From the “we told you so” department, more agreement that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth movie poster child for global climate change has nothing to do with climate change at all, and everything to do with local effects of land use change. This results in less wind laden moisture (via evapotranspiration) to deposit on the mountain and increased sublimation aka “freezer burn”. What next? Wrapping Kili’s glacier like the Germans are doing? – Anthony
Mount Kilimanjaro in snowier times.
Deforestation behind loss of Mt Kili snow
2008-08-14 11:00:04
By Correspondent Felister Peter
A scientific theory has linked the loss of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro to deforestation and dismissed suggestions that the dwindling of glaciers on Africa`s highest peak was due to global warming.
The theory is highlighted in a recent study report compiled by two researchers from Britain`s Portsmouth University, Nicholas Pepin and Martin Schaefer, who surveyed the mountain`s glaciers for 11 days.
The researchers, who revealed their findings at a news conference in Dar es Salaam yesterday, said the mountain`s glacier surface had shrunk from 20 km in 1880 to a mere two kilometres in 2000.
They said the development was caused more by local than regional factors, with Pepin suggesting that deforestation mainly due to extensive farming as the major cause.
“Deforestation of the mountain`s foothills is the most likely culprit because without forests there is too much evaporation of humidity into outer space.
The result is that moisture-laden winds blowing across those forests have become drier and drier,“ he explained.
“Loss of humidity automatically leads to a reduction in cloud cover. Clouds play a crucial role in protecting ice from sunrays, with fewer sunrays meaning faster freezing of water,“ he added, citing reduced precipitation as another reason for the receding ice cover on the mountain`s summit.
Last year, another study on the dwindling ice cover on the mountain`s cap suggested that global warming had nothing to do with the alarming loss of its beautiful snows.
The scientists who conducted the study, US-based Philip Mote and Georg Kaser, assertively linked the problem to a process known as sublimation.
Recent scientific literature on climate and glacier formation defines sublimation as a process that occurs at below-freezing temperatures and converts ice directly to water vapour with the liquid phase skipped.
Mote likened the process to moisture-sapping conditions that cause food to suffer freezer burn.
Revealing the findings they first published last year in the American Scientist magazine, the experts cautioned that using Mount Kilimanjaro as a “poster child“ for climate change was awfully inaccurate.
They said in the tropics, particularly on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, processes are at work that are worlds different from those that have diminished glacial ice in temperate regions closer to the poles.
The two experts wanted the world to ditch old assertions and believe that the ice loss on Mount Kilimanjaro was mainly due to sublimation, which calls for over eight times as much energy as does melting.
Like their British counterparts yesterday, the US-based scientists linked the icecap loss to a fall in precipitation caused by Indian Ocean “variability“.
In remarks at yesterday`s news conference, Journalists Environmental Association of Tanzania chairman Deo Mfugale also linked the loss of glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro to human activities rather than global warming.
He called for an end to the random felling trees and burning forests, mainly done for charcoal and timber, saying these and related practices led to the destruction of some 15 per cent of forests in Tanzania between 1976 and last year.
Kibo volcano is widely acknowledged as located at the highest point on Mount Kilimanjaro at about 5,895 metres (19,340 feet) above sea level.
According to a rough 1889 survey Kibo`s icecap occupied about 12.5 square miles but this had dwindled to about 7.5 square miles by 1912, to about 4.3 square miles by 1953, and just over 1.5 square miles by 2003.
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Boris: Of course glaciers (well, most of them) are shrinking due to global warming. The question is why is the globe warming? Is it due to natural forces and cycles, or human activity? People’s actions affect the climate, certainly locally, perhaps globally. By how much? 50%, 3%, 0.1%? That’s the debate.
The Sahara used to have a lot of trees (500+ years ago). The sand has spread south slowly ever since. Hard to blame that on SUV’s.
Change is inevitable. You can deny it, ignore it, rail against it, or live with it.
I thought this thread had petered out. I hope a personal reflection doesn’t drive a stake through it.
