From the we told you so, time and time again department comes this story about Gore’s buddy, Dr. Lonnie Thompson and his Kilimanjaro glacier that just won’t die like they want it to, even though they don’t believe their own hype.
From ETN Global Travel Industry News:
Mount Kilimanjaro Glaciers nowhere near extinction
The legendary glaciers, one of key tourists ecstasy, on Tanzania’s majestic Kilimanjaro mountain, will not melt anytime soon after all, as it was earlier predicted.
America’s renowned climatologist, professor Lonnie Thompson in 2002 projected that the snow on the summit of Africa’s highest mountain would completely disappear between 2015 and 2020, thanks to global warming.
But 12 years down the lane now, local ecologists who have been monitoring the trend say the ice, in fact, remains steady and it is nowhere near extinction.
“There are ongoing several studies, but preliminary findings show that the ice is nowhere near melting,” said Mount Kilimanjaro National Park (KINAPA)’s Ecologist, Imani Kikoti.
Mr Kikoti hints that sustainable rainfalls supply on Mount Kilimanjaro in recent years could be a factor behind the snow resilient.
“Much as we agree that the snow has declined over centuries, but we are comfortable that its total melt will not happen in the near future,” he stressed.
Sometimes in 2006, KINAPA installed three state-of-the-art automatic weather stations on mountain key areas of Shira 2, Mweka and Kibo huts to collect accurate data on weather trends.
Though scientifically, it takes up to 30 years to conclude on whether rainfalls are on increase or otherwise, but Mr Kikoti says the data are encouraging.
more here: http://www.eturbonews.com/44420/mount-kilimanjaro-glaciers-nowhere-near-extinction
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As we’ve said before, it’s about sublimation and lack of water vapor in the atmosphere, not temperature.
The issue is really quite simple.
Much of the sublimation may be due to the forests around the base of Kilimanjaro being cleared for firewood and agricultural use by the locals. Just imagine if they had electricity- they’d no longer need firewood and the trees would return, along with the evapotranspiration that keeps the up-slope winds onto the mountain laden with water vapor.
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
Of course, it is easy to see why Dr. Thompson wants to keep claiming that the glaciers on Kilimanjaro will disappear, its his business:
Skeptics are once again proven correct.
Has Ann Curry weighed in?
It’s great work if you can keep the gravy train going!
Its clear from the accompanying chart that any fool would keep spouting nonsense if they keep increasing the funding the more crazy and outlandish his predictions and bizarre his explanations. See his hearts in the right place even if his brain can’t make sense of crazy nature. He knows like others that humans are going to destroy the planet so having details wrong is irrelevant.
Nature – Alarmists biggest nightmare.
Time and again we have argued to give the poor access to cheap and abundant electricity. The following is one of the reasons.
Result, a halt in the ice cap reduction.
Even SkS agrees!!!
Lonnie’s wild predictions were just as way out on the Quelccaya Glacier in Peru!
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/another-wild-alarmist-prediction-bites-the-dust/
Seems it is the grants that are “$ ETTLED”, not the science.
From a climatic point of view we’re living in the best of times.
Only warmer weather makes things even better.
Now with this plain wisdom take a frying pan and hit all the scare monger really hard on the head.
It won’t change their mind but at least they will know what a frying pan is.
In 2012 we saw this bit of shocking news too.
Will Al Gore give up now?
So this is what $10,000,000 gets you these days? This lack of results wouldn’t cut it in the real world.
Melting glaciers are the alarmist ace-in-the-hole. No matter how many different ways you explain to them that AGW is wrong and simply alarmist, no matter how many times you point out flaws in their logic, their final argument is always the same: “But even so, the glaciers are melting. So you have to be wrong.” If they no longer have that, they no longer have their last refuge.
Besides that, who ever listens to a guy called “Lonnie”?
OK, so lets see if I got this right: The Tanzanian government scientists predicted that by halting deforestation, Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers should recover. The Tanzanians then tested the hypothesis and it was found to be correct.
But now Dr. Thompson is confused. Could this be just another example of real world data not matching IPCC CO2 computer model predictions? To IPCC indoctrinated researchers, that would be quite impossible, so the only thing to assume is that the computer models are STILL correct. This leaves the only possible course of action: Shift the predicted catastrophe to another place to ensure that the research $$$ don’t sublimate.
Or did I miss something?
from climate change hero to zero.
