Mount Kilamanjaro – Tanzania, Africa – still snowy. Photo by Neil Modie, January 2008
Last week, I broke the story of a press release issued by NOAA where they publish an opinion smashing any link between hurricanes and global warming saying that “There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.”
Many readers may recall that Al Gore used hurricanes prominently in An Inconvenient Truth, and mentions hurricane Katrina specifically. Gore claims that increased hurricane activity is caused by global warming.
Last week, when the NOAA press release came out smashing any link between hurricanes and global warming, I wrote to my local newspaper editor, David Little, and said to him “Do you care to bet that AP and Reuters won’t run this story?” He responded: “I hope they do, it seems newsworthy to me.”
Well here is is, 4 days later, not a peep.
A Google search of news stories for “NOAA increased hurricane” (keywords of the press release) reveals a tiny handful of stories about the press release. Could you imagine though if the story said the reverse? What if NOAA claimed they had established a definitive link between global warming and hurricanes. Oh my, the humanity of it all! Gloom, doom, death, destruction, angst, and demands for action on Kyoto. If it bleeds it leads. Compare to all the stories still circulating about hurricane Katrina and global warming.
Here is another story about a point from Gore’s AIT hit parade; Mount Kilimanjaro. Mr. Gore asserted that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming; “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.” That was in 2005 in his movie An Inconvenient Truth.
Deforestation seems to be causing Mount Kilimanjaro’s shrinking glacier. Researchers think deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the most likely culprit. Without the forests’ evapotranspiration of humidity into the air, previously moisture-laden winds blowing across those forests now blow drier. The summit, no longer replenished with water from those winds, started shrinking. Studies show the ice is evaporating through a process called sublimation. You can witness this effect at home, have you ever noticed that ice cubes left in your freezer tend to shrink with time?
Last year, a British Court ruled Gore’s point about Kilimanjaro not to be true.
So when a news story crossed my desk today that said: “Mount Kilimanjaro: On Africa’s roof, still crowned with snow” I had to wonder, will we see this one covered in the main stream media? Or maybe those beacons of truth over at Real Climate will make a note of it?
Don’t hold your breath. But, at least the New York Times travel section covered it. It seems more of a touristy thing to have snow on Kilimanjaro than a scientific issue of truth I suppose.
UPDATE: Kate over at SDA created a collage over time showing the snow of Mt. Kilimanjaro:
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Thank you, Evan Jones. Your response to Prosser was perfect. In fact, both of them were. Well done.
Bravo. I live in Wisconsin, and I can tell you, if mass global warming were real I think most cheeseheads would cheer. On the contrary, we’ve been setting snow records right and left.
Climate fluctuates. Authoritative records have not been kept for long enough for us to definitively state there are not fluxes every hundred years or so. Ebbing and flowing is natural, a heat wave is not indicative of a lack of ozone.
In addition, the myth evolution perpetuates would seem to say everything would get better. But of course the world has been slowly decaying and nature has been going slowly downwards since it started. Note, slowly. A few years are not going to tear the lid off the sky and let all nature break loose.
If it WERE, you’d think Gore would stop his houses from putting out so much pollution and wasting so many natural resources. I can’t wait for him to put his money where his mouth is.
You’re kidding, right?
Oh Please. It could be raining outside and Al Gore standing right beside me holding an umbrella and him telling me it was raining. I would skip through 3 puddles and a drainage ditch to get next to someone else to ask them if it was raining before I believed one word out of his mouth. All that Liberal yap, yap, yap is enough to give me a migrane. Every single time he speaks I throw up a little bit in my mouth.
Thank God for John McCain is all I have to say!
You know what they say about Iraq… No news coming from the MSM is proof of the success of the surge.
Now just replace ‘Iraq’ with ‘global warming’, ‘success’ with ‘failure’ and ‘the surge’ with ‘alarmist predictions’.
Sod, not satisfied with that as debunking the Hurricane/Global Warming link? Maybe you could tell me, one by one, why all the papers referenced here:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/category/climate-extreme/hurricanes/
Don’t either.
Looking at the picture, it looks like a little “reforestation” went on. Goes to show that land use effects climate quite a bit!
Timprosser said
“Climate change of any kind has scary implications. Those who just want to trash Al Gore are ignoring the realities.
The real problem we face is overpopulation. We _are_ going to run out of food, and our current plateful of resources, some day. This has already begun, and it will become serious in most of our lifetimes. What can we do now to avoid worse calamities?”
What has that got to do with CO2 induce global warming theory?
It seems to me that overpopulation, resources, etc, etc are differant arguments.