Kilimanjaro is a fascinating place for reasons Allen Chapell and many other readers have pointed out. Herald Lange’s book, “Kilimanjaro, the White Roof of Africa” (1985), makes several relevant points:
It’s the largest free-standing massif in the world, and as such “makes” its own climate. Climbers from the base (savannah) pass upward through several different climate zones to reach the crater rim. Each of these “zones” is classified, in part, by the amount of moisture which reaches it: the savannah gets about 750-1000 mm of water per year; the shrub and cultivated zones (expedition porters and guides are drawn from the Chagga people there), gets about 1,000 to 1700 mm annually; montane rain forest (cloud forest) receives between 2,000 and 3,000 mm annually; alpine zones get 600 – 1,000 mm; and the summit, in near-arctic “cold desert” conditions, receives less than 100 mm. So the montane rainforest is noticeably wet, and wett-est.
I climbed it twenty years ago, in the summer, following a route on its east side. The forest at the level of human occupation (the Tanzanian government prevents people from living above about 5,000 feet) is what I would call jungle. It takes a few days of hiking to pass through this zone, and one emerges from the rain forest into the alpine zone to see a spectacular disk of clouds spreading around the mountain beneath you, at about 9,000 feet. This could only be generated by the warm, humid air rising off the forests and moist soil on the flanks of the mountain.
Below the cloud disk is an almost self-contained forest belt containing colobus monkeys, cape buffalo, eland, leopards, fig trees and other strange life. That life stays, for the most part, below the clouds, which makes scientists all the more puzzled at the not-uncommon discovery of antelope, monkey and other animal carcasses near the summit.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,403035-2,00.html
I can guess what the stripping of those mountain flanks for firewood and for cultivable space would do to that disk of cloud. The article refers to the loss of more than 50 square miles of mountain forest in the last 30 years. This is a perfect example of a unique microclimate. And it is an environmental crisis of sorts for the people who live there. If it is a “man-made” crisis, it wasn’t made by outsiders or by tourists, but by the people who live there.
Correction: Alan Chappell – sorry for mangling your name.
Thanks for post this one Tony! The loss of arboreal microclimate precipitation and sublimation has been noted since at least 2003 / 2004 as likely causes of Kilimanjaro’s glacial recession, but Gore paid that no mind in his 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth.
It gets better: James Hansen, the main consulting scientist for Gore’s movie, coauthored a 2003 paper on soot deposition on tropical glacial packs REPLETE with the NASA web page showing a series of pictures of Kilimanjaro’s progressive glacial recession.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20031222/
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/1223blacksoot.html
Now riddle me this: How is it that Gore could get such a fundamental fact so wrong when extant research contraindicated using Kilimanjaro as an AGW poster child? Gore claimed to have had his facts vetted. By whom? James Hansen? If so, then just this one gaffe would serve to discredit both Gore & Hansen for playing so loose with science.
see also:
http://www.scientificblogging.com/leebert/dont_blame_kilimanjaros_glacier_loss_on_global_warming
Leon Broznya:
The Lords and Ladies of Environmentalism have no interest in doing anything.
This is one of my gripes. If they want to do something about any potential risk posed by human-driven global warming, they needn’t risk burning out the public with a fear campaign. The most productive use of Al Gore’s $300 million campaign money would be investing in energy efficient technologies like FloDesign’s new wind turbine concept, or Cree’s new LED lightbulb, or Luxim’s new plasma incandescent, or NanoSolar’s new gigawatt-scale PV production facilities, or Rotartica’s solar-powered HVAC for home use … all of these are technologies already available and needing capital for further marketing and improved manufacturing process.
Or if they want to getting more cutting-edge, there’s thorium nuclear power, or superconducting power grid capacity, or ocean current turbines, and (drum role please) the all-time energy super-techs of the next 50 years: Infrared Photovoltaics & He3 fusion.
Solve these last two problems and we’re home free.
[…] your bets now on if there will be mentions of these key words which actually are relevant to the true Kiliminjaro story: evapotranspiration, deforestation, […]