Kilimanjaro regaining its snow cap

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?

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/

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?