“In 2007, he received the National Medal of Science, the highest honor the United States bestows on an American scientist.
At the time, former vice president Al Gore said of Thompson: “His tenacity through the years in countering disbelievers, coupled with the quality of his team’s research from the very beginning, has shown us dramatically the effects we can expect in the near future.
“His work is the most serious warning cry yet that it is time to change our ways,” Gore said.”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/03/22/207657/lonnie-thompson-global-warming-poses-clear-and-present-danger/
“A type I error, also known as an error of the first kind, occurs when the null hypothesis (H0) is true, but is rejected. It is asserting something that is absent, a false hit. A type I error may be compared with a so-called false positive (a result that indicates that a given condition is present when it actually is not present) in tests where a single condition is tested for. Type I errors are philosophically a focus of skepticism and Occam’s razor. A Type I error occurs when we believe a falsehood.[4] In terms of folk tales, an investigator may be “crying wolf” without a wolf in sight (raising a false alarm) (H0: no wolf).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive#Type_I_error
where do they see this wolf they keep crying is there?
What may have caused the dirty halo around the ice spire on the first photo? Enlarge 200 percent if necessary.
I was on Kilimanjaro in 1985. At the third camp we were on the snow and it was very cold (this coming from a Manitoba boy!) the very early morning of the last stretch. It certainly was not heat that was disappearing the glaciers. If there is precipitation, it will be snow. Surely Thompson et al understands very basic ideas about altitude and temperature.
I notice a grant pause.
Jimbo, go google this: “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc”
So, the mentioned fellow was averaging about $500K per year for the research that he and his wife were leading in Ohio State. This is quite a bit of money and what is the secret of such incredible success in super competitive competition for NSF funding? There is a link at the end of this post to an open letter written in 2010 to that time director of NSF. Did he reply and if he did, what was in this reply?
from the paper
Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options
Lonnie G. Thompson
The Ohio State University
The Behavior Analyst 2010, 33, 153–170 No. 2 (Fall)
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/TBA–LTonly.pdf
” If you connect the dots on the changes seen to date and assume the same rate of loss in the future, within the next decade many of the glaciers of Kilimanjaro, a Swahili word meaning ‘‘shining
mountain,’’ will have disappeared.”
“The evidence is over-whelming that human activity is responsible for the rise in CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gas levels, and that the increase in these gases is fueling the rise in mean
global temperature”
” Many small island nations in the western Pacific (e.g.,Vanuatu) are facing imminent destruction as they are gradually over-run by the rising ocean.”
“In Tanzania, the loss of Mount Kilimanjaro’s fabled ice cover would likely have a negative
impact on tourism, which is the country’s primary source of foreign currency”
“Increasingly, computer models have underestimated the trends because, in fact, the rate of
global temperature rise is accelerating.”
“Around the world organic material is being exposed for the first time in 5,200 years as glaciers recede. In 2002, when we studied the Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru,
we found a perfectly preserved wetland plant. It was identified as Distichia muscoides, which today grows in the valleys below the ice cap” [my comment-so it melted 5,200 yrs ago? co2? Mount Kilimanjaro ice only dating back 5,200 years too? So what happened then? Shows warmer is normal/not unusual?]
“Our only hope is to change our behavior in ways that significantly slow the rate of global warming,”
@ Hans Erren says:
April 7, 2014 at 11:57 am
“I notice a grant pause.”
Yes, but dude seems to be over 70 years old. He is near the finish of spending taxpayer’s money on worthless research. The problem is that multitudes are replacing the old guards. May be it is time to stop them and have some sort of reset for whole system of research funding…
Why does the money graph look like a Hockey Stick? Perhaps the Hockey Stick is the money graph?
Mindert Eiting says:
April 7, 2014 at 11:48 am
Do you mean the very obvious jpeg compression surrounding the spire?
Lonnie knows that the glaciers are melting away, but he refuses to archive the data.
How Inconvenient…
So it takes 30 years now to prove a trend?
Archonix: in these matters I am an amateur. What could have caused the obvious jpeg compression?
OT I know, sorry, but interesting article in The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/the-uns-new-focus-surviving-not-stopping-climate-change/359929/
The cumulative grants graph is a bit misleading. My “cumulative” income is ramping up like that too, but I’m not getting any richer and my buying power is declining year by year.
But the look of the graph if you plotted his annual grant funding in inflation adjusted dollars it would flat. The exponential growth in the graph is misleading and probably intentionally so.
