Anthony Watts proves Mt. Kilimanjaro escapes global warming

From the annals of Anthony’s WUWT blog:

"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"
Posted on November 22, 2011 by Anthony Watts

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WUWT: Al Gore said in his AIT bag of BS that Mount Kilimanjaro was losing its snow/ice cover due to global warming.
{...}
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. {cc notes: he's standing on a talus slope, it is porous and sloped downhill. We wouldn't see standing water if a fire hose were dousing that ice sliver!} 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

Then Anthony goes on to show some of those dastardly ClimateGate emails.  Reaching back to a 2004 email he producing this damning bit of evidence:

WUWT: “...would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for Kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)? (Dr Geoff Jenkins, Climate Prediction Programme, Hadley Centre - dated 9/16/04)”

Then Anthony sticks in the knife:

WUWT: “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. . . ”
{It’s a good article worth the read and it's posted at the bottom of this page.}

Anthony posts the entire article, to his credit, but then he spoils it by chiming in:

WUWT: “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. {NO, Anthony, the point is our melting cyrosphere is proof of serious global warming! . . . Here you sound like you're in total denial of AGW, what's up with that Watts?} 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.”   signed, Anthony Watts

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"Patently false" that's big words.  Read it - Anthony is denying that global warming can have anything to do with the melting snows of Kilimanjaro.

First please note, nearly 8 years have passed since the email. More data has been collected, the resolution continues improving!  Plus the warming and melting continues. 

Here we have an example of the contrarian-skeptic's time warp.  That cynical tendency to grab any idea or statement out of long gone history and treat it as though nothing has been learned since then.

 All these distractions purely intent on wasting precious time, when it’s the science and the observations that matter and they are becoming increasingly robust with every season.  Which may be why the contrarian-skeptical community is getting so much nastier, as if that's anyway to reach a solution.

Another curiosity I want to point out.  Folks like Anthony spend part of the time crying ‘Earth’s climate is too complicated, we just don’t know enough to trust the data.’  Then turn around screaming over-simplistic, tunnel-visioned absolutist pronouncements: “It’s just that simple, and “global warming” does not have one damn thing to do with it.”  Come on, this is teenaged one dimensional logic at work here!  We need honest curiosity and a desire to learn.

Think about it,  Yes, of course, the influence of deforestation helps desiccate upslope winds.  What’s wrong with it is that Anthony and friends want you to believe that’s all there is going on.  When that is blatantly false. Anthony is pretending sublimation happens independent of the surrounding air temps or higher altitude air currents. 

Anthony also willfully ignores that the air flowing over the deforested lowlands, is hotter and drier to begin with, thanks to AGW.  

Anthony’s selectivity in the information he is "present to" is not only juvenile, it’s tragic.
Because his crazy-making has dumbed down, polarized, and radicalized too many politically motivated folks.  So rather than spending our precious time and energy focused on dealing with the reality - we continue wasting more irretrievable time playing these crazy rhetorical games while ignoring the full spectrum of available evidence.


Shame on you Anthony Watts, et al.


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Brian Vastag wrote an excellent story that makes room for the scientists to explain how they understand the dynamics regarding Kilimanjaro’s snow fields. 
Published online 2 November 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1055

The melting snows of Kilimanjaro
Glaciers crowning Africa's tallest mountain 

could disappear within decades.

by Brian Vastag

“{...}
Melting and sublimation both contribute to the ice loss, says co-study author Doug Hardy, a glaciologist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The glaciers have been in retreat for more than a century, Hardy says, with a drying climate in East Africa one main culprit.

"The top [of the mountain] is very, very dry. It's a desert up there," Hardy says. The lack of new snowfall means the dark, dirty tops of glaciers absorb more solar radiation than they otherwise would. In addition, the nearby Indian Ocean has warmed, says Hardy, altering circulation patterns that used to bring more moisture to the mountain.

But Hardy says there is too little data to blame the ice loss on increasing atmospheric temperatures. "It's entirely reasonable that, yes, the glaciers are going away on Kilimanjaro in response to global warming," but the link is via Indian Ocean-driven circulation patterns rather than via a warmer atmosphere, says Hardy. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
{...}"

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And here is the news release that Anthony posted. 

CLIMATE SCIENTIST WARNS WORLD 

OF WIDESPREAD SUFFERING 

IF FURTHER CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT FORESTALLED
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ltbehavior.htm

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.

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.


“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.”

“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, 

Written by Earle Holland

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Ironically, after that bullet point list makes clear that our planet's cryosphere is in deep trouble, all Anthony and the crowd do is tunnel focus on a deliberate misunderstanding, regarding one specific (nearly unique) mountain, then pretend it somehow has global implications.  

How do people manage to miss the message in the above information? Yet, a review of the comments following Holland's writeup, shows that few saw the gorilla in the post.  

Mr Watts' sure looks like pure crazy-making to me.  So sad.

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discussion at:
http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=18430