Kilimanjaro regaining its snow cap

Paging Dr. Lonnie Thompson and Al Gore. From ETN:

“Global warming” has nothing to do with this, it’s all about rainfall, deforestation, and evapotranspiration. I’m not ashamed to say: “We told you so”, several times:

More proof that Kilimanjaro’s problems are man-made; but not what some think it is

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

Kilimanjaro’s snow – it’s about land use change, tree cutting

Oh no, not this Kilimanjaro ice rubbish again!

Another dumb climate stunt from NBC – climbing Kilimanjaro

Gore wrong on Kilimanjaro snow: Its the trees and “freezer burn”

Yet another inconvenient story ignored by the MSM.

h/t to ClimateDepot and Steve Goddard

 

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Pingo
March 21, 2011 12:25 am

Like its ever been about science for those fukushima ups?

Rick Bradford
March 21, 2011 12:38 am

“Snow returning to Kilimanjaro is a clear sign that global warming is real. It is entirely consistent with mainstream climate change science models*, and there are plausible mechanisms# which show how this can happen.”
Somebody’s bound to say it, and I get so fed up of reading it when they do, that I thought I’d get in first. Where’s my grant?
* models = guesswork
# plausible mechanism = thought experiment

wayne
March 21, 2011 1:00 am

Time to start looking for Mars polar cap growth and new glaciation:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=edae9952-3c3e-47ba-913f-7359a5c7f723&k=0

King of Cool
March 21, 2011 1:01 am

Come on Anthony,
We know that the Thought Police have told us that global warming causes climate change.
And that climate change causes droughts and bushfires and floods and earth quakes and tsunamis and cyclones and nuclear disasters and islands sinking and jelly fish sperm becoming infertile and just about anything else you care to mention including increasing and decreasing snow on Mt Kilimanjaro.
I am waiting with some anticipation to find out that it causes more conflict in the Middle East. Anthony, I am a law abiding citizen; when I am convinced of that fact I will be happy to pay my carbon tax (sorry price).
Remember Anthony, George told us “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.”

Warren
March 21, 2011 1:11 am

There are probably a lot of things I could link to, say, quote,
But in the long run, to just let nature take its course over the next few years is satisfaction enough

Richard
March 21, 2011 1:16 am

Shhh… dont tell Al Gore… what will become of his investments.. his ad campaigns that feature the vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro, which whip up fear mongering hysteria for his snake oil products?

Dermot O'Logical
March 21, 2011 1:19 am

Is the land use around the mountain changing back to what it used to be?

Stephen Wilde
March 21, 2011 1:32 am

Well of course.
The global climate zones have shifted again back towards what they were when Kilimanjaro last showed accumulating snow cover. That applies as much to Tanzania as to Europe, North America and Australia.
So nothing or little to do with CO2 levels OR deforestation and human influence is exonerated.

March 21, 2011 1:37 am

To be fair, if you read the whole ETN piece and then read the last “related article”, “Global warming and Mt. Kilimanjaro”, half way down that article it does say “Even if some of their claims are questionable, climate warmists have ………… “.
A long search for a little journalistic common sense, though.

Al Gored
March 21, 2011 1:54 am

I love stories like this. Not so much for the story itself but just anticipating the coming shhhhppinnn. But this one is so in-your-face – unless that’s all warmsnow and warmice up there – that maybe they’ll just go quiet on it.

March 21, 2011 2:13 am

‘Sources from the mountain environmental watchdog groups said the snow could mount to cover most areas of the mountain, but the effects of climate change and global warming could still affect the mountain’s snow layers which are becoming thinner and thinner.’
you just can’t win with these people..

John Marshall
March 21, 2011 2:30 am

I think I said this months ago. They must have read all the old papers going back about 100 years all of which came to the same conclusion. Its lack of snow stupid. (sarc)
Can we get on to something else now this scare has had its day.

matthu
March 21, 2011 2:33 am

How significant id this? It would be good to have some quantitative comparison to justify the claim – even a couple of photos side by side would be better than nothing …

Erik
March 21, 2011 2:36 am

..but still – the polar bears is dying!
http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/30955/knut-dead/

LeeHarvey
March 21, 2011 2:45 am

The smart money says that this was part of the effect of the Obama presidency. You know – ‘this is the moment that the earth started to heal and sea levels started to subside’ or however that nonsense was worded.

