Still, if there is evidence of accelerated widespread glacier retreat worldwide, I would like to see it. I just doubt whether one can extrapolate from the 625 mountain glaciers the World Glacier Monitoring Service has monitored since 1980 to the world's vast number of glaciers. This website, for example, says there are 616 officially named glaciers in Alaska alone, but there are probably 100,000 in total - yes, in Alaska alone!

The columnist states:

The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world's glaciers are retreating.

Well, great. Let's see these peer-reviewed published studies that show the world's many hundreds of thousands of glaciers are overwhelmingly in number retreating faster than some sort of historic or prehistoric average.