Too bad we can’t get scientists like him off the gravy train.
I don’t blame him for spending all that money. I blame the fools who gave it to him.
“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”
————————————————————————–
They aren’t there because that ice is sitting on an extremely porous and permeable heap of volcanic cinders and ash. Every summer 20 feet of snow melts off the volcanoes near my home, and hardly a trickle of runoff is seen on the mountain. If passes through the volcanoes easily, and burbles out near the base as springs.
While I agree with sublimation being the major process, the lack of melt water pools is not very convincing evidence.
“Nature – Alarmists biggest nightmare.” Phil Jourdan at 11:17am
Nice one! And I like this version, too:
REALITY — AGWers biggest nightmare.
Bwah, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
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Thanks for more GREAT information, Jimbo.
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Hi, Gary Pearse — hope all is well up there!
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Good point, Greg (at 1:25pm),
— Way to expose the bias inherent in the form of the data presentation.
Your Truth in Science Ally,
Janice
#(:))
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My thought: And EVEN IF the glaciers were “dying” (oh, brother)… .
It proves about human CO2 exactly: NOTHING.
Greg says:
April 7, 2014 at 1:25 pm
The cumulative grants graph is a bit misleading. My “cumulative” income is ramping up like that too, but I’m not getting any richer and my buying power is declining year by year.
But the look of the graph if you plotted his annual grant funding in inflation adjusted dollars it would flat. The exponential growth in the graph is misleading and probably intentionally so.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If you plot his annual grant take against my tax bill I’m sure that you will find that my tax bill climbed at a faster rate than his annual grant take. Unfortunately my income didn’t either. Rather than defending this largesse you should be shocked and disgusted by it.
It was GREGORY (Peck, playing Harry) who was dying, not the GLaciers, you dummies! (lol)
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (based on short story of Ernest Hemingway)
@ Generic Geologist — You make the BETTER point (at 1:58pm) (than mine at 1:55pm). Such a waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned income is, indeed, disgusting. I sure would like to see Greg as an ally, here… . I think he may actually be one…
These baseless and alarming stories are sublimating into the sunny dry air – more *POOF* of Global Warming.
“News and notes on Kilimanjaro’s summit glaciers and climate”
http://kiboice.blogspot.se/
Thanks, A. Good article.
Good to know that the Kilimanjaro glacier is going nowhere fast and that forests, not warming, are the key. Tanzanians should find a way to promote wealth acquisition to make deforestation unnecessary, conservation desirable.
Well said — GREAT SUMMARY, Andres Valencia, and you nicely make the point of Peter Huber’s excellent book on GENUINE “environmentalism,” Hard Green.
…. Cheers! #(;))
I find it most interesting that using fossil fuels, instead of stripping the surrounding forests for fuel, might facilitate preservation of the glaciers. Score another point for fossil fuels!!
After a few long, harsh and exceptionally snowy winters in a row, Helsinki got rid of their budding glacier in Maununneva snow dump site with fossil fueled heavy equipment. http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Piled+higher+than+the+rollercoaster+at+Linnanm%C3%A4ki/1135255884382. With 10000000$ that should be a piece of cake in Africa.
When the first histories of an event start to appear, you know that the subject event of those histories are drawing to a close and are almost over and finished.
Rupert Darwall has written a history of global warming in his book, “The Age of Global Warming”, reviews of which can be found in “The Spectator” and “The Telegraph”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8883981/the-greatest-scare-story/
Perhaps one of the most intriguing items of this grand and total debacle of the whole global warming scam is the almost total hubris and arrogance displayed by so many very prominent scientists in this whole sordid climate warming debacle.
They made and many continue to make outlandish and unprovable claims on the future of a future diabolical global climate which from the climate gate mail releases we now know they knew were never valid or accurate portrayals of even the outputs of their unproven global climate models let alone having any relationship with the reality of the global climate both past and future.
In their apparent hubris and arrogance these same so called climate scientists seem to believe they would never be found out for their blatant lying and deliberate misrepresentations of the realities of the climate predictions they were very prominently and personally promulgating which they, as we now know, were quite aware had the lack of any proven scientific evidence to back up and base their catastrophic climate predictions on.
Nor did they and in some cases some still believe they will never be held to account for their blatant lying and deliberate misrepresentations on the true realities of the climate and the science surrounding the global climate.