March 21, 2011 2:50 am

Matthu,
Just find a picture from Al Gore. That is sure to be the picture that shows the least snow ever taken in human history.

Alan the Brit
March 21, 2011 2:52 am

They’ll be claiming lives are at risk now due to avalanches threatening to engulf the perimeter due to AGW/earthquake induced by AGW, next. Or that the leaked radiation from Fukushima has travelled round to Tanzania, reacted with the CO2 just above Mount Kilimanjaro causing the added snow. They’ll never give up even on a lost cause! Sarc!

Cold as ice - London UK
March 21, 2011 3:02 am

Great news!
It’s not really a surprise though when you read further down the article, the environmental group states that it COULD still all melt in the near future. AGHHH!!

Don Keiller
March 21, 2011 3:19 am

If the returning snows of Kilimanjaro weren’t bad enough look what’s happening down under…..
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/battle-of-our-times.pdf

DEEBEE
March 21, 2011 3:29 am

Does this make the scientists any different than stock market prognosticators immediately after a large daily tumble?

AusieDan
March 21, 2011 3:38 am

And what you all need to realise is that this is not good snow.
It is rotten snow.
Rotten as in “Damn it – just as I had snowed the good Australian prime minister Green-Julia into taxing the Australian people needlessly and in the worst possible way (worst as in best) to cripple their economy, the rotten snow has gone and spoint it!”
Rotten snow indeed.

AusieDan
March 21, 2011 3:41 am

New Year’s resolution: AusieDan MUST learn to type and to spell.
For “spoint” I could have typed “spoilt”.
But I think that I like “spoint” better anyway.

AusieDan
March 21, 2011 3:42 am

But where are the Trolls when we need them?
This rotten snow must really hurt.

Blair
March 21, 2011 3:44 am

Someone whould graph the increase and project ahead to find a point of no return and the exact day when the entire planet will be covered. Then write a book, make a movie, sell shovel futures and retire early.
It might work.

March 21, 2011 3:45 am

Funny thing, but until air travel, satellites and so on became the norm, hardly anyone not living in the shadow of Kilimanjaro even knew it sometimes had a snow cap!
Now the Greenpeace eco-terror mob think it’s a barometer of their favourite ‘man-made’ disaster movie…

March 21, 2011 3:54 am

I’m just jazzed that they are suggesting that the effects of climate change are ending.

Dave Springer
March 21, 2011 4:24 am

Climate boffins are nothing if not resilient in the face of contrary data. If you listen closely you can hear the goalposts moving.

Tom in Florida
March 21, 2011 4:31 am

So it turns out that the supposed melting of Kilimanjaro’s cap due to
AGW was just a snow job.

Steve Allen
March 21, 2011 4:39 am

Ausie Dan says, “But where are the Trolls when we need them?
This rotten snow must really hurt.”
Preparing to eat “crow” with the missing ocean heat.

DaveF
March 21, 2011 4:52 am

Yeah, well, the snow may be returning, but it’s too late for Kilimanjaro’s Polar Bears, because they’re all extinct!

amicus curiae
March 21, 2011 5:08 am

Joshs AGW table has had yet another leg kicked out from under it.
maybe time to turn it into a side table?
Polar Bears, Fail
Kilimanjaro, Fail,
warming troposphere, Fail,
ocean heating, Fail
ricketty or plain Legless?

March 21, 2011 5:11 am

Dermot O’Logical says:
March 21, 2011 at 1:19 am
Is the land use around the mountain changing back to what it used to be?
Good point!

Jimbo
March 21, 2011 5:38 am

Hans Meyer, German geographer and the first man to climb Kilimanjaro, noted the ice retreat in 1898. He noted that the ice limit had withdrawn by over 100m since his first ascent 8 years earlier.
http://tinyurl.com/68sbmr6

“Results suggest glaciers on Kilimanjaro are merely remnants of a past climate rather than sensitive indicators of 20th century climate change….All ice bodies on Kilimanjaro have retreated drasti-cally between 1912 –2003. Despite air temperatures always being below freezing, areal retreat of plateau glaciers is governed mostly by solar radiation induced melt on vertical walls that characterize their north and south margins [Molg et al., 2003].”
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/tanzania/pubs/cullen_etal_2006grl.pdf

Gore needs a primer and should stop his dis-information campaign.

