Snowcap vanishing from Mount Kilimanjaro

[RamboLiberal]

Source: MSNBC/AP

WASHINGTON - The snows of Kilimanjaro may soon be gone.

The African mountain's white peak — made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway — is rapidly melting, researchers report.

Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And more than a quarter of the ice present in 2000 was gone by 2007.

If current conditions continue "the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro will not endure," the researchers said.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33588569/ns/world_news-world_environment/

[TexasProgresive]

1. Old news

some guy wanted to try covering the snow cap with tarps or some such several years ago. It will be gone soon.

[derby378]

2. The global thermometer is climbing...

...and I still don't see much effort being made to reverse the trend, like sucking up those greenhouse gases or something.

[xc8mip]

5. Maybe , but deforestation is a fact

unless trees are planted there are no solutions, carbon credit tax will suck only a sucker

[Xithras]

7. Exactly. The deglaciation of Kilimanjaro is caused by deforestation, not global warming.

The vast rain forests that used to stand to it's upwind sides transpired water vapor all year long. This water vapor was carried upslope by the winds and fell as snow on the peak year round as altitude thinned the air and the water cooled below freezing.

Go look at Kilimanjaro on Google Maps right now. The deforestation along the flanks of the mountain is virtually complete, and only a thin line of forest remains on its highest slopes below the treeline. Along its lower slopes, and on the flatlands north of the mountain, the once dense jungle simply doesn't exist anymore. It's not "mostly" gone, or "fragmented", or "thinned", it simply gone, replaced by thousands and thousands of small farms and villages. No forest means no transpiration, which means no summer snows, which means that summer melt now exceeds winter snowfall. The glaciers are doomed.

You could stop global warming and revert the entire planet back to 1750's CO2 levels and temperatures TODAY, and those glaciers will still vanish if that forest isn't replanted.

[derby378]

8. Agreed - we need more trees, not less

I'm still riled by that propaganda piece for rising carbon dioxide levels that says "You call it pollution, we call it life." Sounds like something Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg would have come up with in The Fifth Element.

[cpompilo]

3. Kind of like 'Used To Be Glaciers National Park'

So sad

[Roland99]

4. Pffffft...it's all part of a natural warming period following the long-ago Ice Age

:sarcasm:

[defendandprotect]

6. k i c k