Climate change melts Kilimanjaro's snows

[leftchick]

From mile-high Naro Moru, villagers have watched year by year as the great glaciers of Mount Kenya, glinting in the equatorial sun high above them, have retreated into shrunken white stains on the rocky shoulders of the 16,897-foot peak.

Climbing up, "you can hear the water running down beneath Diamond and Darwin," mountain guide Paul Nditiru said, speaking of two of 10 surviving glaciers.

Some 200 miles due south, the storied snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tropical glaciers first seen by disbelieving Europeans in 1848, are vanishing. And to the west, in the heart of equatorial Africa, the ice caps are shrinking fast atop Uganda's Rwenzoris — the "Mountains of the Moon" imagined by ancient Greeks as the source of the Nile River.

The total loss of ice masses ringing Africa's three highest peaks, projected by scientists to happen sometime in the next two to five decades, fits a global pattern playing out in South America's Andes Mountains, in Europe's Alps, in the Himalayas and beyond.

Almost every one of more than 300 large glaciers studied worldwide is in retreat, international glaciologists reported in October in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is "essentially a response to post-1970 global warming," they said.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20061216/ap_on_sc/warmer_world_african_glaciers



Mount Kilimanjaro in southern Kenya, November 12, 2006. The U.N. reckons blame for the vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro lies with global warming linked to human use of fossil fuels. While there will be costs to the U.S. economy from climate change, the problem for Wall Street is that those costs are unknown and in the future. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)

[achtung_circus]

1. For the Freepers and other ideologues

who have trouble reading words, a visual clue follows.



The top image was taken on February 17, 1993 by the Landsat 5 satellite and the bottom picture seven years later by Landsat 7 on February 21, 2000.

The difference is obvious and alarming. The speed at which the snow is retreating has some scientists predicting that the africa mountain glacier will disappear completely by the year 2015.

The icecap formed approximately 11 000 years ago and it seems that global warming is going to destroy it in a fraction of that time.

http://www.african-safari-journals.com/kilimanjaro-photos.html

[Up2Late]

10. Oh forget that old year 2000 photo, check out the new 2006 shot on Google Maps!

Here's the link:

<http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Mount+Kilimanjaro&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=13&ll=-3.065867,37.361696&spn=0.11742,0.21698&t=h&iwloc=addr>

NOTE: After clicking the link, if you don't see anything but a blank page, click the "Satellite" button in the upper right corner. And if you get the info bubble, you can click the little x box in it's upper right corner, to make it go away.

Also, if you Zoom all the way in, look about 1500 to 2000 feet to the right of the crater (according to the map scale), you can see a climber standing next to a small patch of ice.

[Az_lefty]

15. Wow! we're having the driest winters I can remember her in Az...

there's no snow on any of the mountains, no rain...nothing.

:hide:

[valerief]

2. Homeland Security wants to rename Hemingway's classic

"The Slush of Kilamanjaro" but the EPA thinks they should be more forward-thinking and name it "The Sands of Kilamanjaro."

[barb162]

14. or the Deserts of Kilimanjaro

[Jennicut]

3. When are these companies/politicians going to wake up?

Terrorism, health care, the economy, education. None of it will matter if we start really melting the ice at the north and south pole. I just bought An Inconvenient Truth a couple of weeks ago and ice is melting everywhere but it is happening faster in the poles and that could mean rising sea levels. We could eventually be looking at refugees from coastal areas. I understand it doesn't seem that long but just the other day I read an article about the north pole ice eventually disappearing by 2040. I will be 76 by then but my two daughters well only be 35 and 36. This is not good. Also, this is actually costing jobs for the ski and tourism industry. So much for all those jobs lost to environmentalism.:sarcasm: Plus, the people who live in the Kenya region rely on water melt off for drinking water and the rivers are getting lower, livestock is dying with a shortage of the water. This is getting really bad.

[lovuian]

4. Africa looks like a wasteland without the glaciers

There will be such a backlash to Capitalism and Corporations the Anger is rising along with the temperatures

[originalpckelly]

6. Corporations, yes. Capitalism, no.

What we have in America and around the world is a fascist system, which is just as ineffective at managing affairs as communism and even socialism.

We need to do away with corporations, but simple capitalism is the best system, and it has worked for many centuries.

[dad]

13. Socialism is the best system.

[Uncle Joe]

5. Thanks for posting leftchick

Kicked and recommended

[rman]

7. for the denialists

[Porcupine]

8. a needed reminder nt

.

[Harper_is_Bush]

9. Hey Inhofe, you fuck, almost all of 300 glaciers are receeding.

[gristy]

11. Global warming?

The biggest hoax in the history of mankind.













right?

[Chulanowa]

12. It's a twist of the knife

It's bad enough that glaciers are melting worldwide - as an Alaskan resident, I saw a few wither away firsthand. That was enraging enough. And now, to see it in what may be the most sacred place to humanity... It's staggering.

[Hoping4Change]

16. Actually deforestation not global warming is the cause.

I learnt this listening to a Climate Scientist from Pollution Probe who hastened to add that other glaciers are melting because of global warming. He also made the point that environmental degradation is as much of a threat as global warming; so, his clarifying the real cause of snow loss of Kilimanjaro is actually important.


Below are links to reputable sources about deforestation causing snow loss at Kilimanjaro.

Dry Air the Kilimanjaro Culprit
International Journal of Climatology, 24, 329-339, doi: 10.1002/joc.1008, March 15, 2004 http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/tanzania/pubs/kaser_etal_2004ijc.pdf

"A drastic drop in atmospheric moisture at the end of the 19th century and the ensuing drier climatic conditions are likely forcing glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro."

Temperature Not the Driving Force
Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, 109, D16104, doi:10.1029/2003JD004338, August 25, 2004 http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/tanzania/pubs/moelg_hardy_2004jgr.pdf

"It has been speculated that general global warming is directly driving the retreat of Kilimanjaro's glaciers. However, detailed analyses of glacier retreat in the global tropics uniformly reveal that changes in climate variables related to air humidity prevail in controlling the modern retreat. ...

"In the context of modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro, a particular sensitivity of the summit horizontal glacier surfaces to precipitation variability (magnitude and timing) can be confirmed by this study. This fits well into the present knowledge of modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro and in East Africa in general, initiated by a drastic reduction in precipitation at the end of the nineteenth century."

Temperatures Remain Consistent
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 84, S48, June 2003 http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/tanzania/pubs/hardy_2003bams.pdf

"Kilimanjaro's glaciers are extremely sensitive to precipitation variability, as on an annual basis, the summit climate is thermally homogeneous, with a mean annual temperature of -7.1 degrees Celsius."

Deforestation Causing Dry Climate
Nature, November 24, 2003 http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/talk.environment/msg05757.html

"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. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."