Norm814
March 21, 2011 5:42 am

Global warning melted the snow caps…
Climate change is bringing the snow caps back….
Climate crisis is threatening the snow caps…

Ken Hall
March 21, 2011 5:50 am

Is this yet another hole in the cAGW hypothesis which will have to be re-filled with millions of dollars of grant money?
Up until now they were ignoring that it was a hole at all, and now that metaphoric water is pouring in that metaphoric hole, they will need to fill it with something, and cAGW grant money buys them the most convenient scientific conclusions to act as hole-bungs that money can buy.
:: sigh ::

Paul Westhaver
March 21, 2011 5:53 am

Live web cam images of Kilimanjaro with archive:
http://www.snow-forecast.com/resorts/Kilimanjaro/webcams/latest

March 21, 2011 5:57 am

John McCain said he became a believer in ‘manmade global warming’ because of Kilimanjaro losing snow. Doh!

Pamela Gray
March 21, 2011 6:02 am

No, it’s not rotten snow. It’s new snow. What counts is multi-year snow. There is an Algorithm that measures the amount of old snow versus new snow. Model results clearly show a continued decline in old snow.

Bruce Cobb
March 21, 2011 6:02 am

“Environmentalists warn that this highest peak in Africa could lose its ice cover and glaciers between 2018 and 2020 unless global campaigns to save the mountain’s ecology are taken.”
The new information doesn’t seem to have gotten through to their spin doctors yet. For now, it’s just stay the course. They are so predictable in their gloom and doom ideology.

March 21, 2011 6:08 am

From John McCain’s web site, October 30, 2003:
My favorite author is Ernest Hemingway, as he is of many millions of people throughout the world. One of his most famous short stories is entitled “The Snows Of Kilimanjaro.”…… the snows of Kilimanjaro may soon exist only in literature.
http://mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressOffice.FloorStatements&ContentRecord_id=f886bdee-c111-1858-281d-7e2a520b42b9&Region_id=&Issue_id=bc036142-6f29-470a-9be9-37d306822ccf
He also said this:
……“Winters In New England Are Getting Shorter,” according to the USGS scientists
Doh!

Mike
March 21, 2011 6:14 am

This is a report from a tourist promotion group that cites only what a few people think they see. It does not cite any scientific studies or measurements. It may or may not be valid. Even if it is correct it is not at all clear that it is significant. Snow cover expansion where there was once solid ice may or may not be the beginning of a trend. Try to be at least a little skeptical.

Roger Knights
March 21, 2011 6:32 am

What’ll be more fun will be when/if this year turns seriously south (colder).

Jimbo
March 21, 2011 6:48 am

Maybe I’m being paranoid but I have notice a dearth of recent images of Kilimanjaro from NASA and other Warmist sites. Am I looking in the wrong place. I would like to see recent, dated images. Any pointers.

Pamela Gray
March 21, 2011 7:01 am

Been burning wood like crazy, soaking my atmosphere around me with CO2. Still too damned cold for bats or worms. I’ll have to use artificial bait and last year’s roe if I want to try to catch a nice steelhead. And it is snowing, again, in Wallowa County right now.
Reminds me of our Easter pictures from the 50’s and very early 60’s. We stood in front of a snow bank for our Easter dress-up pictures before heading off to mass.