I will say that I don’t at all blame timprosser for believing what he believes. A great deal of time, trouble and treasure went into the effort. Expended by people he had every reason to believe he could trust. I once taught in the NYC public school system. My class has betrayed him in a very fundamental fashion, and it makes me very unhappy.
I can’t fault him and all those like him for trusting those who had a responsibilty to relay the facts in a straight, unbiased manner. It is now up to the rest of us to make up for it by at least placing the other side of the argument on the table. He can choose to believe or not. But at least he should be able to do so having seen both faces of the coin.
cool picture especially time series^^
“I will say that I don’t at all blame timprosser for believing what he believes. A great deal of time, trouble and treasure went into the effort. Expended by people he had every reason to believe he could trust. I once taught in the NYC public school system. My class has betrayed him in a very fundamental fashion, and it makes me very unhappy.”
Education seems to be more about indoctrination and test-taking ability nowadays, instead of the ability to think logically, and outside the box. Too bad more can’t be like Kristen Byrnes, of “paunder the Maunder” fame (speaking of famous).
That’s Ponder the Maunder, of course. Tim might want to check it out.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaunderf/
Well, you are right. I have been following the Global Warming, Climate Change news in the mainstream media and on the Internet. I have never heard that the deforestation could becausing Mount Kilimanjaro’s shrinking glacier.
If that’s the case, why don’t they plant more trees?
It is comforting reading your analysis and the responses by this online community. The climate is changing though, wouldn’t you agree? We do have serious risks if we continue business as usual don’t we? We can’t keep extracting natural resources and dumping our toxic waste into the eco system and it not have an impact can it?
Certainly there has to be a better way to do our business on this earth isn’t there?
You wouldn’t disagree with that would you?
Anyway, I enjoyed reading your post and the comments.
If that’s the case, why don’t they plant more trees?
Because it’s expensive and they’re poor. Because they needed the wood. It’s really as simple as that.
If they could have afforded to replant, they never would have deforested in the first place. (That is why I am such a fervent advocate of affluence and wealth creation.)
We do have serious risks if we continue business as usual don’t we? We can’t keep extracting natural resources and dumping our toxic waste into the eco system and it not have an impact can it?
Yes, repeat, no.
Our “continuing business” is fast changing as here we sit. As usual.
Nautral resources will never be a serious problem. At most, temporary kinks, quickly resolved. That I can say with almost complete certainty.
As for the waste, it depends very, very much on where and how we dump it. Often there are cheap and easy ways to process it into that which is more benign.
The key (again) to the solution is wealth. It is only the poor countries of this earth that have a real problem with pollution or resources. No rich country on earth hasn’t seriously cleaned up its act.
Certainly there has to be a better way to do our business on this earth isn’t there?
There is, we are. It is a continuing process. But these things take a little time, some effort and a lot of wealth. We have the time, we work hard, and wealth is a highly persistant, createable (and recyclable) resource.
You wouldn’t disagree with that would you?
No, but we are well on the way. They never taught you what was going right with the world when you were in school. Only what was wrong. But there are two sides to that story.
These are the first “interesting times” in all of our history that are not also an ancient Chinese curse. (Consider this, and be awestruck.)
We are at a “tipping point”, all right. An economic tipping point. A political tipping point. A cultural tipping point. The tipping point of Childhood’s End. All things are possible (effective environmentalism being the least of it) if we can become a truly affluent world. We will, if only we aren’t actively prevented from doing so, I swear it.
This is also why we are confused. We tread on really, really new ground for almost the first time. Therefore our past wisdom fails us (yet it cannot do otherwise), and we must create a new wisdom. Our forefathers did not have that burden. Or that wonderful privilege.
Very, very sad. Thanks for the link to the news article on Kilimanjaro! If you read past the first couple of paragraphs, it says that the snow observed was a freak occurrence and the snows are in fact disappearing, like the scientists say. I guess none of the commentators on this blog, or WattsUp itself, bothered to read the whole story. So sad.
REPLY: I always find it amazing when another “knows” (perhaps by teleconnection) that someone didn’t read something. And Spencer what of the sublimation related to lack of forestation and evapotranspiration? No comment there? Did you not read the full posting?
Nature will of course be the final arbiter of this argument. We’ll see what it looks like in 8 years.
Spencer apparently can’t read and/or comprehend what he reads. Sad, very sad.
Forget climate change. I’m going to be worried when we have climate stasis!
Green Netizen:
You ask a lot of seemingly innocent and forthright questions. Well let’s answer some:
“If that’s the case, why don’t they plant more trees?”
