreat in Asia revolves around the Karakoram, where glaciers were actually expanding until a few years ago.
This is well known scientifically as the Karakoram Anomaly.
However researchers have found that this expansion has not been a constant process.
During the 20thC there have been periods of decline as well as expansion.
The most recent growth only began in the 1990s.
The end of that expansion is simply part of a natural cycle.
Interestingly, it is surging glaciers that are bad news, not the gradual decline:
There is of course nothing mankind can do, either to prevent these surges, or stop glaciers around the world continuing their retreat from Little Ice Age maxima."