Jimbo
March 21, 2011 7:10 am

Current weather conditions. Brrrrr!
http://www.snow-forecast.com/resorts/Kilimanjaro/6day/top

dp
March 21, 2011 7:20 am

Because this has always been cyclical one needs only give time a chance to prove the current “trend” is just a segment of a well-established cycle. Because a trend looks like a very long cycle, and because serious long cycles predate observation requiring the use of proxies, and because proxies require interpretation, and because the interpreters have been shown to be corrupt bastids, best we just be patient.

truthsword
March 21, 2011 7:24 am

My expert analysis reposted with permission from myself:
We have said all along that the science is settled, sometimes we have to adjust our predictions forward several decades because they don’t happen. You deniers like to twist these necessary recomputations from model adjustments as ‘moving the goal posts.’ It is unfair to consider it as such, because our previously settled science of AGW meaning less snow has now been slightly updated to AGW means more snow, so thus we have all along said that the snow would not disappear from Kilimanjaro because AGW causes more snow, as well as that the snow will disappear from Kilimanjaro as AGW causes less snow. Either scenario is not inconsistant with AGW. Thank you.

frank verismo
March 21, 2011 7:28 am

“Climate boffins are nothing if not resilient in the face of contrary data. If you listen closely you can hear the goalposts moving.”
Moving?
That sound is the goalposts leaving the stadium and hailing a taxi!

Mike
March 21, 2011 7:33 am

Look if they were really serious about snow cover on Kilimanjaro they would have Al Gore host a climate change conference there.

Sundance
March 21, 2011 7:57 am

More WAG based science bites the dust. Please inform your librarian that “An Inconvenient Truth” should now be moved to the fiction section of the library.

Gary Pearse
March 21, 2011 8:35 am

I climbed Kilimanjaro while waiting for an electrical inspection of a project in the 80s. It was a day after President Carter climbed it. It was very snowy and cold at the last camp and a beautiful experience starting in jungle, crossing tundra and into winter. Oh I got robbed at gunpoint losing a bit of cash, a twenty doolar traveler’s cheque and my passport which sent me off on another unplanned adventure by bus to Dar es Salam for travel docs.
I’d gotten a contract to develop a stone quarry in an ignimbrite bed (welded volcanic ash)and build a stone sawing plant near Moshi at the foot of Kilimanjaro. The ash bed is 8m thick and many km long and was to serve as a cheap substitute material for concrete blocks for housing construction. The specifications were for a labor intensive op that would would employ workers who were quarrying and shaping blocks by hand and burying the quarry with waste (about 80% of the stone). We bought an old wire saw from Vermont, a compressor, drills and tools and shipped them over in 20′ container. We had to build an electric generator out of two scrapped Soviet units and a quarry crane from hardwood telephone poles a 3 ton chain hoist and a counterweight made of a steel barrel filled with scrap iron and poured concrete. The boom was suspended from a tripod of poles with the short end over the quarry and the long end rigged with the chain hoist and counterweight for leverage. The short swing was enough to lift a 5-10t block from the quarry and onto a flat-deck truck usin nuscle power. The crame was a substitute for one that was supposed to be available and the generator for tthe grid power that was supposed to have been ready to hook up (the poles for it were lying on the ground along 10 miles of road, afew of which we borrowed for the crane).
Anyway, I’m happy the snow is coming back. Anyone checked out the status of world mtn glaciers recently?

klem
March 21, 2011 8:41 am

The thing is, the environmentalistss and watchdogs actually want Kilamenjaro to lose it’s glaciers, they don’t want the ice to return. Though they cry about the loss publically, it is to their benefit to have the ice vanish permanantly.

Richard Keen
March 21, 2011 8:44 am

Kilimanjaro’s ice cap seems to have stopped shrinking almost ten years ago. Check out this plot of published acreages of the “permanent” ice:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/KILIMANJARO_KEEN.jpg
Joe D’Aleo and I have a write-up of this on ICECAP:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/lonnie_thomson_again_snow_cap_disappearing_from_mount_kilimanjaro/

Sun Spot
March 21, 2011 9:10 am

Quick alert for the “Google Climate Spin Fellows”, I’m sure this perception of snow on Kilimanjaro can be corrected with the proper search filters.
~!/sarc

Holbrook
March 21, 2011 9:28 am

The snow returns to an African mountain and there is a very cold period from late November through to January in the Northern Hemisphere including the UK.
The cold weather stays in the USA and many parts of the Northern Hemisphere well into the New Year but Britain settles down to a more normal winter.
It is probably something to do with the Gulf Stream.
Sorry Al, I just thought I would point it out.

