OSU's Dr. Lonnie Thompson pushes gloom and doom, still thinks the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting due to global warming

This is an OSU press release, timed to appear in Eurekalert for Cancun’s COP16 on December 8th, and reposted here verbatim, including the all caps headline. Even though the “melting on Kilimanjaro due to global warming” has been fully debunked by a recent peer reviewed paper (see Kilimanjaro’s snow – it’s about land use change, tree cutting) Dr. Thompson continues to push this false information.

For example, this is a photo (at left) of Dr. Thompson standing next to an ice spire on Kilimanjaro. Notice any meltwater pools nearby? You won’t, because they aren’t there. Read this quote from this entry to understand why:

The ice cap on Kilimanjaro consists of ice on the 5,700-meter-high flat summit, some with vertical edges, and several slope glaciers, mostly at altitudes where temperatures stay well below freezing and the major source of energy is solar radiation. Considerable infrared radiation is emitted from the glacier surface into the surrounding air, and the glaciers lose the most mass through sublimation-the direct conversion of ice to water vapor. Observers have seen only a trickle of meltwater.

Dr. Thompson seems not to want to understand the process of sublimation on Kilimanjaro – Anthony

RyanM chimes in:  Tennis great(est) Martina Navratilova, who recently battled breast cancer, participated in a charity climb/hike up Kilimanjaro this week, but sadly had to turn back due to health concerns.  However, an “unexpected blizzard” and really ugly “tropical winter” weather made her climb quite miserable.  “We have sent a message down to our base camp to bring up thicker gloves, hand warmers and more heavy clothing. I was expecting it to be cold and snowy, but not so soon.”

CLIMATE SCIENTIST WARNS WORLD OF WIDESPREAD SUFFERING IF FURTHER CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT FORESTALLED.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – One of the world’s foremost experts on climate change is warning that if humans don’t moderate their use of fossil fuels, there is a real possibility that we will face the environmental, societal and economic consequences of climate change faster than we can adapt to them.

Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, posed that possibility in a just-released special climate-change edition of the journal The Behavior Analyst.

He also discussed how the rapid and accelerating retreat of the world’s glaciers and ice sheets dramatically illustrates the nature of the changing climate.

Lonnie Thompson

Photo by Thomas Nash

It is the first time in a published paper that he has recommended specific action to forestall the growing effects of climate change.  During the last three decades, Thompson has led 57 expeditions to some of the world’s most remote high altitude regions to retrieve cores from glaciers and ice caps that preserve a record of ancient climate.

In the past Thompson has let his research data and conclusions speak for him but in this paper, intended for social scientists and behavior experts, he voiced his concern regarding  the risks that ignoring the evidence of climate change may bring.

“Unless large numbers of people take appropriate steps, including supporting governmental regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, our only options will be adaptation and suffering,” he wrote in the concluding paragraph.

“And the longer we delay, the more unpleasant the adaptations and the greater the suffering will be.”

In the paper (available here), Thompson said that virtually all climate researchers “are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

His opinion isn’t hyperbole, he said, but instead is based on a “very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the Earth is warming, that the warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes to many of the Earth’s support systems, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are possible.

“Such future scenarios,” he says, “emerge not, as is often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.”

Thompson listed three options humanity has for dealing with global warming which, he says, “is here and is already affecting our climate, so prevention is no longer an option.”

“Clearly mitigation is our best option, but so far most societies around the world, including the United States and the other largest emitters of greenhouse gases, have done little more than talk about the importance of mitigation,” he says.

He says that there are currently no technological quick fixes for global warming.

“Our best hope,” he says, “is to change our behavior in ways that significantly slow the rate of global warming, thereby giving engineers and scientists time to devise, develop, and deploy technological solutions where possible.”

Thompson prefaced his advice with examples of the Earth’s diminishing ice cover, examples that constitute some of the strongest supporting evidence of the current threat of global climate change:

— The ice fields atop Mount Kilimanjaro have lost 85 percent of their coverage since 1912;

— The Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru – the largest tropical ice field on Earth, has retreated 25 percent since 1978;

— Ice fields in the Himalayas that have long shown traces of the radioactive bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s have since lost that signal as surface melting has removed the upper layers and thereby reduced the thickness of these glaciers;

— All of the glaciers in Alaska’s vast Brooks Range are retreating, as are 98 percent of those in southeastern Alaska.  And 99 percent of glaciers in the Alps, 100 percent of those in Peru and 92 percent in the Andes of Chile are likewise retreating;

— Sea levels are rising and the loss of ice coverage in the North Polar region continues to increase annually.

“Everyone will be affected by global warming,” Thompson wrote.  “But those with the fewest resources for adapting will suffer the most.”

A research scientist with Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, Thompson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  In 2007, he received the National Medal of Science, the highest honor the United States gives to American scientists.

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Contact:  Lonnie Thompson, (614) 292-6652: Thompson.3@osu.edu

Written by Earle Holland, (614) 292-8384; Holland.8@osu.edu.