Gore started this. Note to journalists everywhere: IT’S THE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION STUPID!
See this article to understand why linking Kilimanjaro glacier retreat to small changes in global temperature is just flat wrong. The plains around Kilimanjaro have gone through years of deforestation. Less trees > less evapotranspiration > less snow.
Don’t believe me? Here’s news of a recent study from Portsmouth University Of Mt. Kilimanjaro ice waving us good-bye due to deforestation. Here’s another peer reviewed study from UAH saying the same thing.
From News.com.au
Agence France-Presse
The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 1912 was 85 per cent smaller by 2007, and since 2000 the existing ice sheet has shrunk by 26 per cent, the paleoclimatologists said.
The findings point to the rise in global temperatures as the most likely cause of the ice loss.
Changes in cloudiness and precipitation may have also played a smaller, less important role, especially in recent decades, they added.
“This is the first time researchers have calculated the volume of ice lost from the mountain’s ice fields,” study co-author Lonnie Thompson said.
Mr Thompson is the professor of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.
“If you look at the percentage of volume lost since 2000 versus the percentage of area lost as the ice fields shrink, the numbers are very close,” he said in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While the yearly loss of the mountain glaciers was most apparent from the retreat of their margins, Mr Thompson said an equally troubling effect was the thinning of the ice fields from the surface.
The summits of both the Northern and Southern Ice Fields atop Kilimanjaro have thinned by 1.9m) and 5.1m respectively.
The smaller Furtwangler Glacier, which was melting and water-saturated in 2000 when it was drilled, has thinned as much as 50 per cent between 2000 and 2009.
“It has lost half of its thickness,” Mr Thompson said. “In the future, there will be a year when Furtwangler is present and by the next year, it will have disappeared.
“The whole thing will be gone.”
The scientists said they found no evidence of sustained melting anywhere else in the ice core samples they extracted, which date back 11,700 years.**
They said their findings show that current climate conditions over Mt Kilimanjaro were unique over the last 11 millennia.
See the story at news.com.au
=========================
** There wasn’t organized farming near Kilimanjaro until the last century. Farming preparation clears trees, trees evapotranspirate mositure. Less trees, less moisture.
No surprise then they don’t see it in the ice core record. It is simply bad science to not consider land use issues looking you in the face while you drill ice cores on the slopes. – Anthony
Considering that AGW is supposed to have the least effect in the tropical areas, this stands out as another blatant lie. Deforestation is the probable cause (due to overpopulation of course), but AGW is absolutely 100% NOT responsible. The temperature at the top of Kilimanjaro is NEVER above freezing so it ain’t melting, it’s sublimation where the ice changes to water vapour due to higher winds, another cause of deforextation.
There is an article in the Scientific American a few years back that explained in great and compelling detail why the ice on Kilimanjaro is melting. It has to do with the chopping down of trees on the slope. It has nothing to do with GW as the temp. never gets above freezing. The ice sublimates and is not replaced because the air rising from lower levels is dryer than before
It can’t be that bad otherwise Pen Hadow would be there with his tape measure.
There’s a full page article in today’s Independent newspaper in the UK on this too.
Clearly, global co-ordination of agreed party lines is being fed to the compliant media outlets….
This story is running on the AP now. The latest tactic is to post these fear monger pieces where you cannot comment or email the author to refute them.
Anthony, can you contact the AP to correct the record?
It’s all over the British press today. Another day, another load of alarmist hogwash. The alarmists certainly believe in recycling. They’ve been recycling this rubbish story for years.
“Deforestation of the mountain`s foothills is the most likely culprit because without forests there is too much evaporation of humidity into outer space”
Interesting. Does only Kenian water disappear into outer space? Or would it be a bit more true to say that virtually none does?
Mr Thompson is the professor of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.
In other words he’s an environmentalist who got his qualifications by turning up at a university who’s policy it was to dish out impressive titles to anyone who could manage a worm farm.
In case anyone wants to read it, here is the original source in PNAS:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/30/0906029106.full.pdf
Near the end of page 4:
“Over recent decades there has been a continual transformation of the landscape surrounding Kilimanjaro into agricultural land, thus, unraveling large-scale climate forcing from regional forcing caused in part by landscape changes is difficult.”
Gee. I wonder why so many media outlets are losing viewers/subscribers? Could it be that people are catching on to the lies, myths, and urban legends that are being pedaled as news? Journalism has gone from being a respected and trusted profession with high ideals, honesty and integrity to a field akin to that of a used car salesman — and all the respect and chicanery that is associated with that profession. This retread of a fictional short story ranks [both verb & adjective] with the hockey stick, hurricanes, polar bears, and penguins.
If any one of these alleged environmental journalists had a couple of neurons to rub together between their ears, they would use the plight of Kilimanjaro as an example of one of the consequences of rain forest deforestation. Kill the rain forest ~ kill the snows of Kilimanjaro.
Roger Knights (22:19:01) : “Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s entry for prof. Lonnie Thompson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Thompson
Here are extracts from that entry:
” …Lonnie Thompson has been awarded 53 research grants from the NSF, NASA, NOAA and NGS …” ”
There in lies the smoking gun!
OT, but Anthony but this may be of interest. BBC today, Tuesday
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/8339652.stm
One Tim Nicholson is made redundant; he claims because of his Climate Change views. His solicitor says:-
“Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.” As in UK that is.