Kev-in-Uk
March 21, 2011 10:18 am

I haven’t time to read all the comments – but obviously the increasing snow cover is just down to the natural variability THIS time. As soon as it’s reducing it will be cow farts and CO2 all over again….
sad really……
(sarc off )

Tim Clark
March 21, 2011 10:27 am

oh-no-not-this-kilimanjaro-rubbish-again /sarc

March 21, 2011 10:52 am

Anthony… Here is a better article to link to on the subject. And isn’t this a most damning quote?
“Unfortunately, we made the prediction. I wish we hadn’t,” says Douglas R. Hardy, a UMass geoscientist who was among 11 co-authors of the paper in the journal Science that sparked the pessimistic Kilimanjaro forecast. “None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now.”
WHAT?????
“None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now.”
So WHAT THE HELL were you doing publishing and supporting this AS IF IT WAS CERTAIN?????
I wonder if anyone will demand a retraction from Thompson and Hardy?
This will be posted on my blog shortly.

Richard G
March 21, 2011 11:15 am

All this talk of goalposts and the curly fry bulb in my heat lit up: there are goalposts at both ends of the field. That is why they can be right no matter what happens.

rbateman
March 21, 2011 12:19 pm

I think we need to address Global Warming once and for all.
Computer :
“Yes”
What is your name?
“Global Warming Mark V”
Thank you, Computer.
“Feed me”
What do you require for fuel?
“Grants. Specifically stacks of fresh bills”

March 21, 2011 12:48 pm

“The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause,” Dr Lonnie Thompson said in a statement.
Thompson would like us to believe that the cause is global warming caused by a rise in CO2. But as we can see from this ICECAP image, that explanation fails.
The planet has been emerging from the Little Ice Age since around 1800. That and deforestation would certainly have more of an effect than a change in a harmless trace gas.

March 21, 2011 2:13 pm

rbateman says:
March 21, 2011 at 12:19 pm
“Feed me”
What do you require for fuel?
“Grants”.

comic on grants
http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/9540/drbagshaw.jpg

John F. Hultquist
March 21, 2011 3:17 pm

Hello. Hello. Anyone out there?
There is a question hanging in the air.
Dermot O’Logical says:
March 21, 2011 at 1:19 am
Is the land use around the mountain changing back to what it used to be?

How many mpingo seedlings have been planted? Enough to reverse a century of landuse change? Hello?
http://www.blackwoodconservation.org/kilimanjaro_conservation.html

DAV
March 21, 2011 5:14 pm

“None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now.”
We got it wrong but “This time fer sure!”
http://bullwinkle.toonzone.net/heyrock2.wav

Robert of Texas
March 21, 2011 8:48 pm

Oh, but you need to keep reading…”but the effects of climate change and global warming could still affect the mountain’s snow layers which are becoming thinner and thinner.”
Priceless; the snow layers are thinning, so more new snow isn’t as good!
Where’s my Brandy… I need a drink.

Pamela Gray
March 22, 2011 8:26 am

Greater and greater amounts of snow is nice. But the amount that doesn’t melt compared to the amount that does is the key to glacier growth. It may be the case that glacier growth occurs at such a slow pace, it may be indiscernible within a human life span, but the degree to which it melts may be discernible. On top of that, all current glaciers likely cannot keep up with erosion. This means that glaciers are made very slowly during cold epics, and then lost quickly during warm epics (which explains our PANIC). By the time a new glacial period comes along, glaciers will build in places they were not, because the mountain that used to have one is now too low to support one.

kwik
March 22, 2011 3:39 pm

Oh no!
So the universe isn’t rotating around humanity after all?

savethesharks
March 22, 2011 8:07 pm

kwik says:
March 22, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Oh no!
So the universe isn’t rotating around humanity after all?
============================
That was hysterical! So true.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

kate sisco
March 23, 2011 4:22 pm

Actually, in case no one has noticed our atmospheric content has altered. As have all the other orbiting bodies from info gathered here at the local drive up E. The part of our atmosphere that makes up the greenhouse gas, the fabled oxygen, is increasing.
More oxygen in atmos, more water vapor, more ice falling. Makes sense?