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Larry

[Thanks. Trashed. ~ E]

So there. We are all correct.

I got up this morning and dug through older issues of American Scientist. There is an article by Mote and Kaser (Vol 95 July-August 2007) which shows photos of these glaciers, and there are occasional features exactly like this one. They are close to the glacier edge, and the way this photo was taken it looks like a completely isolated feature, but I withdraw any suggestion I made that it is fake.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26303346-5012765,00.html

“Credit: Ohio State University”
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3109/kilimanjaro-snow-vanish-20-years

So it appears that the sciencenews caption was misguiding, but probably not intentionally. It appears that if anyone photoshopped the pic it was no one in the press, and since it appears to have been officially sourced to the press from Ohio U or Thompson, it is genuine.

Ric Werme (10:00:37) :

“Science News has the story too, see http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49038/title/Mount_Kilimanjaro_could_soon_be_bald

They have a photo, credited to “Thompson et al./PNAS 2009″ that looks like a photoshop fake.

I have never seen anything like it at its scale. Looks very suspicious, but this isn’t like 60 Minutes and the faked National Guard letters, so it’s not like there will be any reprecussions from a photoshopped picture. This is science after all.”

Since the date of the article, text of the article and caption indicates the pic is from the current online paper ahead of print and since the pic is not in the full access online paper or supplemental, it was not from “Thompson et al/PNAS 2009″.

It may have been provided to the reporter by one of the authors, the only pics I found are from “recent fieldwork” on Hardy’s website:
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/tanzania/oct09/
Closest is picture 26 in “recent fieldwork”. Not quite as “shocking” as the sciencenews pic.

REPLY: I did an extensive search for this photo in PNAS in the orginal article, plus the SI for the article,
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/30/0906029106.full.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2009/11/02/0906029106.DCSupplemental/0906029106SI.pdf

plus the Ohio State Newsroom, and I found it here:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/lonkilipnas.htm

It doesn’t look quite the same, but it does appear to be the same ice structure, perhaps taken at different times from a slightly different angle, possibly in a different season. – I don’t see any reason to suspect a fake. – Anthony

2) The talus at the base of the object looks more like snow than ice. One would not expect talus at the base of a remnant receding through sublimation. The layers in the thing make it look more like a portion of a cut though snow with a rotary.

3) She says that ice blocks separated from a receding glacier that persist and make kettles are not shaped thin and tall like this one. These isolated remnants are more block shaped. (My engineer/physicist eye tells me that sharp edges vanish quickly with melting, but sublimation can make scalloped shapes with some sharpness to the surface. )

4) I don’t see the shadows as being right. The shadows on the ice remnant seem to come from Sun at a high angle, almost overhead, but the shadows on banks of the gullies come from a lower sun ahead of the camera.

5) Also patterns in the clouds appear to change right next to the ice above it and on its left side. It is almost like someone used the healing tool on these areas. At the interface between the ice and the soil there are many long horizontal trends, whereas the soil surface elsewhere is blocky, and covered with cobbles.

Perhaps it’s all a coincidence. I wish someone who knows more about editting images would weigh-in.

REPLY: Clarify please, Anthony

They have a photo, credited to “Thompson et al./PNAS 2009″ that looks like a photoshop fake.

I have never seen anything like it at its scale. Looks very suspicious, but this isn’t like 60 Minutes and the faked National Guard letters, so it’s not like there will be any reprecussions from a photoshopped picture. This is science after all.

CLIMATE is temperature PLUS HUMIDITY, RAINFALL, WINDS, CLOUDS , etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

An UNPRECEDENTED DROUGHT is certainly something than can be called “Climate Change”

Okay, again, thank you for the discussion and sorry, I have to improve my English.

REPLY: “Honesty” in any form is moot without data verification. If Dr. Thompson wants trust, he should make his data available as requested. – Anthony

“you see, the other authors say the deforestation is more likely. ”

Scientifically speaking, what constitutes “likely” is a problem for those that want to attribute this glacial melting to global warming but are unable to quantify “likely”, or “some” or “part of”. If you can find where deforestation has been ruled out, or natural variability ruled out scientifically, or any combination (including “global warming”) quantified, you’re left with deforestation, what is actually *known* to have happened, and what is actually causing ice loss, which is not directly a temperature increase of the ice, but of other factors such as humidity. Reasons for these factors, such as air current patterns, past ocean temperatures, regional temperatures, have not been positively identified as being responsible, nor have changes (either known or inferred) in these factors been shown to be caused by “global warming”.