As another noted, they are poor. They cut the trees for fuel and to open new agricultural land. There isn’t a stick of wood left in neighboring Somalia, one of the world’s poorest lands. In the US, forests cover more land today than at any time in recorded history. Of course, we’re very rich.
“The climate is changing though, wouldn’t you agree?”
Without doubt. A million years ago, a continental glacier a mile thick covered where I now live. It disappeared, then reappeared. Altogether four cycles of glaciation and post-glacial warming have affected my area over a million years. Today, I only have three feet of snow in my yard, and that only in the winter. So we’re either heading toward another glacial period or in a warm period. I hate it when those glaciers come!
“We do have serious risks if we continue business as usual don’t we?”
Do we? If we’re the Soviet Union, under communism, yes. We’ve degraded and contaminated our country and debilitated our people so that they are basically worthless. If we’re the United States, we’re the freest, most productive nation that has ever existed, and one that has spread peace and economic and environmental improvement over the globe for many years. Of course, that status may be endangered now, as there seem to be many Americans longing for the good ol’ days of Soviet Unionism.
“We can’t keep extracting natural resources and dumping our toxic waste into the eco system and it not have an impact can it?”
Once upon a time we dumped stuff. Today we strictly regulate such stuff, and recycle a vast amount of material. We, at least we rich humans, are trying to minimize our impact while striving to remain rich. Our activity may have an impact, but it is generally small in the natural order of things (there are some notable departures that should be studied). If you want to see truly large-scale “dumping of toxic waste” then examine the oceanic (and to a lesser degree, continental) rifting systems that drive plate tectonics. Imagine the amount of material from the earth’s interior that is deposited in in the oceans – CO2, H2SO4, Na, Mg, Hg, As, and so on and on. At the other end, in the subduction zones, volcanoes spew and geothermal fluids are created and spill stuff into the sea. Geology is great stuff.
Certainly there has to be a better way to do our business on this earth isn’t there?
Well, based on my answers above, rich is the key to minimizing man’s impact (unless extinction is your goal. It isn’t, is it?). Rich implies capitalism. Marxism, communism. socialism, Islamism – all have produced despair, poverty and more or less environmental damage with no thought to correcting it. I suggest you read a lot of stuff you have obviously missed, starting with Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”, and then take Geology 101/102 at your local college. Beware living on the ‘Net. That can impair your education because you are exposed to fools constantly. It should be taken in moderation.
Good luck
jafco
What happened to that ice shelf that broke up in the anartic. I am looking at photos and it looks like its back. I think it was the larson B ice shelf?. I have been trying to find an update on it.
That colloge of Mt. Kilimanjaro is not accurate. The last picture was not from 2008 but from January 2007. I remember seeing it posted in the NY Times website.
Al Gore used A PAINTING of Mt Kilimanjaro in his movie, to show what it “used to look like.” No credibility whatsoever. Artists are free to embellish their work and add dramatic snowdrifts.
HERE IS 100% SCIENTIFIC PROOF THAT OUR PLANET IS COOLING:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/03/24/lorne-gunter-perhaps-the-climate-change-models-are-wrong.aspx
Dozens of nations worked together to gather this ARGO data that was supposed to PROVE global warming.
I must give credit to my country’s National Post newspaper for balanced reporting in giving us “deniers” a voice: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/pages/climate-change-the-deniers.aspx This ongoing DENIERS SERIES is excellent.
Peace to all
[…] snows of Kilimanjaro, for instance, which Nobel Peace Prize winner Mr. Albert Gore lied to us about in no uncertain terms, began melting long before our current warming trend; it began melting because of a local climate […]
[…] Mount Kilimanjaro covered in snow […]
“Or maybe those beacons of truth over at Real Climate will make a note of it?”
Indeed they have. See for yourself at the “Tropical Glacier Retreat” page on the RealClimate website. Go to Section 3, “Kilimanjaro: Icon or Red Herring?” Interesting reading.
finally took the effort to watch al gore (no relation, thankfully). talk about “fiddling with the truth”. He can’t even pronounce antarctica, keeps calling it “anartica”, my-oh-my, goodness gracious! he’s got some weirdo pronunciation for arctic, calls it “artic” or something. Look at the arctic circle on google earth…there is no ice, it melts in the summer most years, read about it for yourself. notice he used an animated polar bear trying to crawl onto a sliver of ice. Also how can they possibly correlate data taken 100 years ago using primitive equipment compared to the technology used today ie a thermometer hanging on a verandah v”s satellite technology. Talk about sophistry; there’s a faint odour hovering about Al’s little porker “A convenient stretching of the truth!”
[…] Yet another inconvenient story ignored by the MSM. […]