Hopefully some of the worst offenders in climate science will find that they are marked for the rest of their lives with the tar and feathers of being the prime perpetrators of a blatant scientific fraud that has cost the people of this earth so much in treasure and health and lives and all for totally and absolutely nought.
The true legacy of corrupt climate science is the very marked reduction in public respect for all of science and the suspicions by the public that many scientists across all disciplines are far from dedicated and pure in spirit scientists and are in science purely for the money and the prestige.
And the unpredicted and surprising creation of a very large internet based science lay person run blogsphere dedicated to going over science of every type with a fine tooth comb looking for both the strengths and the weaknesses in particular of any science based claims across all of science’s disciplines.
As the global warming debacle slowly dies those interested science blogging lay persons will switch their interests to other science disciplines and for many of those other science disciplines the exposure to the public and often forensic type examinations of the blog sphere will be traumatic and deeply disturbing to the status quo and most unwelcome but they will have to adapt or be revamped in a new modus operandi or it will be done for them and harshly.
Science has a serious future shock awaiting it and will probably be changed forever as it now starts to come under a constant questioning surveillance from the science orientated sections of the lay person run blog sphere.
Never again will science be allowed to operate in it’s own exclusive closed ivory tower isolated academic circles remote from and completely contemptuous of those little people down there who pay the increasingly onerous bills that science presents and which much of science has become convinced that it is science’s rights to have access to as much of the public wealth as it demands.
As is said; “He who has the gold makes the Rules,”
In this case it is the public and it’s tax money which science of every type now relies almost totally on for it’s very existence and that public is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the science of the recent past.
The Graphting of Grants al la Hockeey Stick needs to be terminal
You really need to give poor Lonnie a break. He’s just trying to stay warm.
Back before he began his studies, glaciologists had to go to terribly inhospitable places to do their work, places like Greenland, the Vostok research station, and Baffin Island.
Lonnie ‘discovered’ low-latitude glaciers like Dunde and Quelccaya, where you could take some measurements in the morning and then catch some rays while enjoying your afternoon tea on the veranda.
His worry, now turned into desperate fear, is that these glaciers might melt away during his lifetime and his glorious summer research projects would go away. He and his students would then face the unpleasant choice of returning to the frozen wastelands to collect ice cores, or perhaps find a different line of work.
So what if his ‘solution’ would mean shutting down a significant portion of the world’s economy; he and his students would stay warm while they explored their favorite glaciers.
(sarc of course)
Have Lonnie and Ellen archived their data yet?
http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/08/lonnie-thompsons-legacy/
Indeed, I will note that one of the criteria for a dynasty in China to claim the Mandate of Heaven was to write the history of the previous dynasty.
Heh, I read that as “Global Travesty Industry”. 😉
What the heck are “sustainable rainfalls”? Maybe they meant “sustained”?
Reblogged this on Head Space and commented:
The devil in the details is the chart at the end of the article showing the 12 million dollars in NSF grants awarded to Dr.Thompson for his theories pushing the agenda.
What a lovely hockey stick graph courtesy of NSF.
[SNIP too stupid to print -mod]
A remake of 1952’s ‘The Snows Of Kilimanjaro’ is in order. Perhaps a release to coincide with any Gore AIT 2 warmenklatura nonsense. Who would play Harry. Clooney? Hell no.
It makes you wonder if these idiots ever look at themselves in the mirror and think “was I wrong?”
A quick glance at their pay cheque and suddenly all queries disappear.
Hemingway would be pleased.
There were 2 sharp jumps in Dr. Thompson’s grants in the early 1990s. That wouldn’t have anything to do with an IPCC report and Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’? No wonder he latched onto global warming.
Done it. And yes, global warming was of highly questionable cause. Global warming occurred, the ice cap receded and they blamed global warming. Reforestation carried out and the ice cap built up. The Kilimanjaro ice cap has been dwindling since 1912 so the reforestation efforts had a big impact in a relatively short period of time compared to 1912.
Also see my peer reviewed references above.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/07/kilimanjaro-glaciers-just-wont-die-nowhere-near-extinction/#comment-1608025
$11 million in grants for this Quackitist ? This is the main issue isn’t it ? Public money for non-science, activism, Cut all of it now. No $ for the cult of globaloney. No $ for anything unless it is applied science, which conforms to the scientific method, whose results, data sets and code; are put into the public domain for review.
Here is what the IPCC has said in the past.
“Increasingly, computer models have underestimated the trends because, in fact, the rate of
global temperature rise is accelerating.”
