Hot air cause of Kilimanjaro ‘crisis’

New findings from glacier experts signal it’s time to remove another catastrophe from the list of alarmist global-warming predictions.

Scientists report in the July/-August issue of American Scientist that “warming fails spectacularly to explain the behavior of the glaciers and plateau ice on Africa’s [Mount] Kilimanjaro.”

Scientists from the University of Washington and Austria’s University of Innsbruck studied 20 years of field work and comprehensive data regarding Mount Kilimanjaro. They made numerous findings that individually and collectively refute any notion that global warming has any meaningful connection to the recent retreat of Kilimanjaro’s alpine glacier.

As noted at the beginning of the American Scientist article, “Viewers of the film An Inconvenient Truth are startled by paired before-and-after photos” of Kilimanjaro’s glacier. The scientists document, however, that the three data sets offering the most reliable readings of Kilimanjaro’s recent temperatures “do not suggest that any warming at Kilimanjaro’s summit has been large enough to explain the disappearance of most of its ice.”

Indeed, two of the three data sets indicate either no temperature change or a net cooling at Kilimanjaro during recent decades.

Moreover, regardless of temperature trends, “temperatures measured at the altitude of the glaciers and ice cap on Kilimanjaro are almost always substantially below freezing,” the scientists report. Only on rare occasions do temperatures reach as high as 26 degrees Fahrenheit, which is still six degrees below freezing, the scientists note.

So what, then, can be causing Kilimanjaro’s glacier to shrink? The scientists point out that declining precipitation atop Kilimanjaro is the real culprit.

With the exception of the past two years, when snowfall has been relatively abundant and has replenished some of Kilimanjaro’s alpine snow pack, conditions have been relatively dry in recent years around Kilimanjaro. Sublimation — a process by which snow evaporates in sub-freezing temperatures — is occurring faster than snowfall is able to replenish it.

Indeed, as far back as 2003, scientists have been aware that declining precipitation is likely responsible for Kilimanjaro’s retreating glacier. “Although it’s tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the more likely culprit,” reported the Nov. 23, 2003 issue of Nature magazine. “Without the forests’ humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry.”

Is Kilimanjaro’s ice cap therefore doomed? Not necessarily, say the scientists in American Scientist. Global warming, the alleged culprit initially framed for the receding glacier, may be the glacier’s best hope for survival.

If temperatures occasionally rise above freezing atop Kilimanjaro, the scientists explain, the vertically sharp shape of the glacier would become more of a gentle slope. A gentler slope would allow for the more efficient capture and retention of the snows that occur. Kilimanjaro’s glacier would then thicken and expand its range.

Moreover, warmer temperatures might facilitate more precipitation, which would further reinforce mountaintop snows, the scientists report.

As far as the overall global warming picture, science is showing that Kilimanjaro is more the rule than the exception.

In the past month alone, Nature magazine has published the results of two new studies that have slammed the door on claims that global warming is causing unusually strong and frequent hurricanes. The studies document that the 1970s and 1980s were periods of “anomalously low” hurricane activity compared to historical norms, and that the higher frequency and intensity of Atlantic Ocean hurricanes since then is merely “a recovery to normal hurricane activity, rather than a direct response to increasing sea surface temperature.”

Similarly, claims that global warming is causing an alarming retreat in Himalayan glaciers are also being refuted by science. As reported in the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, “Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who have recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame.”

The lesson to be learned from such frequent backpedaling on global warming claims is that we cannot accept at face value the never-ending, scare-of-the-month global warming predictions. Let’s give sound science a chance to tell us the truth about global warming.