Posted on 11/03/2009 4:19:19 PM PST by presidio9
Edited on 11/03/2009 4:26:25 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The snows of Kilimanjaro may soon be gone. The African mountain's white peak — made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway — is rapidly melting, researchers report.
Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Kilimanjaro is a volcano. That might have something to do with it...
Just in time to buttress algore’s investments.
0bamas fault!
Every five years for the last fifty we have had the same story.
Algore will make another billion off this news. ;-)
Oh well.
Mts. Kilimanjaro and Kenya are directly on the equator! I’d bet that over the past 6,000 years, the white caps of those mountains have been steadily decreasing. It may be more noticeable now since Africa has been in a 30-year drought cycle. Ergo, less snow
Maybe they will find the Joan of Ark.
I feel no guilt.
Glaciers have been melting on Kilamanjaro for hundreds of years. Deforestation on lower levels by villagers has sped up the melting because of dryer air now around the mt. Has nothing to do with warming, as anyone who as actually studied the history of the mt would know.
Say it isn't so!!!!
I find the timing of this suspicious.
Good, now maybe we can visit it.
Somebody somewhere from the left will make use of it though. Perhaps Hussein will see it as a “reason” for pouring more billions into the black hole of Africa. What a trade he made for the US-we send them our money, they send us their HIV/AIDS positive denizens as “immigrants”. He’s a slick horse trader, that Hussein.
We need to do something to restore the precious Yosemite Glacier. How can this rape of our planet be allowed to continue???
I won’t be losing any sleep over it.
Is that how that frozen leopard got halfway up the northern slope?......
And in a related story, the Glaciers that historically covered the Great Lakes of Northern USA have melted, and have not so recently completely dissappeared ! !
However, the Great lakes have been known to still freeze during the North American Winter, and are expected to again Freeze this year.....That would be 2010-11, in the Al Gorian period of excessive Hot Air Bloviation period.
I did visit Alaska in September and can report that I saw many glaciers. The one a sea level just outside of Juneau is reported to be declining, but didn't hear that about any of the others.
Oh noes! Then those poor polar bears will have nowhere to hide from the gorillas!
You can't underestimate the importance of actually reading the article. The scientists actually say one possibility is that it's just snowing less up there right now. Then they reject that hypothesis. Presumably because it does nothing to enhance global warming theory. Meanwhile, there are entire regions of Africa that supported millions of people for tens of thousands of years facing starvation because of decades long droughts.
All they care about is convencing enough airheads that what thay say is true.
For decades, they—the experts—have been proclaiming that Mt. Kilimanjaro is a dormant volcano. Imagine the ruckus in that ‘expert’ community when its found that Mt. Kilimanjaro is beginning the cycle of becoming active. lulz!
At any rate, the libtard wacko global warming/climate change alarmist love to use Mt. Kilimanjaro as an example of proof....how quaint that it is once again being brought up.
Deforestation by local villagers = dryer air around the mountain = less percipitation on the mountain = less snow.
Kaiser Wilhelm put that ice up there as a prank when he gave it to Queen Victoria for her birthday.
She said “We are not amused by that little willie”
FLASH~!
Some of the missing snow has been found in my yard.
Yes but ice is growing in other parts of the world.
Antarctica is the only continent not owned by any country.
So, buy it, and keep your drink there.
Damn. First the Sahara loses all its water now Killamanjaro loses its snow.
Some things never change.
Railla Odinga’s fault.
And this hurts...what? Tell me again, please.
You feel no guilt?
Well. You’re not a very useful idiot, are you?
You are correct. That’s why I posted this article of course. The left has a lowest common denominator cycle that it uses to get the uneducated psyched up about global warming. Next month, it will be polar bears again. Then coral reefs. Then possibly frogs. Then honey bees. Then flooding in major population centers. By then we’ll be into the summer and we’ll have a hurricane we can blame on our own actions, hopefully followed by a devestating tsunami that somehow resulted from too many cow farts.
And it is still Not My Fault.
While currently some glaciers are retreating there are others which are thickening. That is historically consistent ... good grief, the earth has seen Ice Ages retreat long before there were SUVs.
