Saturday, March 1, 2008

Kilimanjaro: Snow cap is back like normal

An enormous snow cover is back on Mount Kilimanjaro; the loss of snow on it in recent years had become another portent of doom. Not anymore...but notice the author's sentence highlighted in bold. Of course...once again, so much has been said in the media that it will now be impossible to unravel without ending a few careers in humiliation, so the best course of action is to continue the myth for as long as possible...idiots. Kudos to Anthony Watts and Noel Sheppard.

Mount Kilimanjaro: On Africa's roof, still crowned with snow - International Herald Tribune:

I had wanted to climb to the roof of Africa before climate change erased its ice fields and the romance of its iconic "Snows of Kilimanjaro" image. But as we trudged across the 12,000-foot Shira plateau on Day 2 of our weeklong climb and gazed at the whiteness of the vast, humpbacked summit, I thought maybe I needn't have worried.

An up-and-down-and-up traverse of the south face of Kibo, the tallest of the mountain's three volcanic peaks, showed us a panorama of the summit ice cap and fractured tentacles of glacial ice that dangled down gullies dividing the vertical rock faces. And four days later, when we reached 19,340-foot Uhuru, the highest point on Kibo, we beheld snow and ice fields so enormous as to resemble the Arctic.

It looked nothing like the photographs of Kibo nearly denuded of ice and snow in the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Nor did it seem to jibe with the film's narrative: "Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro."

As it turned out, we had simply been lucky.

3 comments:

Bernay said...

Okay Blog author, I just wanted to point out that I never did beleive the alarmists hype about the snows of Kilimanjaro nor did I think that global warming was true. The first thing to point out about Kilimanjaro is that it's surrounded by warm savana grass land and if the rain fall drops below normal levels there wouldn't be enough precipitation for snow at the higher levels of the mountain. In older 2007 photos of Kilimanjaro there is a definite frost line a few thousand feet below the summit, proving in my mind that it was a lack of cloudbase and precipitation to replace annual melt through normal seasonal warm weather. A drought in other words. There are droughts mentioned in the bible are there not? Perhaps they burned too much fossil fuel then? The other reason I didn't beleive the hype was simply that the sun was going through a warmer period, which came to a height in 2007. Bernay

Unknown said...

G.W. Denier reports a return of the SNOWS on Kilamanjaro, but the ICE caps have shrunken to about 10% of their mid 1990's volume. A (relatively) thin coating of snow looks similar to a thick coating of ice, but is a very different situation.
I'm not sure why the ice on Kilamanjaro is dissapearing (changes in climate, and/or ground cover around the mountain may be having an impact), but it is. The photos and measurements don't lie. What GW Denier is trying to convince peope of by pretending snow cover is the same as ice cover is beyond me.

JF

G.W. Denier said...

JohnF mistakenly says "G.W. Denier reports" blah, blah, blah, but being someone who doesn't read very much before typing off a comment, JohnF failed to see that I was simply commenting on another news story, which is what I typically do in this blog.

G.W. Denier is not trying to CONVINCE you of anything; he's trying to get you to use your brain and not merely ACCEPT what you're being told without educating yourself from all points of view and then making an INFORMED opinion (not merely the opinion Al Gore wants you to have).

Don't let these pathetic liberals scare you into paying MORE taxes, buying into boondoggle climate businesses, and giving up MORE freedom through a horrendous distortion of science for political purposes.