Snowcap of Kilimanjaro refuses to die

One of the most localized and emotional posterchildren of the global warming doom in the last decade has been the snowcap on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.



It's been retreating for quite some time and global warming alarmists were assuring everyone that the snowcap was disappearing because of CO2 emissions and it would be gone by 2015. Needless to say, the list included Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth (see 2:20-4:00) in 2006.




Mass Live.COM informs about some fresh research done by people including some folks at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst:

Snows of Kilimanjaro defy global warming predictions

It doesn't seem that those predictions will work out. Some scientists have some conscience. For example, Douglas R. Hardy, a UMass geoscientist who was among 11 authors of a paper to be discussed momentarily, said that "unfortunately, we made the prediction; I wish we hadn't."

I am talking about a 2002 paper in Science called

Kilimanjaro ice core records: evidence of holocene climate change in Tropical Africa (full text)

by Lonnie Thompson et al. If you look at the last sentence of the abstract or the last page, you will see that their prediction was that the snowcap would be gone between 2015 and 2020. Al Gore translated it as "the snowcap would be gone by 2015" but I guess that this dishonest ...man... (did you search for something else here?) can no longer surprise anyone. A sequence of 3 similar jerks is enough to announce that a doomsday will arrive on the day after tomorrow.

Like the hockey stick, the shrinking snowcap of Mount Kilimanjaro became one of the most costly overhyped pieces of sloppy science in the history of mankind. Many people have believed that CO2-Kilimanjaro link despite the fact that it had been known that the retreat began long before CO2 emissions became significant. Local moisture was arguably more important for the fate of the snowcap.

Even more importantly, it was realized in the very new research that although the area may be shrinking, the thickness of the snowcap isn't really getting any thinner, and it's the thickness that decides about the long-term survival.

Representatives for Al Gore declined to comment on this article, Mass Live.COM says near the end of the text. ;-)