Consider the research of Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson ... he who predicted in a 10/02 paper in Science an end to Kilimanjaro's glaciers by 2020, more or less, according to current trends. I remember when ABC news picked this up.
Well. much of modern environmental journalism displays a pervasive lack of critical insight toward environmental scares and the scientific papers on which they are supposedly based. An inspection of Thompson's own data, also published in i Science, shows that Kilimanjaro's glaciers would be dying even if i Homo sapiens ancestors were still the dominant hominid in the Rift Valley, a few hundred miles to the West. That is to say, humans are not to blame for the glacial recession.
Thonpson cited five surveys of Kilimanjaro from 1912, 1953, 1976, 1989, and 2000, as per your graphic.
From 1912 to 1953, global temperatures rose (as measured controversially by surface thermometers) 0.4° C (0.74° F). This rise occurred before most of the industrial emissions of so-called "greenhouse gases" , mainly CO2 and CH4. As a result. most scientists think the warming of the 20th century had mainly to do with changes in Mr. Sun. In fact, slight changes in solar output have modulated the earth's surface temperature plus or minus about 1.0° C (1.8° F) over millennia.
Kilimanjaro's glaciers lost 45% of their areal extent during that era of solar warming. If the glaciers had continued to decline at the pace established in that period, they would already be gone by now, pfffft, even with no additional warming from the emissions of greenhouse gases.
But the glaciers are still here. From 1953 through 1976, another 21 percent of the original area was uncovered. This occurred during a period of global cooling of 0.07° C (0.13° F). OSU's press office could logically have written the following hype in 1976: "Kilimanjaro's glaciers will completely disappear by 2015 if this cooling trend continues".
It is patently obvious that global temperatures and their behavior of Kilimanjaro's glaciers are pretty independent, at least on the time scale of decades. Local climate, however, is apparently critical. A glacier cares what happens from its head to its toe, not elsewhere.
The local climate record around Kilimanjaro is confusing. There is very little cohesion between nearby thermometers which argues more that the data are bad than it does for any local cooling or warming. Poor (unsubsidized by Kyoto) countries have little income to spend on a quality climate-monitoring network.
Since, 1976, another 12% of the original mass has disappeared - and despite all the hoopla, a loss of 12% represents the slowest decline since 1912. Although the local temperature measurements are clearly questionable, more recent decades' measurements area as close to perfect as possible. In 1979 satellite monitoring began. All scientists - even the most ardent Anthropogenic Global Warming ™ apocalyptics - acknowledge that the satellite is excellent at measuring temperatures at the altitude of Kilimanjaro's glaciers - about 19,000 feet. In fact, it may measure temperatures at that altitude better than it does at sea level.
Around Kilimanjaro, satellite data shows a cooling of 0.22°C (0.40°F) since 1979, which is the same as the global warming rate between 1912 and 1953 (0.09°C or 0.17°F per decade). Still, Kilimanjaro's glaciers continue to shrink.
In his Science article, Thompson noted that the period from 4,000 to 11,000 years ago was warmer in Africa than it is today, and yet Kilimanjaro was much more glaciated because it was also wetter than it is today. Some estimates place today's precipitation at only 50% of what it was during the warmer period. Obviously, precipitation, not Anthropogenic Global Warming ™ temperature, is the key to the glaciation of Kilimanjaro.
Did people make it stop snowing? Precipitation in East Africa is highly correlated with El Niño activity in the tropical Pacific ocean. During the last big one, 1997-8, how many news stories promulgated the notion that El Niños are becoming more frequent because of AGW?
So someone could argue that humans cause global warming, global warming causes more El Niños, more El Niños affect precipitation, and therefore humans are causing the glaciers to recede. But, if people are causing more El Niños, then in fact it should be snowing more and more on Kilimanjaro - more than it did back in the day when it was even warmer, thousands of years ago.
Lol! Is it time for you to be fitted for a
straight jacket, LJ? :)
Good, they can use the water.
Damn Germans. Always causing trouble. :)>
Environmental justice: Whitey shouldn't be on top.
It’s summertime there. The ice will come back in the winter.
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