TTG
There’s a short summary in the NYT here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/africa/03melt.html
Quoting bits from Georg Kaser attempting to set the information right:
” But Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the Institute for Geography of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, said that the ice measured was only a few hundred years old and that it had come and gone over centuries.
What is more, he suggested that the recent melting had more to do with a decline in moisture levels than with a warming atmosphere.
“Our understanding is that it is due to the slow drying out of ice,” Dr. Kaser said. “It’s about moisture fluctuation.” ”
Quoting bits from Dr. Thompson that close the article:
” But Dr. Thompson emphasized that the melting of ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro was paralleled by retreats in ice fields elsewhere in Africa as well as in South America, Indonesia and the Himalayas.
“It’s when you put those together that the evidence becomes very compelling,” he said. ”
So, according to Dr. Thompson, the dominant physical phenomena and processes responsible for an observed response are unimportant and unworthy of consideration. Equally unsettling is the fact that he has linked all observed responses to a single, and in this case wrong, process.
This is not science.
When your Great Global Surface Temperature Totem, the Totem with the most Mojo ever in the entire history of the entire planet, loses its Mojo, “Go for the ice”.
Rolling Stone magazine says that there is no person in the world that has spent more time above 18,000 feet than Lonnie Thompson.[4].
He should consider using oxygen next time. He needs his few remaining brain cells…
I wonder why comparative images so many times have one of very poor quality, in this case the most recent one.
If we look at figure 5 of the paper at: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/30/0906029106.full.pdf , the most striking feature is the loss of ice on the upper section. That is revealing. A melting glacier tends to loss more ice at the lower tongue. Ice loss at the top is an indication of decreasing accumulation (less snowfalls, more sublimation).
What is also revealing is the lack of attention to the most important feature of the site: We have a tiny glacier on top of a Huge volcano, with fumarole activity reported often elsewhere, yet there is not a single mention to geothermal heat, not even to rule it out … interesting.
I am no scientist, but I find it interesting that they never present detailed analyses of temperature changes over time on Kilimanjaro, when they present these findings. Are they saying that the temperatures up on the mountain have risen so much that the snow/ice is melting away? If so, by how much and when? Is it warmer winters, or shorter winters and longer hotter summers. I don’t “get” the story.
A few more things will be melting away and not necessarily ice. Among these Copenhagen. 🙂
I wonder how much smaller the ice cap was in 1912 compared to say, 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age?
Roger Knight:
“Here are extracts from that entry:. .”
The two interesting things that emerged from the biopic are
1) The attempt to find some figleaf of credibility for Gore’s trashed documentary by inclusion of the words “Academy award winning documentary”- an exercise in futility and oxymoron if ever there was, and
2) That no amount of campaign medals can help the blind to see – the consensus on kilamanjaro is that it is a land management problem. Solution to problem – build some nice meaty power stations so these poor people don’t have to grub up their environment for energy. Now that would be green.
In Boxer’s capntrade markeup meeting this morning, Deleware’s Sen Carper used Kilimanjaro as an example of GW .
It’s hard to watch this senatorial silliness, about as much as would be to watch a baby play with a razor blade. These irresponsible people either can’t or do not care to even try to get to the real state of scientific knowledge on the subject. Yet they are willing to further endanger the whole economy of the US. I have never seen such smug attitudes in any group in Congress as this bunch of Democrats. It borders on insanity.
Science News has the story too, see http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49038/title/Mount_Kilimanjaro_could_soon_be_bald
They have a photo, credited to “Thompson et al./PNAS 2009” that looks like a photoshop fake. There are some interesting ice photos from Kilimanjaro, the CNN story has some, but I wouldn’t be surprised if none of this photo is from there.
I don’t have time to investigate further today, maybe tonight.
[snip false email address – university coward – see the policy page]
“Although it’s tempting to blame the (Kilimanjaro) ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the more likely culprit.” Nature
hmpf, fine.
@Anthony
two questions:
* have you read the actual paper? The authors described and discussed several possible factors in detail, inclusive percipitation, land use, cloudiness, etc etc. and of course, higher temperature. Why do you accuse them to do bad science?
* where can I find your detailed analysis about the percipitation, cloudiness, temperature trends in this area and in the area of other tropic shrinking glaciers? What are your sources? Your little picture is a little bit embarrassing, isn’t it? Can you write up a nice post about it with all the stuff: sources, uncertinaty, alternatives, possibilities, etc etc.
REPLY: The press release cites the paper but does not give access to it, you should ask the very same questions of journalists who use the press release without reading the paper. That is the real issue. Why give them a free pass while demanding that I’m the only one that must read the paper and not use the press release info?
All the press stories say: the cause is global warming, if Thompson can’t get the message correct, then yes it is “bad science”. Further Thompson has refused to provide key data for replication of earlier studies.
Read more here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1552 (Thompson refuses data requests)
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2328 (Thompson and Gore)
So yes, anytime a researcher refuses to provide data for replication, it is “bad science”. Don’t like that label? Get Thompson to produce the data.
The picture is fine, it is from Wikipedia. If you don’t like it, I suggest you get it changed there.
– Anthony
It is a stunning sight to see
The ceremony
Of the Donning of the Robes of certainty
Mere mortals we
Made witness to the birth
Of a new spiritually
Enfold the Earth