He wrote this in 2010, when there had been no global warming for over a decade.
The man’s a liar.
Chris
I remember reading Michael Crichton’s excellent novel ‘State of Fear’ pub 2004 .
there he put deforestation as the probable cause of retreat of Kilimanjaro glacier, & cited the journal references. “Kilimanjaro has been rapidly melting since the 1800s–long before global warming….& has been a topic of scholarly concern for over a hundred years.”
Sea levels, also: sea levels have been rising for the last 6,000 years, ever since the start of the Holocene,at the rate of 1.7 to 2.4 mm/yr = 6″ to 9″ every hundred years.
Also mentioned was the benefit of CO2 producing plant growth, the Greening of the Sahara since the 80s, for example.
A most important book for a non-scientist such as myself, because he also deals with the social & political sides of the CAGW/CC/WW scare scam. Because that’s precisely what it’s all about: the control of society through fear.
Mr. C, RIP, correctly identified the start of the popularisation of Global Warming as the televised stitch up Wirth & Hansen arranged in June 1988.
Not coincidentally, the Berlin wall came down in Nov 1989, & the GW scare scam was in place to replace the dead Cold War scare scam, which had sufficed as a control mechanism since WWII.
It’s all about control, & always has been. “Sustainability” is a red herring.
His grant money is increasing exponentially. It’s better than he thought.
Check out this sinle million Dollar grant for ONE year! Who needs adjustments for inflation? He was well on a hockey stick trajectory.
“Reconstructing Tropical Pacific Climate Variability and Monsoon Systems, and Abrupt Changes from Ice Cores on Irian Jaya, Indonesia and Hualcan, Peru”
Investigator(s):
Lonnie Thompson thompson (Principal Investigator)
Ellen Mosley-Thompson (Co-Principal Investigator)
$1,094,433.00 Date: 2008
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0823586&HistoricalAwards=false
Jimbo says:
April 8, 2014 at 8:44 am
Greg says:
April 7, 2014 at 1:25 pm
The cumulative grants graph is a bit misleading. My “cumulative” income is ramping up like that too, but I’m not getting any richer and my buying power is declining year by year.
But the look of the graph if you plotted his annual grant funding in inflation adjusted dollars it would flat. The exponential growth in the graph is misleading and probably intentionally so.
Check out this sinle million Dollar grant for ONE year! Who needs adjustments for inflation? He was well on a hockey stick trajectory.
If you read it carefully you’ll see it was the amount awarded over 6 years.
Climate Dunce says:
April 7, 2014 at 8:29 pm
[SNIP too stupid to print -mod]
If that is the criteria, probably 10 – 15% of comments should be snipped.☺
Mod: readers can handle stupid comments. I’m sorry I couldn’t read what ‘Climate Dunce’ wrote. Sometimes it’s fun to reply to stupid. Don’t deny us that pleasure.
“””””…..Doug says:
April 7, 2014 at 1:49 pm
“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”
————————————————————————–
They aren’t there because that ice is sitting on an extremely porous and permeable heap of volcanic cinders and ash. Every summer 20 feet of snow melts off the volcanoes near my home, and hardly a trickle of runoff is seen on the mountain. If passes through the volcanoes easily, and burbles out near the base as springs.
While I agree with sublimation being the major process, the lack of melt water pools is not very convincing evidence……”””””
Are your volcanoes 19,000 ft high, like Kilimanjaro ??
Ice tends to not melt at Temperatures well below zero. And if it does, it tends to form downward facing spikes (on refreeze), not upward facing ones. Ergo, one can conclude that Thompson’s icicle is not melting.
This is an example of taxpayer abuse of the worst kind. These leeches, need to get off the taxpayer’s backs, and try and find some honest work; like selling used cars maybe.
That Thompson and his wife can slurp at the public trough for 38 years, is itself a travesty. At some point, they need to get a job.
Well this is good to know! I still dream of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. I’m hoping to win a spot with a charity climb of 30 high-tech leaders to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro and raise money to provide water to Africans in need. My contest ends Apr. 17 and I’m also trying to achieve my mom’s dream of climbing Kilimanjaro. She passed away recently but I still want to make her dream come true. I’m getting FB likes for my video :). http://thesummit.co/kilimanjaro/nominees-individual#entry-102
Hey friend,
Look at that stuff I’ve just found! It’s best stuff I’ve ever seen, check it out
Warmest, gerjaison