A year or two ago, the disappearance of the snows of Kilimanjaro was the poster child for global warming alarmism. Unfortunately for them, it turned out that the Kilimanjaro area wasn’t warming and that the recent disappearance of the glaciers was more likely down to a climate dislocation in 1880 exacerbated by deforestation (my colleague Marlo Lewis summarizes the temperature evidence in Chapter II here, while Nature subscribers can find the article about deforestation here).
Now it seems that the Kilimanjaro glaciers are likely to be around for decades yet:
“About five years ago Kilimanjaro was being used as an icon for global warming. We know now that this was far too simplistic a view,” said Thomas Moelg.
“We have done different kinds of modelling and we expect the plateau glaciers to be gone roughly within 30 or 40 years from now, but we have a certain expectation that the slope glaciers may last longer,” added colleague Georg Kaser.
Of course, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth haven’t caught up with the science yet.