Al Gore's global warming claims on Kilimanjaro glacier – finally dead and buried in the Climategate 2.0 emails – even Phil Jones and Lonnie Thompson don't believe it

Al Gore said in his AIT bag of BS that Mount Kilimanjaro was losing its snow/ice cover due to global warming. Here’s the Transcript of “An Inconvenient Truth”:

Effects of Global Warming

And now we’re beginning to see the impact in the real world. This is Mount Kilimanjaro more than 30 years ago, and more recently. And a friend of mine just came back from Kilimanjaro with a picture he took a couple of months ago. Another friend of mine Lonnie Thompson studies glaciers. Here’s Lonnie with a sliver of a once mighty glacier. Within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.

I’ve said this many times, Kilimanjaro’s loss of ice cover has to do with sublimation, not warming. The picture of Thompson next to the sliver of ice proves it. Note there’s no meltwater near him. That sliver is a symptom of sublimation – ice evaporating directly into the air, just like ice cubes shrink when left in the freezer too long.

Almost a year ago I wrote this:

OSU’s Dr. Lonnie Thompson pushes gloom and doom, still thinks the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting due to global warming

And now today, here’s indication in the Climategate 2.0 emails that I was right.

5315.txt

date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004

from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>

subject: Re: kilimanjaro

to: “Jenkins, Geoff” <geoff.jenkins@metoffice.xx.xx>

Geoff,

The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low

elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if

there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.

I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.

Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson” <thompson.3@osu.xxx.xxx>

You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.

Ellen Mosley-Thompson <thompson.4@osu.xxx.xxx>

I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.

I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well !  I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.

Cheers

Phil

At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:

phil

<<kilimanjaro.doc>>

we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an

example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.

I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?

be grateful for your help

cheers

geoff

Dr Geoff Jenkins

Head, Climate Prediction Programme

Hadley Centre

Met Office

FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK

tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx

mobile: 0787 966 1136

[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit        Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090

School of Environmental Sciences    Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784

University of East Anglia

Norwich                          Email    p.jones@uea.ac.uk

NR4 7TJ

UK

—————————————————————————-

Compare that to this press release Dr. Thompson put out a year ago right before COP16 in Cancun.

================================================================

CLIMATE SCIENTIST WARNS WORLD OF WIDESPREAD SUFFERING IF FURTHER CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT FORESTALLED.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – One of the world’s foremost experts on climate change is warning that if humans don’t moderate their use of fossil fuels, there is a real possibility that we will face the environmental, societal and economic consequences of climate change faster than we can adapt to them.

Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, posed that possibility in a just-released special climate-change edition of the journal The Behavior Analyst.

He also discussed how the rapid and accelerating retreat of the world’s glaciers and ice sheets dramatically illustrates the nature of the changing climate.

Lonnie Thompson

Photo by Thomas Nash

It is the first time in a published paper that he has recommended specific action to forestall the growing effects of climate change.  During the last three decades, Thompson has led 57 expeditions to some of the world’s most remote high altitude regions to retrieve cores from glaciers and ice caps that preserve a record of ancient climate.

In the past Thompson has let his research data and conclusions speak for him but in this paper, intended for social scientists and behavior experts, he voiced his concern regarding  the risks that ignoring the evidence of climate change may bring.

“Unless large numbers of people take appropriate steps, including supporting governmental regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, our only options will be adaptation and suffering,” he wrote in the concluding paragraph.

“And the longer we delay, the more unpleasant the adaptations and the greater the suffering will be.”

In the paper (available here), Thompson said that virtually all climate researchers “are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

His opinion isn’t hyperbole, he said, but instead is based on a “very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the Earth is warming, that the warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes to many of the Earth’s support systems, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are possible.

“Such future scenarios,” he says, “emerge not, as is often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.”

Thompson listed three options humanity has for dealing with global warming which, he says, “is here and is already affecting our climate, so prevention is no longer an option.”

“Clearly mitigation is our best option, but so far most societies around the world, including the United States and the other largest emitters of greenhouse gases, have done little more than talk about the importance of mitigation,” he says.

He says that there are currently no technological quick fixes for global warming.

“Our best hope,” he says, “is to change our behavior in ways that significantly slow the rate of global warming, thereby giving engineers and scientists time to devise, develop, and deploy technological solutions where possible.”

Thompson prefaced his advice with examples of the Earth’s diminishing ice cover, examples that constitute some of the strongest supporting evidence of the current threat of global climate change:

– The ice fields atop Mount Kilimanjaro have lost 85 percent of their coverage since 1912;

– The Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru – the largest tropical ice field on Earth, has retreated 25 percent since 1978;

– Ice fields in the Himalayas that have long shown traces of the radioactive bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s have since lost that signal as surface melting has removed the upper layers and thereby reduced the thickness of these glaciers;

– All of the glaciers in Alaska’s vast Brooks Range are retreating, as are 98 percent of those in southeastern Alaska.  And 99 percent of glaciers in the Alps, 100 percent of those in Peru and 92 percent in the Andes of Chile are likewise retreating;

– Sea levels are rising and the loss of ice coverage in the North Polar region continues to increase annually.

“Everyone will be affected by global warming,” Thompson wrote.  “But those with the fewest resources for adapting will suffer the most.”

A research scientist with Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, Thompson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  In 2007, he received the National Medal of Science, the highest honor the United States gives to American scientists.

#

Contact:  Lonnie Thompson, (614) 292-6652: Thompson.3@osu.edu

Written by Earle Holland, (614) 292-8384; Holland.8@osu.edu.

=================================================================

I got into a tiff with Earle Holland in comments over my post on it. The point of all this is that Kilimanjaro has lost much of the lowland surround forest due to firewood cutting and land clearing for Agriculture. This limits the evapotranspiration available to upslope winds, the wind carry less moisture, less moisture falls on the top due to orographic lifting effect creating precipitation.

It’s just that simple, and “global warming” does not have one damn thing to do with it.

Dr. Thompson, you need to come clean and stop pushing this disinformation. Ditto for Mr. Holland. To say Kilimanjaro is losing its ice due to “global warming” is patently false.

Ditto for Gore, but he has no scruples so I don’t expect him to acknowledge it at all.

UPDATE: I’m reminded by “jeez” that Dr. Lonnie Thompson and his wife served as advisors for Gore’s AIT movie as mentioned in this glowing press release from OSU:

Lonnie and Ellen both served as advisers to former Vice President Al Gore in the production of his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore said, “Lonnie Thompson’s research has yielded some of clearest, most definitive evidence of the dangerous state of global climate change that we’re all facing.

…

Thompson shocked the scientific community in 2001 when he predicted that the famed snows of Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania would melt within the next 20 years, a victim of climate change across the tropics. Return expeditions to that same mountain have shown that changes in the mountain’s ice fields may signal an even quicker demise of its snowy cover.